Progress Report 2021.07.31

Hi friends,

Just a short update today, since it’s been a pretty chaotic week. I am still working on finishing the last scene of Chapter 1 Route B. Because of all the various ways the chapter can end, there’s an important conversation between Aeran and the MC that needed particular attention to detail to track all of the continuity, which was very time consuming. The entire conversation is around 40,000 words to account for all the variations, but in reality the player is only going to see maybe about 5,000 of that—which is kind of indicative of how branching dialogue paths and branching continuity in interactive fiction can get very complicated, very quickly!

The good news is that I have finished the toughest part of the conversation and things are a little more straightforward. I am getting closer to finishing and I am hoping to be done in a couple of days. I did receive my second Covid vaccine yesterday and the side effects are hitting me pretty hard today. I am trying not to be too hard on myself for not meeting any of my deadlines (as my partner says, two months from now it’s not going to matter that I took more time than I thought since the chapter will be done!).

As I mentioned in my last update, I am redoing the game’s UI. I have been poking at it a little more (and broke my stylesheet so badly I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong, and I ended up having to scrap the entire thing and start over). But I am happy to say that mobile functionality for both portrait and landscape mode is going to be possible with this update! Portrait mode won’t work on Chrome due to the way itch.io opens browser games on Chrome, but it will work in Firefox.

Mobile will look something along the lines of this for the game’s main stylesheet:

I am designing the dark mode version first, but there will be a light mode (black text on white) option too since I want to preserve the original colour palette of the game.

The plan for the next couple of weeks is to finish drafting (hopefully by the end of the day on Monday; I really don’t have all that much left, the final scene is maybe around 70% complete). Once that’s done, I need to finish my edits (I have been editing as I go, but there are areas that need clean up and I’m sure I’m going to miss lots of typos). And then once that is complete,, I need to go through all of the bug reports and fix the typos, continuity errors and other issues. Aside from the bug reports from the playtester team, I also have about 4 pages of notes of various things I need to fix (lore changes, continuity changes, sections where I changed my mind about something, areas where the player may be missing an important codex entry if they went down a certain path, etc).

The alpha build will be updated with new content before I tackle the UI. I want at least two weeks for playtesting and to fix all the bugs and errors before launch, so it’s a good time to handle the visual design elements of the game.

If you’re planning on playing the complete chapter when the alpha build updates, your saves will not transfer to the next chapter properly (meaning that there could be continuity errors on your save, locking you out of future dialogue/action options even though you did the required story content). There are a lot of background variables at play and I will need to adjust some of them for the new UI. So if you want to see the new content, I recommend playing with a throw-away character because you will eventually have to start over from the beginning.

Thank you all so much for your support through these last few months! It’s been quite a challenge getting this chapter finished, but I am really pleased with how the game is shaping up, despite greatly underestimating how much time I actually needed to complete it. Chapter 1 is a game unto itself and acts as much as tutorial for the player as it did for me. I’ve learned a lot from crafting it the way I did, and I have a much better idea of how to handle things as the game progresses (this is without a doubt the largest chapter in the game and it’s going to stay that way 😂).

Thank you, thank you, thank you! 💗💗💗

EDIT, AUGUST 2, 2021: As of yesterday, I have officially finished drafting and moved onto the editing and coding process! Woo! 🥳 

Because of this, I feel confident returning to monthly bonus content. If you're in a tier who has the benefit of voting on bonus content topics, August's bonus content vote has been posted today. ✌