Weekly Devlog: 15 - 21 April 2024

Hello Patrons and happy Sunday 🌼

This past week has seen me start work on the last part of Chapter 9's update. I think I was a little too optimistic (read naive) when I thought that adding a(n) RO/companion of your choice would be easy variations to manage 🥲

Already, Zikar's basic response has 4 variations based off of 4 response choices for each RO. I probably will have to tackle these scenes slightly differently so that it will be more like when Irus first met the Vinia family and the MC leads the conversations.

There will still be scenes with the ROs/companions but having a reaction from every family member at every scene will mean I take two entire months to even finish the scenes.

Making sure there are only specific scenes that get responses regarding the ROs means the scenes are written at a good pace and I don't drive myself to a burnout because writing variations is like writing separate but similar chapters of a book and eventually, I start dying on the inside.

That said, I'm still working on the family dinner scenes and will probably take another two weeks to complete them. Depending on how much time I have left, I might include an additional RO scene for players who don't choose to attend the family dinner but that's going to be excluded if I see that I won't have enough time to complete the last few dialogue scenes.

I'm going to have to come back in edits to flesh out these scenes a lot more, but for now, getting a rough draft of everything is the way I'm tackling completing the game. My hopeful goal is to have Chapter 11 completed by the end of the year, but there's a good chance that Chapters 11, 12 and the prologue will only be completed next year mainly because of Part 4's crazy branching depending on choices you make as a player. I honestly don't know how many words the game will be when it's officially completed with edits but I can say we've passed the 580K word count and that's excluding Chapter 9's word count 😬

When I first started developing COE, I really thought I'd have 9 chapters altogether and it would be a super linear and easy plot to write. Obviously things changed and a lot of extra content (especially family drama) became a focal point of the game so here we are.

If it weren't for your support, I'd never have been brave enough to continue past Part 2, so thank you for always being so patient and kind as I develop the game 💖