Quest Failed: Chapter Two - Dev Log #150

Hiya everyone! Happy almost end of January! I hope you're all doing well and that 2022 is treating you nicely so far!

So, I'm back with the first dev log in...gosh...what feels like forever now, huh? As previously, I'd put them on hold while I soldiered on ahead with the pending alpha build--and now the prospect of getting back into them is a bit daunting, given how far I've fallen behind with these weekly logs. I've honestly been hesitant to write one after so long, and I don't even know where to start now!

But...let's just jump right into it, and see where it takes us, huh? We've got a lot to discuss!

First up, I'll tackle the elephant in the room. With tranquilliser darts and a comically large net. Even then--that stubborn elephant is putting up a heck of a fight!

Which, uh, is to say--I'm talking about the most recent alpha build and all of the troubles that came with its development. I won't attempt to mince words or try to come up with excuses and I'll just say it outright--it took a long time to come out. An unreasonable amount of time, at that, despite my constant assurances that it was just around the corner, despite it failing to materialise for months at a time until December. In total--that was about 10 months, coming off the back of the last alpha build that took 6 months--both of which are ridiculously unreasonable amounts of time to develop such things when you look at how long previous builds took, versus the content in them.

I'm deeply sorry for making such a huge mess of these builds, and feel like I've been letting people down in recent months. I understand that it's more than likely resulted in a lot of irreparable damage to my reputation and faith people may have once had in me. Especially with how much I kept assuring people that it was just around the corner for several months at a time.

These promises weren't made out of malice of course, or an attempt to lure people into pledging the highest tier and then not deliver--and I tried to emphasise that by backdating things across the months from when I first promised it would appear--but rather, it was more just out of sheer optimism that I would be able to tackle the brick wall in the way of progress and give people some amount of light at the end of the rather long tunnel. Because believe it or not, setting self-imposed deadlines is just as important for me as it is for assuring others that things are coming along. It motivates me to do everything in my power to hit those deadlines and gives an idea of where I should be at by a certain point, all while giving people peace of mind that something should be out soon. But...it's a double-edged sword as I've learned, and can backfire tremendously, even when I continue to double-down and insist that the next deadline will be the one for sure, digging myself deeper and deeper into the tunnel. And so, I created a lot more stress for myself as a result, while also disappointing people in the meantime. Which I really do feel bad about.

I'm incredibly proud of the actual content that's IN the new alpha release, of course, which I'll delve a little more into in a bit--but this wasn't a very smart way for me to go about promoting its development, nor a healthy way to work in general. By the time I finally got the build out in December, I'd completely screwed up my sleeping schedule and had been sleeping barely 3 or 4 hours at a time, desperate to try and catch up to where I was supposed to be. Which...did end up helping me get things out before Christmas, which I was grateful for--so I don't regret the insane crunch at that point. Nor am I saying this in an attempt to garner sympathy. I just wanted to let you all know how manic the rush up to 0.13 was!

But the real question here I'm sure you're all asking--beyond what purpose Jacob serves at all in the game--is why did things take so long? What possible aspects of the build could have taken such an absurd amount of time to put together?

Welllll--it was a rather ambitious mixture of wanting to have 5 h-scenes in this build, alongside a rather huge addition to the main story, which in itself contained a large amount of CG scenes, developments, and so many different moments that I was kind of amazed I had really written all of that while going back through and adding sprite posing and expressions to each line.

I bit off more than I could chew at once, and didn't want to go back on my promises of all of those scenes, so doubled down on including them all no matter what, even if it meant the delays. Which I hindsight was a mistake. I should have just kept the partially written scenes for another build, and released what I had at the time, which most likely would have ensured the alpha build released a good few months earlier. So I suppose we could say it was my stubbornness that brought about such a wait. It most certainly didn't help that one of these h-scenes capped off a set of character events and their stories, and another one was quite a dramatic revelation--so it took a lot longer for me to set about writing than if it were just another casual exchange. This was all pretty important story stuff--and stuff I wanted to get right on the first try, no matter what!

Whether I stuck the landing or not is up to the alpha testers, of course, but again--even if it took a long time, I'm proud of what I achieved and took the time to write, even if it was detrimental to the growth of the project and the Patreon as a whole. It was just a combination of taking on a lot of scenes at once, a lot of which had a large significance to the story, with lots of twists and turns, shocking revelations and very dynamic and exciting battle scenes! (Which were a real pain to animate and I never want to see another fight scene again, wahhh!)

And the frustrating thing about a lot of the stuff I've worked on is that it's just so gosh darn spoilery! I'd love to delve into the meat of everything I've been writing for the past few months, and my thoughts behind it, and what I wanted to achieve...but beyond the fact that it serves as the climax of Chapter Two's main scenario--I really don't want to delve too much into it, so you have some surprises when you play it yourself!

What I CAN share however, is one of the rather...busty story CGs that is associated with this rather  lengthy scene, showcasing a VERY rare moment in which Cynthia and Ren aren't quite getting along.

...Okay, that happens almost every exchange they have--but the rare thing here is just how serious Ren is, too! Something extremely bad must have happened for even Ren to drop the lightheartedness and put on a serious face. And even though this is quite a dramatic moment...I guess I couldn't pass up a chance to have those royal busts of theirs pushing up against one another. Because, uh, yes--it's very important, and symbolic of the weight of each of their arguments they have against one another as they push back in a rather...plump...sweaty display...and...uh...where was I again?

Oh, right. Big, serious, dramatic story moments! There's lots of them! Lots of highs! Lots of lows! Everything comes crashing together at long last, and it finally becomes apparent that I actually have been planning some of these elements from the beginning, and haven't just been throwing them in randomly when I felt like it, honest! There really was a plan and a semblance of an outline when I started QF, even if I've strayed from it quite a bit at times...a lot of the key moments are still here! And gosh is it rewarding to see them come to life with so many story CGs!

I'm sure I've said it before, but this particular build marks practically the entire main scenario of Chapter Two now. I'd hazard a guess and say 90%. Outside of a couple of closing scenes, and an epilogue, the main story is very nearly finished! And then after that, is just the stray side quest and events, which admittedly does encapsulate a fair amount of h-scenes to be written still--but not TOO many more.

It's my honest hope that once all the big serious story stuff is out of the way, being able to focus on far smaller scenes at a more rapid rate should hasten things along far more than before. But, realistically, that can't be proven until I have the results in front of me, can it? Not with my track record, haha. Ahh... We'll just have to see where things take us!

So--my next order of business is to get voices primed and ready for the existing build I published last month. I want to release an 'alpha 0.13.5' as it were--which will be available to all existing alpha 0.13 patrons, and include all the voices for scenes that weren't fully voiced in this build. I can't give a solid deadline as for when this will come out, as it's honestly at the mercy of VA availability at a certain point--but I would like to aim for next month if everything aligns. Otherwise, I'll just be prepping for 0.14 in the meantime while waiting for all the voices to come in.

To ease myself back into things and avoid another absurd wait for a new build, I'll be keeping things to a smaller scale for 0.14, adding in a few new h-scenes, expanding on some side events, and adding a bit to the main scenario. While there's only a small amount for the main story to be written, I feel I should probably take a step back from it to focus on the more light-hearted stuff and avoid getting too bogged down in everything the main story demands of me. Because it truly is mentally draining when focusing my energies on getting everything just right for the main story stuff. I fret over every line, rewrite entire scenes when I feel they aren't up to scratch, and get stuck in some pretty nasty feedback loops where I can be bricked in for a while at a time. And it's not fun. For anyone.

It's my sincere hope that 2022 will be a fruitful year for QF and once more I'd like to express my appreciation for everyone that has remained on board this wild ride. I hope to have something that will live up to your expectations, and that I won't run into as many mental blocks this time around.

I'll also say that I've learned a lot over the course of Chapter Two's development, and will be taking all of this into account for future Chapters and projects. For one, I won't be making a game of this scale again in the future--because it just isn't feasible for a single developer like me to handle on my own, nor is it fair for you guys to have to wait so long. I really do want to release smaller things at a faster rate after Chapter Two--and if it had been possible at all, I would have split this game into much smaller parts if they weren't all so entangled within one another.

That's the most frustrating part of all of this, really. As I feel I've written enough to encompass at least a few fully featured games--but since they're all entrenched in Chapter Two, it often looks like I'm just taking forever to deliver a single, small game. Which is far from the case! I'll be genuinely curious to know just how much playtime people get out of this bad boy when it finally does come out! My hopes are in the 30/40 hour mark if not more, given the script is as large as it is.

But hey--there's a point. Why don't we have a brief overview of just where the project is at in terms of statistics? This'll either make Chapter Two look really good, or really bad, but here we go! Using the built in script checker, Ren'Py announces the following stats:

The game contains 29,171 dialogue blocks, containing 572,669 words and 3,254,466 characters, for an average of 19.6 words and 112 characters per block.

The game contains 94 menus, 1,642 images, and 22 screens.

So--we're fast approaching the 600k word mark, which is rather exciting, and it'll definitely be well over that when all is said and done, which I hope gives quite a lot for people to sink their teeth into across multiple playthroughs! This isn't counting several scenes I've already written, too, which are commented out in the code right now due to not being able to be implemented until I've progressed further in the story. (I wrote them in advance when I was feeling the inspiration, and they're fully voiced to boot!)

But let's look at that second part there. '94' menus. I believe this just counts all of the moments there's dialogue choices and such so far--which again, will go up considerably once the last few events are added along with the interactivity that comes with them. And '1,642 images' might sound insane--but it's counting everything separately, as in, separate character expressions/poses and all the layers that go along with CG scenes. But maybe that gives an insight into just how dynamic some of said scenes are!

And on the subject of the CG scenes...I took the liberty of going through the folders and counting them up. There's 57 cg scene folders presently in the game--with 32 of them being full h-scenes. The rest being divided into story scenes, and ecchi moments (like kissing scenes, etc.), or steamy pseudo h-scenes that aren't quite h-scenes, but still have lots of hot and heavy moments in them, along with voice acting.

And speaking of voice actingggggg--the voice acting folder as of right now reports 2719 voice clip files. That's a whole lotta voice acting! Granted, not every line there is dedicated to a h-scene or CG scene--and some of those being counted will be for their general all-purpose reaction lines that are present in Chapter One, but not yet implemented in Chapter Two--but the very large majority of the lines there are towards the CG scenes themselves!

I hope this transparent look into where things are at was an enlightening one, as it's often scary to just straight-up say where I'm at for risk of being picked apart...but, well, I feel like I owe it to you guys at this point!

And whew, there we have it. The first dev log in a while, and I think I've more than made up for it in size! I hope this post wasn't too much of a downer, or made me look TOO bad. I just feel that being as honest as possible is the best course of action here to avoid obfuscating anything going on behind the scenes and give you all a transparent look behind the scenes! Please remember that I am only one person working on an incredibly ambitious project, and have been prone to my fair share of mistakes along the way. And I may write a bit slowly at times--I'll be the first to admit this--but I've always put the project first, and not once have I ever considered abandoning it, even after all of these years. I'm in it to the end, for better or worse, even if the scope got a little out of hand. And even if I only end up releasing it to a single patron, or none, it WILL be done, haha.

Anyways--this will probably be the last post of the month, but as always, if you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out and I'll do my best to get back to you in a timely manner!

Look forward to February--where as is customary, there'll be some cute Valentines art! I'll also try to get back on the saddle with dev logs and maintain something of a weekly schedule again to fill you in on what I'm working on, now that Frost panic mode is over. As I really did pride myself on keeping up with these in the past!

Until next time, whoooosh~