In the last Dev Talk, I was discussing exploring options of better incorporating player choices without derailing the main story or getting bogged down with multiple story branches. I'm happy to announce that this seems to be going well. I had began incorporating "Canvas", which is a feature in my notetaking/central-brain app
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. It's much easier to keep track of choices and interactions without losing sight of the overall story. This means that I'm able to provide variations without derailing the story, but also be able to implement small callbacks to prior decisions without too much effort.
The beauty of Canvas, and Obsidian in general, is that everything can be linked. All backlinks are also automatically updated upon change. In the example above, not only do we have a typical flowchart of choices, but each one can contain a link that opens to relevant information. You can pretty much have an inception of notes/canvas linking to each other forever, making writing and planning so much easier.
I've went back and implemented Canvas to map out all of the existing notes and events for the entire story and now have a good estimate of how many episodes are required to reach the end. Once again I will mention that this isn't a multiple ending type game, but there has been feedback of player choice and immersion feeling limited, and this is something that I can agree with and definitely improve.
Production wise, the writing and renders for the second half of chapter 4 is almost complete. Once that's done, I'll revisit the events in chapter 5 and adjust the events to have more choices wherever appropriate.
As a side note, I'm kind of thrilled about the timing of this
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course which was just released the other day. I use a Blender to Davinci exr workflow for post-processing and this course addresses exactly what I'm doing. Despite working this way for a couple of years now, I already learned quite enough to make the recommended price well worth it. This is probably not something interesting to talk about but I'm pretty damn giddy about it.
Cheers,
Dom