Devlog #23 - Reflecting and Re-evaluating.
Good timezone! I apologize for the delay in this month's devlog. Let me explain.
May Progress
I wanted to spend this month experimenting with the game's art direction, so I started by scripting out a few scenes.
...And then everything ground to a halt.
This is really embarrassing for me to admit. But for the past few years, I've spent most of it working on an outline, hoping that if I got that locked in, the rest of the writing process would be smooth sailing.
Turns out I was wrong. Even if I knew what each scene should be about, the moment I tried to put that into text, I felt like I was running up against a wall. The dialogue was flat, the scenes were boring, and while I know first drafts all suck, I instinctively felt like this wasn't just a "first draft" problem.
And worst of all, I wasn't having fun. I tried to persist and kept writing for a few weeks, but it wasn't clicking.
I think the main reason behind this is that I haven't grasped the characters' voices. Being that I was trying to make a romance VN, I had one love interest character - Aven. And while I like his design and concept, I must admit that I never found him fun to write. Which is hard to do when you're, well, trying to write a story about him. Lmao
Maybe the issue here is that I approached this story backwards. I usually write the character first, then build the world around it, which gives me a lot of love and excitement for writing voices. But this time, I put a lot of legwork into the worldbuilding, and as a result, Aven feels less like his own character but rather a vehicle for the lore.
(Which is really obvious in hindsight considering how many times I've reviewed and changed this fucking guy.)
To make matters worse, I'm finally coming to terms with the fact that the scope of this game might be too big for my first game. My outline has ten chapters, and while my sad attempt at a script had me combining chapters and moving scenes around (why did I spend so much time on my outline?), considering how much trouble I had writing just a few scenes, I can't imagine it'd be easy writing the rest.
It's honestly incredibly embarrassing and soul-crushing how I realized this when I'm already two years into development. I think part of me realized it deep down, but kept going cause of the sunk cost fallacy. Lovely. Better now than later, I guess.
So, with all that whingeing out of the way, what do I do now?
For one, I still really like the lore. I love modern/urban fantasy, and I'm happy with my take on it. And despite the endless headaches Aven gave me, there are still parts of him I like, so I don't want to scrap him entirely.
So I've decided I'm going to spend June thinking about where I want to go with this story. Do I want to shelve it? Break it down into a smaller one? Take just the lore and make a new story? Lots of questions.
But simultaneously, I also want to try making smaller VNs to gain some experience and explore new ideas. This... makes me nervous. What if I blow the scope out of proportion again? Or it collapses into dust?
I worry that I'm going to mess up again and fail, but I need to remind myself that any time spent failing or learning why I failed is still time well spent. I guess I just gotta do something.
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So that's it from me. I apologize that this update is so long and gloomy. I really hope I'll have better news next month, but until then, have a good timezone :) Thank you for reading!