Elm and Coda are still alive, we promise. And if you’re reading this, well, so are you!
Behind The Scenes
This Past Year
A lot has happened since our last update in February 2020, when the COVID-19 global health crisis picked up momentum. As with the rest of the world, we’ve had to restructure our lives to flatten the curve. And though that didn’t directly affect our game development as we are a remote team, the changes in our daily lives do impact us, and that's ok.
This pandemic has and continues to affect all of us in different ways, and we just wanted to give our readers a gentle reminder that self care is key. There is no right way to deal with this, even in lieu of vaccination rollouts and tiered social mandates being issued or lifted.
So please stay safe.
Now, personal events have definitely impacted development and presence. On Coda’s end especially, after wrapping up her last college semester and earning her Visual Arts degree, her ill father unfortunately passed away some months after. Time was needed to healthily grieve and adjust.
But even with all of that hanging overhead, we still managed to chip away at this amazing project. Now we have a major milestone to share:
Main Game Progress
Writing
Common Route:
Draft Script: 100% ✓
Word Count: 128,164
Scenes: 99/99
First Draft Revision: 100% ✓
Second Draft Script: 98%
Word Count: 92,997
Scenes: 82*/84
*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review.
We completed our review of all 99 scenes! How did we go about that?
It was a two-part process: first, Coda and Elm went through the entire script individually, leaving behind comments and heavy edit suggestions. Then we both came together to consolidate these suggestions in many, many live review meetings.
This resulted in a massive script restructure that improved our story’s hook and cut 35,000 words—much of which were cut as a result of now nullified scenes. While we’re sad to see some great lines go, this revision has only made the story more exciting, the pacing much stronger, and the writing even sharper.
Now the common route revised script is 93,000 words! That’s absolutely fantastic!
So what are our next steps?
One more editing pass to tighten up the flow even further. In addition, a couple scenes need some extra writing, and two new ones need to be written in place of several.
Mark the common route as done!
With all these new changes, we’ll then revisit the outlines for the 8 routes before moving on.
Thanks for reading! Remember to take it easy on your Quiet Days. ♥
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask: Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Socials
• Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
• Live development on Twitch!
• Ask us anything here!
• Continue the discussion on Discord!
• Master thread on Lemma Soft!
It's a brand new year and a brand new milestone! We've really missed you. Have you missed us? It's so great to be back!
Last devlog we said we were taking a break for the holidays. And we did, but between new jobs, family, college, and festivities, you couldn’t fully keep us away from the dream! All of December and January, we wrote. And now?
The common route first draft is finished!
For such a wide and important aspect of our project, this is no small feat. We've been at the script for six months counting, and it felt so good to get another step closer every single day.
Check the facts for yourself:
Main Game Progress
Writing
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✓
Revised Outline: 100% ✓
Draft Script: 100% ✓
Words: 128,164
Scenes: 99* / 99
*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.
Did you see that number? Yes, it's not a mistake. The common route is over 128,000 words! We love every part of it and we're very proud, but the journey isn't over yet.
You might be thinking: “All that and you've only done the common route?!”
Yeah—it's a long journey, but one that we're happy to share with you!
Since this is a major milestone, we wanted to share a few words of our experience until now:
Elm says...
I feel simultaneously relieved, proud and dead inside and, like all creatives and developers, I hope I get to keep feeling like this as we continue to hit milestones. Primrose is definitely something I consider to be too big a project, but I also refuse to let it go. It is a learning experience and a proud moment. As someone who has written things, but never really considered themselves a writer, this is a surprising feat and one that fills me with a great sense of calm. If I knew one day, I'd be working a full-time industry job with the typical hours and somehow managing to write over 65,000 words in just under half a year in my scarce free time, I would have said that's nice, but unrealistic. (If you told me I was going to work with someone else and double that, I might have told you to politely close the door on your way out.)
Nonetheless, I think I finally found my calling as the child who wrote manuals and to do lists before approaching middle school. Developing baselines are important for any project, and without it, I don't know where we would be. I remember saying, rather casually, we should be tracking our progress to establish a baseline as this is a first for us. I didn't realise it would be such an integral part of our process and leading to an understanding of what we can achieve. It started off as a nice thing to have, but without it I strongly believe I wouldn't be able to finish a project. That's not so uncommon, I think. We all have that pile of unfinished things that we don't expect. Except this time, I'll see it coming a mile away and work around it.
How much did data help us? I don't know. Our current average is 21,000 words a month between us. That's including a very low December, and a very high (39,000-word) January. I don't know if that's because our goals averaged at 20,000 more words a month, or if that's genuinely our limit, but it seems to be a healthy rate to allow us to do other things with our time.
I've always had an interest in production and management, a change in self has come over over the past year. One that is more confident, positive, understanding and encouraging towards myself and others. Creating a project is less like tending a well-oiled machine and more like cultivating a garden. Cogs wear down and get replaced, but people don't work like that. We need space and understanding, time to reflect, encouragement and the ability to know when we've had enough. I'm sure that shift of thought is just me developing a stronger sense of self, but it's one that I welcome and I hope will be reflected in the work I produce with Coda.
In the past, I've adamantly liked to work alone. I've wanted to push myself to the high standards I hold myself to, and I do feel it's unfair to treat anyone but myself like that. I still think this is true, but there is also pleasure in sharing work with others. When you're tired, someone else can carry the project forward. When you split the work, the other brings in an interesting and exciting twist you hadn't yourself considered. I truly believe, some of the best work isn't created alone. With everything we do, we bring a little of ourselves into it and we make it personal. This story is significant in size for two people to attempt, but there are bigger, emergent narratives out there and maybe one day we can be a part of that too.
Until then, I'm happy to just make the kind of games that you load up on a quiet day.
Coda says...
This is the first time I’ve ever written this much content for a story in my life. 57,000 words in half a year. As much as I’ve entertained trying out hypernarrative models in personal projects, this is the first time I’ve actually done so. This is also the first time I’ve ever worked with Elm, and if I didn’t have such a competent, versed, and approachable partner, this passion project would have quickly become an untamed chore, much farther behind in progress than where we are today.
I’ve learned a lot over the past six months. I’ve been learning how I reframe my motivation to work so that I’m not chasing whims but developing a self-disciplined ethic. For me, that heavily involves pre-planning and tracking explicit goals. Elm operates similarly having such a strong interest in project management, so building up our workflow this way was to both of our benefits.
I’ve learned that I have a growing interest in narrative design. I’m spending more and more of my free time listening to lectures on theories and models to leverage player interactivity and agency, reading materials on mapping consequence, utilizing channels other than dialogue to exposit information, and learning new ways to breathe life into a scene.
And in deconstructing these concepts and figuring how to incorporate them, I find myself growing more and more with the characters. These characters are all stitched together from personal experiences—some as recent as these past couple months. They’re also those of friends and family, of passersby, of vocal strangers. They’re things I love, things I tolerate, and things I could do without yet exist. They’re research of facts, opinions I might share or reject, and trivia. These characters are points to make, and those points evolve and refine as we do.
My final thoughts are, whatever this project ends up becoming, I’ve enjoyed it so much. There are times when Elm and I have glanced at each other’s scenes and for me at least, I’ve had genuine reactions that’ve run the gamut. I have honestly gasped at these words before. I’ve laughed a great deal. I’ve nodded along and I’ve shaken my head. I’ve felt something. Whoever you are, reader, I hope you will too.
We hope these words mean something to you. If they don’t resonate, then at least they give you an idea of who we are as individuals and as a team!
So, what are our next steps?
We’re reconvening to address any pressing concerns.
The next few weeks will focus on a review pass for consistency and game flow.
Afterwards, we’ll move onto the final revision of the common route, assess, and then mark it “Done” once and for all! We'll have something else to offer once we do!
Oh, before we forget...
Here’s the last of our favorite unrevised snippets from these final two months:
RAFAEL: You've done me a wonderful favour.
RAFAEL: And maybe saved my life.
MC: Does it have something to do with the two over there?
He glances over woefully.
RAFAEL: No, they'll definitely try to kill me.
PRIYA: Someone is spreading a rumour that you had to meet with two extremely questionable kids in a trench coat.
MC: God, is that what people are saying?
PRIYA: No, that's what I'm saying, and if you don't fess up the rumour will only grow.
HARPER: It's a restraining order.
HARPER: Been a while since I've seen one of those. This branding is nice, don't you think?
One of the pheasants stops and stares at us. It spreads its wings, revealing the second pair beneath them in a captivating display.
He buttons up his blazer.
JUN LAU: (squint) Stop staring.
MC: Literally, are you one to talk?
JUN LAU: I’m not staring at your tits though, so don’t stare at mine.
MC: Oh my God, I wasn’t even looking!
It’s a lie because I totally was and I look so dumb for lying because he can read it all over my face, oh crap. Walk right past him, just walk, go go go go.
A light flurry falls from the night sky. The moon gazes through a break in the clouds, just enough to line them and every drifting snowflake in silver. A few flakes land on my nose and eyelashes.
I hum for brown paper packages tied up with strings. He recognizes the tune and smiles at me.
If this is the kind of content you like to see, we’d love for you to jump into our Discord server! We occasionally share much longer unrevised excerpts and discuss the game in much more depth with our community.
Behind The Scenes
Greyson Update
We’ve finally nursed Greyson back to health from a nasty bug, and upgraded him to the newest OS (as it goes with tech these days). He seems ready to get back out there on Twitter and help in March!
One thing we noticed about the old Greyson is despite being cheerful, he spent nearly all of his time talking to himself, not utilizing the tools available to him to increase his presence. With his recent bug fixes, the new Greyson is now going to be out there actively searching for folks in need of some encouragement, widening his reach! If you get a message from Greyson, feel free to reply back! After all, he’s always there for you!
Side Projects
Clearly, Primrose Path is a large project and one that means a lot to us. We're under no illusion that this project will take a few more years. It's a little like our magnum opus in that regard and we're giving it everything we've got.
However, we're not the type who can sit in the dark for years on end. At Quiet Days, we recognize the benefits and importance of personal projects, and that is something the two of us will be doing more often. Whether it's game jams or comics, we hope to share them with you!
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask: Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Socials
• Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
• Writing Progress on GitScrum!
• Live art development on Twitch!
• Art logging on Instagram!
• Ask us anything here!
• Continue the discussion on Discord!
• Master thread on Lemma Soft!
November was very productive! This month was NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month”. This is typically a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during November that a lot of writers and authors choose to do (with varying levels of success). All that creative energy definitely spurred us on this month with our own challenge!
Check out our progress report:
Main Game Progress
Writing
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✓
Revised Outline: 100% ✓
Draft Script: 50%
Word Count: 79,506
Scenes: 50* /100
*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.
We’ve finished 20 scenes this month, which means we’ve completed 50 scenes for our first draft! We’re halfway done! That’s a total of nearly 80,000 words so far, and these numbers are only going to get bigger!
We haven't been without a small hiccups, but it looks like we’re slowly writing more and more each month. We’re eager to keep up that momentum.
Take a gander at some of our favourite unrevised snippets from this month:
PRIYA: Morning, hotshot.
PRIYA: Wow, you look like you woke up on the wrong side of life...
PRIYA: ... then fell out of bed and onto two fists. One for each eye.
The tall blonde woman folds her cards and rises from her seat in a huff.
SAMSON: (Chuckles) Clearly, you don't share your wife's sense of humour.
She rolls her eyes, throwing her bag over her shoulder.
AMANDA: Pipi, we're leaving.
As she leaves, a small Pomeranian jumps off from Sam's lap and scurries behind her.
PRIYA: Are our readers interested in intimidating, towering thug dad vibes?
MC: Are you?
PRIYA: I watch hour-long videos of a buttery-voiced Russian narrating a tournament between elephant beetles in captivity.
PRIYA: I am not the majority of our readers.
With her grasp firmly on me, I pull her out of the crowd. Her prim and proper appearance, a little more disheveled.
MC: That wasn't so bad, right?
LEIGH-ANNA: You're insane.
MC: Y'know, people do say that.
If this is the kind of content you like to see, we’d love for you to jump into our Discord server! We occasionally share much longer unrevised excerpts and discuss the game in much more depth with our community.
Behind The Scenes
Concepts
This is a potential face concept for auto and tech CEO, Samson Opeyemi. We’re trying to work around a few face refs, so as well-rendered as this sketch may be, we’re eyeing a few other facial structures.
Are you a fan of any of these? Let us know! We love to hear from you guys, and your support can have a direct influence on our design decisions. We want this to be something everyone enjoys.
Real Life
Coda’s been contracted for a sequential artist position with an animation and video game studio! Getting some industry-level experience on creating and managing production materials is nothing but a boon for the team going forward. She believes this will strengthen her composition and scene directing skills, which will help make Primrose Path and other projects going forward much more engaging.
A Short Break
The holidays are here, so we’ve decided we're gonna take it a little easier this month! Our next update will be at the end of January, as we settle down for the festive period and college finals.
Self care is important to us, so we make a conscious decision to try and achieve a more balanced lifestyle. We're far from perfect, but we encourage everyone else to do the same.
We hope to see you in 2020 with some big changes! ♥
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask: Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Socials
• Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
• Writing Progress on GitScrum!
• Live art development on Twitch!
• Art logging on Instagram!
• Ask us anything here!
• Continue the discussion on Discord!
• Master thread on Lemma Soft!
So that was October! We're posting a little early this month in an effort to have more consistency between our updates. From now on, we'll be focusing on getting a devlog out on the last weekend of every month - regardless of what day it falls on.
So let's see how we've been getting on, shall we?
Main Game Progress
Writing
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✓
Revised Outline: 100% ✓
Draft Script: 50,089
Scenes: 28 /100
As you know, our main project Primrose Path, is something we work on during the free time we can find between work and school hours. Every month to reach our goals, we usually put in 60 hours of writing between the two of us. Despite this, Coda has managed to balance taking part in the Spooktober VN Game Jam and the two of us have reached our current total of 50,089 words and 28 scenes ready for internal review. We’re pretty happy with that, but hope to go even further next month.
Last month we had broken up our common route into 98 possible scenes, but after a recount to double-check, turns out that two were missing. Both are rather short and have simply been separated for clarity, so it’s no wonder it slipped us. What luck that we have exactly 100 scenes now!
Primrose is something we're quite proud of so far, and seeing ourselves get closer to completion is always exciting. We’ll be hitting that 100 mark in no time.
*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.
As always, let's take a sneak peak of some of our favourite moments from this month’s script:
I scowl at him. Is this man made of ice? Is the sight of someone dropping dead a regular occurrence for the rich?
Eh, probably.
I hold out my hand for a shake.
BEL: Ah…
Instead he pulls out a handkerchief from his breast pocket and lightly dabs his forehead.
MC: You have to promise me you’ll listen to them.
EZRA: You have my word.
I squint.
EZRA: I promise. It’ll be the first thing I’ll put on the second I get home. I’ll even pop my window open for Mr. Torres downstairs. He’s one hundred and four, but the man moves. I think this might be his fourth hip.
MC: So you’re being targeted by whom?
BEL: A jealous, witch-hunting conspiracy of journalists.
If this is the kind of content you like to see, feel free to come down to our Discord server! We occasionally share much longer unrevised excerpts and discuss the game in much more depth with our community.
Behind The Scenes
Concepts
This month, we have some early concepts of everyone’s favourite artist: Matthias Barousse! You may remember this face from an earlier devlog, but he’s not quite done yet. A lot of the behind the scenes is still preliminary work, but we’ve really been trying to get a feel for our characters. Here you can see what we’ve been fleshing out in the groom department.
Are you a fan of any of these? Let us know! We love to hear from you guys, and your support can have a direct influence on our design decisions. We want this to be something everyone enjoys.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Socials
Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
It's been a little crazy, but it's finally that time where we share the exciting things we've been up to. We hope you're ready!
Main Game Progress
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✔
Revised Outline: 100% ✔
Draft Script: 40k words
Scenes : 17* / 98
Since finalising the common route outline just a few months ago, we've continued to press on with the common route script, landing at a very comfortable 40,000 words. That's 19,000 more than last time! We're quite proud of this progress, given the fact that between work and part-time education, Primrose Path is being developed in our free time! Elm even had to revise scenes on her phone as she was away for half of the month!
While 40,000 may feel like a lot, we're not aiming for the common route to be any particular length. It may be worth noting that there are 98 possible scenes in the common route alone, but you'll probably only see a third of that in your first playthrough. Primrose Path is designed to evolve with your choices and this means the scenes you encounter will change.
On average, our scenes are 1,500 words of adventure and questionable life choices. We've been tackling interview scenes, interactive home scenes, and the infamous party scenes this month—all while fleshing out our lovable side characters.
If you took part in the pre-alpha, you may be surprised to find out how different the additional scenes and new characters are. But we truly believe we're taking this project in the right direction!
*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.
Here’s our favorite unrevised draft snips from this past month:
His soft brown eyes take me in. I almost don’t notice the cautious press of his hand against the small of my back.
MATTHIAS: Take a moment to catch up with yourself.
He tucks his wipe away and leaves me hanging. Ok. I guess I’ll just run my hand through my hair and pretend that’s exactly what I planned. Cool.
Pique your interest? You don’t have to wait for one every month: we share more unrevised draft snippets in our Discord server. Join if you’d like to peep longer excerpts and chat with us over them!
Behind The Scenes
Somehow between drowning in words and having a life, we also found time to get down on some visuals:
Moodboards
Part of our process is nailing down a strong visual guide early in development. We've been focusing on character and background moodboards. The main goal is to be able to present a collage of images to anyone involved in the project and have them immediately understand what it is we're aiming for. It's also great for us, so we don't stray too far from the original vision!
Lynn Austen
Lynn Austen, better known as our nameable MC, now has a face! We're still in concept mode, but we definitely wanted a protagonist who felt visually acceptable to all kinds of players. We hope to be able to allow players to pick from a swatch of skin tones and hair colours to truly express themselves. We’ll be tweaking the exact tones as we go.
Bellarmino
Bellarmino LaFauci is a proud, visionary fashion designer and model—and a potential client. After writing some party scenes about the decorated host himself, Coda decided she’d scratch an itch and draw what was on her mind.
Here’s what she had to say about it:
“Yeah it’s just a sketch, but I wanted to capture the frigid air that comes with someone untouchable judging you. And that moment is as short as a breath. You don’t know if he’s thinking of you for better or for worse, but he’s seen your face now. He doesn’t forget.”
There will be more concepts for him in the future as we play around with a few facial details, makeup ideas, hair, and of course his bold fashion statements.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Thanks for reading! Remember to take it easy on your Quiet Days. ♥
Socials
- Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
- Task tracking on GitScrum!
- Live art development on Twitch!
- Art logging on Instagram!
- Ask us anything here!
- Continue the discussion on Discord!
- Master thread on Lemma Soft!
We’re flipping the script... in more ways than one! We’re proud to show our month’s raw stats—first this time:
Main Game Progress
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✔
Revised Outline: 100% ✔
Draft Script: 21k words
This month we wrote the common route draft script and ended up hitting a cozy word count of 21,000 or so. We’ve taken a fourth week off to review, address side projects, and manage miscellaneous company tasks among other things. The next few months will follow this routine and progress will be listed as a word count. We expect to hit the same word count goals at minimum.
So far we’ve written scenes from The Party, wanting to get into the head space of our men and how they’d interact with the different playable tones of our main character, Lynn Austen.
We've also started implementing some of the interactive elements in Lynn’s apartment. Want to watch TV? Channel surf and pick up on world lore—and maybe some crucial clues for characters. It pays to know what's going on in Primrose Path!
Here’s a couple of our favorite unrevised draft snips from this month:
My eyes dart to the Prince so I can apologize for the misunderstanding, but his gaze pierces through me as he laughs.
PRINCE: Oh, don’t be such a tease.
PRINCE: Are you getting coy over what you shared about Priya?
PRINCE: (smiling) Because that would be silly… and unadvised.
EZRA: Old royal buildings. It used to belong to a runaway Prussian heiress—a distant cousin of the Romanovs.
He freezes as the panel clicks open and slowly reveals a small stairwell.
EZRA: Allegedly.
Pique your interest? You don’t have to wait for one every month: we share more unrevised draft snippets in our Discord server. Join if you’d like to peep longer excerpts and chat with us over them!
Behind The Scenes
CGs in VNs Survey
We had questions about CGs and wanted to know what fans of the visual novel community thought about them, the role they play, examples they enjoyed, and more. We received over 200 responses from folks across different platforms—all this is in addition to our previous survey which received over 100! There's only two of us, so it'll be a while to get through all the data, but we’re excited to interpret and release them in separate posts coming soon!
Writing GitScrum Board
We’ve had this feature in our Discord server for much longer, but now that we’re writing our script draft for the common route, we’ve decided to open up our writing GitScrum board publicly. Now you lot passing by can peek into our progress on scenes at any point. Please, feel free to hold us accountable for how much we get done weekly. Your watchful eyes spur us on.
Code Blog
We're keeping up a mini-blog on side projects and developments! Elm will be talking about developing with Unity, starting with basic knowledge and things to consider during the early stages of production. If you're interested in hearing about 2D narrative development in Unity via our projects from start to finish, you can stop by Elm's coding blog!
Real Life
Coda’s back in college this semester, and she’s decided to pick up a 3D Game Graphics class to learn some asset creation basics. The class will teach her how to make a low-poly asset pack for creating environments, interiors, and props in Maya 2019 to explore in the Unity game engine. Quiet Days’ method for creating backgrounds in Primrose Path uses 3D modeling as a base for our environments, which is later rendered and post-processed in 2D. This is the main reason Primrose can exist at it's current scale! Elm is the one with the BA (Hons) for 3D, but Coda wanted to take some of the weight off of Elm for efficiency. Wish her the best; so far she’s had a great first day!
Lore Snippets
BŌGLŌ
BŌGLŌ is a trendy meal replacement drink in the universe of Primrose Path. Although many consumers are skeptical about its appearance, the bioluminescent algae smoothie has become a popular drink among its eccentric audience. Creator and CEO of BŌGLŌ, Chouette Lars is a contentious figure in the natural holism movement. Many prominent holists denounce her for appropriating the ideology in her pseudoscientific and capitalist ventures. Lars’ health claims for the drink have been found inconclusive by food scientists and nutritionists. BŌGLŌ glows brighter when agitated, is allergen-free, may stain teeth, and comes in such flavors as “Pasta La Vista” and “Cake or Death”.
Love this snippet? We’ll be posting more on our Twitter under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, but come back here to get detailed insight beyond Twitter’s character limit.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Thanks for reading! Remember to take it easy on your Quiet Days. ♥
Socials
- Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
- Task tracking on GitScrum!
- Live art development on Twitch!
- Art logging on Instagram!
- Ask us anything here!
- Continue the discussion on Discord!
- Master thread on Lemma Soft!
Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready?
Behind the Scenes
Playtesting Feedback
Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:
“The number of elements of the MC's [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”
“There's a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”
“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”
“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”
“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”
As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future!
Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:
“This might be silly, but I wish there were an option that weren't a dress for her outfit to the party.”
It’s not silly at all, playtester! It had us thinking about the different ways our protagonist, Lynn Austen, could express herself. This concern lead to one outfit redesign and introduced a number of new ones!
“The beginning was a little slow, but I love Priya, so all of her scenes brought my attention back instantly.”
We love co-worker and bestie, Priya, too, but she can’t be an exception for pacing. We’ve since reevaluated and tweaked Part 1: Work Day. Plenty of visual changes and cutting scenes entirely were discussed in order to tighten up the overall pacing.
“Harper seems harsh but has pressure on her to make her harsh, but then you see her and shes [sic] just straight up scary.”
While all playtesters understood Harper’s role as Lynn’s no-slack boss, a few found her consequentially unapproachable. We have a lot in store for her in later routes, but acknowledge she was sparse during the common route. We’ve since taken this concern and made her more available in new scenes, adjusted her tone in some of the older ones, and had other characters—who have a very different relationship with her than Lynn does—reflect more openly on her. We think this humanizes Harper much more.
“Unfortunately [Bellarmino] feels like a snobbier, more irritating Matt. [...] I personally don't find him very likable but I'm looking forward to being proven wrong.”
In our feedback form, we asked about character impressions. We also polled if players didn’t have to play all routes at least once, which clients they’d pick. While character impression responses expressed a willingness to give our model and fashion designer, Bellarmino LaFauci, a chance, he was our least popular choice in the poll. We figured it may have been that his personality wasn’t differentiated enough against the company with whom Lynn encounters him, so we’ve made adjustments to contrast him more against his judgmental cabal.
So as we went through and addressed feedback, we had some ideas of our own to implement, which leads us to...
Updated Revised Outline
Double the wordcount! Yep, we’re just shy of 32,000 words for the revised common route outline. How could this be? Look: don’t mistake Primrose Path for a linear narrative. Your choices affect the world from day one.
Beyond changes from playtester feedback, other new content includes:
New Characters! We work to make sure our side characters leave an impression. We’ve added a few more with the means to salvage or devastate Lynn’s career. Until you yourself can meet them, look out for future Lore snippets on our Twitter!
New Events! Lynn has more opportunities than before, and under different states of mind, to navigate and impact the world around her. Depending on what Lynn did, where, and when can completely change an encounter within that same space and time.
New Key Items! There are a couple of items Lynn can collect if she meets the right people and takes certain actions. These items can reveal some important information in client routes later on—and some hints for others, too!
New Areas! A few more places have been added to the common route, including whole new scenes. What could possibly lie behind these doors?
So how’s that sound? If you said “Damn, that’s hella rad,” well you just took the words right out of our mouths. But we’re not done yet; we take feedback seriously. When we can’t decide on what our audience may want, we leave no room for speculation. There’s really only one way to settle that.
VN Protagonist Sprite Survey
We run a survey! We wanted to know how visual novel fans preferred to see a customizable MC represented as a sprite, if at all. It’s tough for us because as much as we want to make Lynn as visually present as her sense of self, we also acknowledge that “immersion” for many players also means different levels of “intrusion” from MC’s sprite—down to none at all, for folks wanting to self-insert despite taking on another character’s existing backstory. While we think we’ve come to a happy medium that serves our purposes and would appeal to a good number of players, we’ll be sharing with you all in a separate post our findings.
Two things are for certain:
Visual novel players are an incredibly dedicated base, having turned out over 100 responses to our form! Thank you so much for helping us see your side on the matter!
The communities we frequent overwhelmingly take issue with one specific manner of MC representation—one that seems to plague the industry. If you’re not an avid consumer of visual novels, this begrudged answer may surprise you!
But hey, we haven’t closed it yet: you can contribute your opinion too until August 5th, 11:59 PM EDT. Stay tuned for our detailed write-up on the results, next time. We’ve got another survey in the works too (sounds like we’ve got a few hard decisions, huh?) so keep tabs on our Twitter when we release that form.
Greyson’s Twitter
Greyson’s been taking a break from Twitter for a minute. Working Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday overheated him, and in that vulnerable time, he caught a virus! So now he’s on sick leave and we’ve promised him an easier schedule of one day a week when he gets better. His posting schedule will be announced soon. You can still send him some love on his Twitter account. He’ll be sure to respond when he’s feeling up to it. He’s always there for you. Will you return the favor?
Main Game Progress
Common Route:
Rough Outline: 100% ✔
Revised Outline: 100% ✔
Draft Script: --%
The Artist: Matthias Barousse
Rough Outline: 100% ✔
Revised Outline: --%
Progress on the main game has primarily been on the common route outline. Some interesting things to note are that last time we reported our revision to be at 90%. After implementing feedback, our clean outline doubled in word count and we’ve reviewed it entirely since then. So now we’re thoroughly at 100%!
The breakdown of that is:
We finished up the common route’s Part 3: The Interviews, in which Lynn meets all her clients whom she may or may not have stumbled upon at a legendary bash.
We elaborated on Part 2: The Party encounters and added more variations which subsequently trickle over into alternate interactions in The Interviews.
We added an interactive, portent dream sequence the night of The Interviews, right when Lynn hits the bed after evaluating all potential clients at work.
... and a few other additions. Also among other things, we’ve actually started work on the draft script already, but we’ve not had time to properly calculate the percentage. It’ll be updated accordingly in our next log.
What’s Next For Us
We’re going to finish up our script draft and start focusing our efforts into creating a playable, visual alpha build of Primrose Path. Yes, we want to play our game as much as you do and that’s motivation enough!
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Thanks for reading! Keep up and remember to enjoy your Quiet Days. ♥
Are you ready for an update on what we’ve been doing since last? This is an eventful one for us, so strap in!
Behind the Scenes
Real Life
Elm just got a new job working as a Junior VR/Real-time artist! While that may slow down some things on the Quiet Days team, the new position trains Elm’s skills in 3D architectural visualisation, which can only benefit our workflow for background art! Congrats, Elm!
Playtesting
We’re testing a pre-alpha version of Primrose Path’s common route outline! You can imagine it’s taken up most of our time! This test’s purpose for us is two-fold:
1. We’re trying out Inkle Studio’s interactive narrative scripting language, Ink, to see just how well it ties into our workflow.
2. We wanted to create a minimum viable product just to see if it those in our target audience developed interest in further playing Primrose Path.
We call this phase our pre-alpha because this version of Primrose Path’s common route is presented as a long-form summary. It is overwhelmingly narrative—you are not reading dialogue script. And while it is interactive with a number of choices and variables coded in thanks to Ink’s magic, we only chose to create choices in the game which make the concepts we plan to have in our visual novel feasible.
That said, we’re proud to say that there’s actually a lot of opportunities to explore the setting, meet and build connections with the main cast, and have your interactions affect the way your character perceives and is perceived. At about 16,000 words or so for this entire summarized version alone, you can tell there’ll be a lot in store when it comes time for the actual script!
So far, almost all of our responses are from our target audience of heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ persons ages 20-30. And we’re delighted to hear that every single tester—target or not—was interested in playing Primrose Path further!
Playtesting majorly occurs in our Discord server. If you would like to participate in testing and give feedback, you can click this link and ask for the AlphaReader role when you join. Testing and survey submissions will close on June 17th, 11:59 PM EDT.
Lore Snippets
We can’t stress enough how vibrant the world of Primrose Path is, so now we’ll be sharing some fun facts about characters, locations, events, and culture. We hope you find it just as interesting and insightful as we do! Let’s talk about:
Lynn’s History
The above is a snapshot from our pre-alpha. Lynn comes home from work and video chats with her friend Priya, but is notified of an incoming call from a number she had blocked. She refuses to pick up, but it’s clear that there’s a reason why that number’s blocked.
Our protagonist, as customizable and renameable as she is, exists with her own history. There are people in her life who are present and gone, precious and tenuous. We think it’s exciting that you, player, will have the experience to simultaneously shape and discover who all she is while untangling the lives of the main cast.
PlantPal
PlantPal is a young and popular plant care and delivery service in Primrose Path. Lynn is a frequent customer, shopping through their online catalog of proprietary and partnered nurseries and garden centers. From shrubs to succulents, flowers to grasses, PlantPal couriers arrive with your order and spend up to 20 minutes of free consultation to help you get started caring for your plants today!
Love these snippets? We’ll be posting more on our Twitter under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN. Visit our devlog in the future to get detailed insight beyond 240 characters!
Artwork
A fan by the name of Hazel drew herself taking a selfie with Priya, wearing dresses from the game’s New Year’s Eve party. This photo says #NoFiter, but with how much drinking went down, of course spelling goes out the window.
If you adore Hazel’s fanart like we do and are interested in more of her work, you can follow her on Twitter @HLR_ART.
Accessibility
A carry over from our last update: Quiet Days still wants your take on what we can do to make visual novels more accessible! Your opinions, preferences, and first-hand experiences are important to us, as we all have different abilities and sensibilities—and we all deserve a chance to enjoy this game.
Main Game Progress
Common Route:
• Rough Outline: 100% ✔
• Revised Outline: 90%
The Artist:
• Rough Outline: 100% ✔
• Revised Outline: —
We are almost done with the clean outline of the common route! We’re missing a scene that resolves the common route: Lynn meets with Harper after the client interviews to confirm which client she picks, which locks the player onto that character route. We didn’t have that in the playtest version as it’s not critical to the purpose of the test, but the scene will be no trouble to write.
The next things we’ll focus on will be revising the common route based on the feedback we received from those who played the playtest, and then tackling the common route script.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Thanks for reading and hope to see you next time. Keep up!
Looks like it's time for an update! Let's take a gander at what we've been up to!
Behind The Scenes
Real life
Coda held down the fort at home while Elm was out and about on vacation! Elm went hiking in Switzerland and brought her camera along! Not only was it a beautiful country with breathtaking views of nature in the sublime, it was a great well of resources, and she took many reference photos—like these beauties:
Those images and more, we hope, will better influence our environmental game designs! You’d be surprised by how this inspiration can fold neatly into this:
Lore Snippets
Primrose Path has deep lore that sprinkles itself across the narrative. Although we still have to go through beta before release, you can look forward to having some special previews long before the game is out. Our Twitter will now include occasional snippets of lore and fictional media which may be referenced in-game. They’ll all be tucked under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, so stay tuned!
Greyson
Everyone's favourite virtual assistant, Greyson, has joined the World Wide Web! Greyson's database now regularly Tweets voice assistance snippets as if he was your very own! Isn’t he a sweetheart? Currently, his schedule is once every Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday. You can interact with him here!
Discord
Our discord server is for all current and future Quiet Days' games! Recently we have been mentioning and voting on early concepts long before releasing them to the public, as well as logging our project tasks to hold our productivity accountable. If being in the know is something that interests you, you can slip on in here.
Accessibility
A major thing we’ve been dealing with this past month is redirecting our design to be more inclusive, via accessibility. Great game design starts when these things are considered ahead of time, rather than as an afterthought.
Currently we are very much open to hearing about what we can do to make visual novels more accessible. We have some ideas and designs of our own for the future, which include mindful options over font choices, audio-related functions, and content warnings.
Share with us your accessibility concerns in video games! Opinions, preferences, and first-hand experiences will be of great help, as we want to make sure people with different abilities and sensibilities can have a chance to enjoy our game!
Main Game Progress
Coding
Coding is underway on the Primrose Path team! Our current focus is introducing the Ink scripting language into our current workflow, which we think will tie into our natural way of writing script while allowing for easier, lighter coding of varied branching narrative. If we succeed in the integrations we have planned, we think this will deepen the level of interactivity for the game overall. Which reminds us:
Outlining
Primrose Path is very much still in the scripting department. We have a very thorough process, where we create a heavily detailed draft outline that covers the overall entire game. (It's currently a whopping 30,000 words, but this amount goes up and down as we fill in and delete what's transferred to the clean outline.) We then take this, revise, and transfer it to a 'clean' outline, which breaks down each scene on a beat by beat basis. Only then do we move onto script.
On that note, we're rather happy to say that the common route of our draft guideline document is fully complete! Work on that route's clean outline is nearly finished at a pretty 5,500 words or so. That’s an easy read, as we’ve had to boil it down from tens of thousands of words, weeks of discussion, and countless passing ideas!
Common Route:
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
• Clean Outline: 66%
The Artist:
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
With The Artist's route draft outline 100% completed, we've come a long way since the plotline's inception. The Artist is a bisexual love interest named Matthias Barousse, a soft-spoken social butterfly best known for his interactive media exhibits—and a bit of a playboy reputation in the community. His route is a tightrope walk between perceptions of good intentions and questionable engagements as rumors about his sex life come to the fore. Is he a good Samaritan or a master manipulator? He'll say it's not his place to judge—is it yours?
And we can’t forget to put a face to the name:
Artwork
The beguiling and provocative multimedia artist, Matthias Barousse
It’s another rough sketch, but here’s an initial concept for The Artist. We’ll be playing around with his look in the future, but Matt for certain likes parkas and has long locks to glide your fingers through.
In other news, we ran a poll on Twitter to see which hairstyles people preferred for another love interest, Ezra Safir, the Executive Assistant. Based on both the poll and written responses in spaces where the poll was shared, the methodical organizer and jazz enthusiast will be sporting this:
That low bun and undercut looks good on him! You guys have pretty great taste!
Coda also took the time to whip up fan art (yes, our own fan art; hear us out) of your best friend, Priya, gearing up for your makeover like any other grown woman in her late twenties:
(original source)
Was asking Priya, of all people, a mistake? You’ll have plenty of time to think on that as she blocks the only exit out of the bedroom.
We're focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Well, all of March flew by, and while we’re watching participants of this year’s NaNoRenO celebrate their demos and bite-sized projects, we’re happy to share with you some of the fruits of our labor! We focused on the first third of the game’s Common Route, which is the very beginning of Primrose Path’s story. Here’s some of our mock-up assets we worked on from all of last month:
Character Sprites
We have initial sprite concepts done of the first three characters you’ll meet in-game! From left to right, say hello to:
The one-eyed silver fox and security guard, Arthur Talbert
Your best friend and secret love informant, Priya Korrapati
Your calculated, stiff-lipped glamazon boss, Harper Steffensen
We have all planned poses and expressions drawn for Arthur but a little ways to go for Priya and Harper, who are main characters with a lot to show off! It doesn’t stop here of course. Primrose Path is a big world, so expect to see plenty more faces to come, and some particularly handsome ones very soon!
Background Art
And with a big world comes a breadth of places. Several backgrounds are still in progress, but here’s a snap sketch of where you’ll be spending some private time as Lynn Austen:
This is an initial draft of Lynn’s Bedroom, where work and leisure are a shuffle away in her small apartment.
Expect to see some more clean drafts of places central to Lynn, and those that help set up the fashionable and tech savvy world in which she lives.
Writing
Here’s a quick overview of the writing for the Common Route so far:
- 98% outlined
- Part 1, Work Day: 13,375 words scripted
So save a couple scenes, we’ve nearly completed the script for the first third of the route! Lynn’s had a rough day at work and an ultimatum from her boss. Next up will be Part 2, The Party, where she winds down with Priya at an unusual New Year’s Eve bash—and stumbles upon some interesting characters.
We’ve worked really hard to get to the point we have after a month, and it revealed to us some things about project management, which we’ll share in another “The Process” post at a later date. But we’re not slowing down! We’ve plenty of content and some special character reveals, soon to come.
Thanks for reading, and we’re always a click away if you want to reach out and talk to us. Follow along on our social media below. Keep up!
Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. In this second installment of The Process, we’ve finished forming our idea and now it’s time to inform it.
2. Research
Mind you, this isn’t a “step two” per se. Here’s the big kicker on what we soon discovered about this part of development:
Research is an active, ongoing process, whose goals change throughout pre- to post-production.
We may have created the idea of Primrose Path but our research didn’t stop at the end of pre-production, as if to say we’ve got everything we need and now it’s time to dive into making it. During production, we still had questions. Research is the only reason that, if you stopped us on the side of the street, the topics of future biomaterials and methods, dynamic UI design, and historic architectural eras could all pop up in the same conversation.
And all of that is valuable information to us, because researching is relevant in every area of the process! But what kind of information did we look for?
Our five categories are Community Canvassing, Story & Character Development, Team Management, Game Design, and Marketing.
Let’s break it down:
A. Community Canvassing
Identifying and learning our target audience.
Identify personal wants from our game.
We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.
Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.
Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.
Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.
This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.
Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.
Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.
Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.
The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.
Connect with other developers for support and networking.
The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.
B. Story & Character Development
Creating an organic experience.
Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.
Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.
Observe and converse with people.
The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual.
Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.
Psychology and sociology research.
Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!
Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres
It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!
C. Team Management
Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.
Pipeline development.
Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.
Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.
Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.
Style guides to standardize writing and art.
Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow.
Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.
Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.
Potential for contracting help.
We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future.
D. Game design
Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.
Consider for which platform to design.
PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.
Consider designing globally.
There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.
Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.
We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?
Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads
There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.
E. Marketing
Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.
Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.
We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation.
Types of advertising and promotional materials.
There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?
Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.
Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?
Cross-exposure with other devs.
Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.
The Takeaway
At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!
Speaking of ongoing research, Western otome is a largely indie market with many small, tenacious teams and hardly any corporate studios. If you are a Western otome developer, please contact us! We’d love to interview you in a Q&A, get your input on your process, and feature your story on our blog!
Today we decided to share some lore and design decisions for our visual novel! Set in a contemporary, not-so-distant future, Lynn Austen’s world runs a timeline slightly alternative to our own. Technology has improved daily life, especially for our ambitious heroine. Reporting for clients has never been easier with her trusty Virtual Assistant! Witty and polite with a sleek interface, this AI allows the player to access client notes, article drafts, emails, and voice recordings. Take a look for yourself:
(1) new Tech blip!
Preview from The Technologion:
“Grey, Inc. just released a new AI update. Here’s a snippet from their website:
Meet Greyson, your virtual personal assistant. He connects to your existing smart home ecosystem and helps you have total control over your lifestyle!
A Great Listener: His unique evolving encryption encoding allows you to securely dictate information to him as he accesses and updates all your synced business, social, and productivity accounts to the cloud.
A Big Brain: With a zettabyte worth of memory at your fingers, Greyson can always recall local and cached data in a fraction of a second, so you’re always connected even when you’re offline. His new No-Brainer mode gives him short-term memory, so all new information is immediately forgotten in a configurable time frame!
Knows You Best: With improved prediction in Ghost mode, Greyson can autorun all your learned routines with minimal reminders after only a month of monitoring your data.
Stylish Too: You can also customize his or any of his family members’ appearance and voice with our ever-growing, open source library of cosmetic assets. You can even mod your own skins and audio files and upload it to our paid developer store!
Greyson always has you best interest at heart. He’s here for you.
Greyson is so savvy that you can actually follow him on social media.”
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A Sprawling Metropolis to Explore
We’ve no shortage of lore and locations in Primrose Path. There will be over 100 beautiful location backgrounds to experience—not including our atmospheric day, evening, and night variations. We will be introducing more in-universe teasers like Greyson in future updates!
Customizable Female Protagonist
Lynn is a woman with history, family, career, and taste. You can’t change that. But you can change her look! With five different hair colors and skin tones each, you can create a more relatable character to view in relevant, gorgeous snapshots in your CG gallery. That's 25 possible CG variations!
NaNoRenO
This year’s NaNoRenO—the Ren’py version of NaNoWriMo (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month)—is starting this March, and fellow developers using the visual novel engine are psyched! NaNoRenO’s premise is to challenge indie teams to create a playable, fully-developed visual novel by the end of the month!
A game the scale of Primrose Path can’t possibly be completed in that span of time, but the Quiet Days team is still sharing the game jam’s spirit! We won’t participate in NaNoRenO, but we’re inspired to push through development alongside it. We’ll be using the event to measure how far we can get with an in-house demo, and give more substantial visual updates in the future!
While our blog is still the best way to receive regular, thorough updates on Primrose Path, you can now keep up with our Lemma Soft thread, which we update as a sort of master document!
Nanoprogress
Continuing on the NaNoRenO thought, while we won’t be creating assets until March 1st, we do have a head start on concept and design work! Our progress so far:
Concepts / Design work
Characters: 21%
Locations: 11%
... We’re calling it “nanoprogress” for a reason, but rest assured, the steps we’re taking are anything but small. We’ll update as we go. Keep up!
Ever wanted to make something, but didn’t know where to start? We too. Since this is our first game ever and we’re still fresh in development, we decided to chronicle our process in creating our visual novel, Primrose Path. We think insight into how the two of us attack the complex problem of making something exist is a great thing for us to look back on when we reach our goal, and for other aspiring game devs to relate and learn from.
Let’s start from the beginning:
1. The Idea
How did we come up for the idea of our game? Well, it all started with Elm’s idea: a game where you can romance men who are based off of the cardinal sins. Yes, that’s how it all started, and yes it’s very played, but why would we pick up from there?
Our Motivations
How it started for Elm:
What motivated me was the current visual novel market. Visual novels have always had a special place in my heart, but man was I getting tired of what was on my plate. It didn’t feel like the medium was maturing with it’s audience. There was no shortage of amnesiac clueless protagonists, where all you had to do was marry the love interest and get the good ending. (That’s not to say there haven’t been some truly great games in the medium, but they often go unnoticed.) At the end of the day, I wanted to see playful interactions, deep character relationships, rich story-lines and strong atmospheric narrative in more visual novels.
Thus, Primrose was born, partially out of deep-rooted frustration but also partly out of excitement for the idea. I wanted to create stories that allowed others to feel the way they made me feel. I wanted to use my love of narrative in games to create atmospheric and meaningful choices, and Primrose was quickly becoming that opportunity. What started as a joke had quickly become my favourite project to work on.
Personally, I love growth and project management. When I entered University for 2D animation, I wanted to improve my illustrative skills. I switched to 3D Games Art when I realised there was an entirely new skillset for me to learn. Afterwards, I dipped into sequential and comic art, and learnt so much from that. The end result led to me having an understanding of the unique combination that is cinematic composition and text, 3D pipelines, 2D animated workflows, and the use of interactive narrative to create endless and unique experiences. Ultimately, I knew I would end up making a visual novel at some point, I just didn’t know it would be now.
As for Coda:
This became an opportunity. It didn’t feel like it at the time. It was all brought up in a kind of joking context, and so I jokingly took Elm’s “seven deadly sins” tripe and wrote up some mad predictable character types to match. I shared them back. And when it was received well, a back-and-forth ensued for more creative character building. It grew into an organic exchange and it kind of fueled an already small fire in me. Maybe this was a chance to create something and leave a mark, but I would have never anticipated it’d develop into the scale currently planned. It never crossed my mind what kind of outreach was possible, just that I wanted to collaborate something fun for a change.
But what motivated me to even continue past the point of brainstorming? When did I decide that I’m willing to hunker down and take this into production? It was a culmination of things. I’ve attended college as an undergraduate working towards a Fine Art degree with an interest in illustration, but I never had an opportunity to be employed within my field of study or anything administrative. I wanted to break out of my retail history, but I had a recent streak of being passed up by lot of potential employers for someone with more experience or a college degree—any college degree, at times. With all these perceived dead ends, I felt the need to create something myself in my own field of study, to proudly be able to show others as the peak of all my talents. I had to take control over what I could control.
Our Interests
Both of us have an interest in art and talent in illustration, with Elm specializing in creating 3D designs, and Coda with 2D animation. We both enjoy the art of storycraft, combining Elm’s penchant for outlining and analyzing story arcs and plot pacing, and Coda’s interest in crafting prose and character creation and dynamics. And we both love to prove ourselves to ourselves. We can get pretty competitive if you challenge us!
In the end, it was clear we were driven by our passions, improving our portfolios, and garnering a publicity that’d lead to eventual profit.
Our Relationship
It’s important to understand too the unlikely fortune of how easily two strangers—who, at the time, barely knew any of the other’s artwork!—are able to work together. We had an existing relationship in an online chat for artists, both being active and talkative community members and easily riffing with each other, so it was clear we were both casual and approachable people in the first place. We didn’t seek each other out to contract; this just naturally developed between two ambitious, complimentary personalities. In private over more involved matters, we both know how to speak respectfully to each other, talk through disagreements, and compromise. But we absolutely want to stress to anyone hoping to collaborate with other people:
Clear, consistent, and upfront communication with your partners is extremely important!
The moment you know you want to create a marketable product and need to work with someone else to get you to your goal, you absolutely have to communicate that. For us, we established very early a mutual recognition of what we personally want out of the project. While we both wanted the same things, it’s important to know what the project represents to each of us so we can measure out and balance each other’s investment.
If you’re in a binding partnership like we are, there should be an intrinsic investment in every partner involved. If you’re working with contractors, while money may be a factor if either of you charge, they also willingly create quality work if they believe in you and the product. Check with and update them actively, make sure they understand their roles and project duties in your pipeline, give specific and constructive feedback, and socialize to build a comfortable and trustworthy relationship. And if you feel like someone’s not pulling their weight, you need to be direct about that too, in private and tactfully, because in the end, you need to look out for your goals and maintain those positive, worthwhile relationships.
So, Elm and Coda started with a silly idea about the cardinal sins. Now it’s become a story that explores the line between “good” and “bad” people. Once we refined, the rest was history.
Primrose Path, our current development title, is a narrative based game following the life of a dissatisfied 27-year-old columnist. Lynn Austen (the re-nameable heroine) is tasked with writing a PR article on one of several high-profile men who’re losing their good favor with the public. But the longer she shadows them, the more wild, intense, and unforgettable the secrets she uncovers.
Planned Features
Choice-driven Personality
Assertive? Modest? Flirty? Aloof? People love a woman with a personality, and Lynn is no exception. What she does and how she does it says a lot about who she is. With these men, that can get her far—or nowhere at all. Play around with actions and responses that give a specific, yet believable, tone. Your motives are Lynn’s: stay true to your character (whatever that may be!) or play up to your client’s interests. The little things count!
Evolving Report
Your actions and choices have consequences. As a writer for a well-regarded magazine, Lynn will be able to control the ending narrative through her daily interactions, impacting how she reflects on her draft at the end of the day. Based on how you’ve played the story, you get to choose what to include in the article at the end! What you decide to publish may make or break these men’s—and your—careers
Story and Romance Endings
There are 8 planned story routes (including a hidden unlockable route). Though Lynn is working with clients, she’s still a single woman up for a little excitement, and these unwed men don’t disappoint! But life isn’t all romance—she might miss something critical if she’s too busy staring into their eyes. Explore your options and play with boundaries. How you navigate through key scenarios will play out in one of a route’s four possible endings.
Do you like interactive, narrative-driven video games? What about young adult visual novels? Well, you’re in luck! We’re a small independent team working on narrative games, based in Maryland, USA and London, UK. Our first and current project, Primrose Path, is a choice-driven visual novel drama. It has plenty of twists, turns, and tumultuous men.
If you want to keep up with our development, you can follow us on social media. Here’s our:
Twitter
Instagram
Want to be a part of the conversation? You can also join our Discord Server and chat with us and other piqued persons!
Or throw us an ask right here!
