Hallo everyone! Time for the tumblr update! I have big news! So read on!
Finished drafting Yren's ending
Revised Kav, Noel, Raif, and Yren
Formatted/Scripted Kav, Noel, Raif, and Yren's endings
Worked on the play test for Yren
I am done with the writing. (Well. As done as one ever really is. I was telling another writer friend of mine just yesterday that we're never really done until the moment we have to ship the project to someone).
BUT. I am done with the rough draft. I am done with the major revision. So from this point onwards, the changes will be more minor as I play test and others play test (eventually. I'm the only one testing right now).
So going forward you probably won't be getting any writing updates because there won't be enough to report. Cause...it's done.
Uncoded word count is 657,000 words.
Coded word count is 616,000 words (this is how much actually ended up in Ren'py).
Huzzah. My 350,000 word story is done. He he. He. LoL
It took so much longer than I thought it would even though I was writing every day - sometimes 3000 words a day!
Timing was just so hard for this project. It was much more difficult to predict a total word count for this game. Because of the structure of this game, word count variations are going to be much more noticeable and I had to focus and work a little harder to keep everyone in much tighter alignment. So when one route (like Asher), increased by 5000 words, I knew immediately I would have to increase all the others by roughly the same amount.. That meant the overall word count goal instantly increased by 25000 words.
Additionally, any time I made a small change in something - whether it was lore or a minor wording or vocabulary change (for instance, changing one thing from "system void" to "gate void" then to "nexus void") - each time, I had to go change that thing in all the other routes.
There was a lot of continuity babysitting.
This was somewhat true for GS but not to the same degree. Not everything mentioned in one route in that game was even mentioned in the other routes. So I might need to only change one other route's references to that thing but not all nine routes. Or maybe no other route would need changes. In WSC, it was all 6 routes every single time.
So even if I was focusing on one particular route, I could never really work on that route in a vacuum. I was constantly having to go check on and edit the other routes for things too.
This not only made it harder and more time consuming to write in general, but also just made it impossible to predict things like how much time it would take.
But that is squared away. Life is good.
Just some BG stuff. I've been so focused on writing that not much of that focus has been spread around to art so there's not much to report here.
As you know I've been making some visual changes to the UI. Mostly minor stuff involving slight changes to the general aesthetic of the UI. Those fixes are largely complete.
And now the focus has shifted to adding more of the features and functionalities that have been planned but on-hold for the last year.
The new save screen is coded. This save screen, as you can see, divides the characters up by name and lets you add additional save slots when you've filled up all the empty ones.
For a game like WSC, where people may have multiple playthroughs for different characters going at the same time, I thought it would be useful to have this paged organisation. I always find that even if I try to keep my playthroughs separate and organised, they invariably get messy. This is true in other games, this is true for my personal play tests...
I'm really hoping this structure helps with that.
Another feature I'm adding to WSC is a recap screen.
I know that with episodic games, one of the struggles people have is that they forget some of the story details during the gap between episodes. So people feel like they constantly have to replay and refresh their memory. This is, of course, an attempt to help players maybe not have to do that.
The idea is that I will update this with every episode so that people who want a recap can just click in and refresh their memory.
There are some other features that have been added in. Some other QOL of life things. And there are more features to come. I won't go into everything here.
But those things are slowly coming together as well.
There are a lot of things that have to be done before the first episode can release. Some are major things like completing the CGs or coding the sprite expressions. Some are more minor like adding the in-game achievements.
And there are also a ton of smaller, more fiddly things. Like double-checking the styling of certain words (my editing programs could never decide if they preferred home world or homeworld and so both get used.)
I want to fix those kinds of things so testers don't have to worry about pointing them out.
I have a massive to-do list filled with all of those big and small things. And now I'm working through it.
I have also been doing a play test of Yren's route. I have to personally do each route one time just to see if there are any significant issues that need to be fixed before anyone else sees the game. So I've been doing that as well.
Finishing my own play test of the game. This goes fairly slow because I play test with the self voicing enabled. And that means that I'm playing through it at a much slower pace. I also stop frequently to fix typos, change repetitive wording. Or may slightly more substantial fixes.
I've been testing for like...2 hours a night because I've been focused on writing during the day. But I'm going to be increasing the time I spend play testing so that hopefully I can get through the rest of it a little faster.
Additionally, all the UI and "Fiddly List" stuff will continue to be worked on as well.
We have moved past writing and into the next phase of development. I'm really excited to be finally focusing on other stuff.
That is all for now. I will see you next time.
izzy806
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