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!
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!
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!
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!
Hi. I’m Elm and I’m learning to code with Unity.
Some people consider making games with Unity to be a daunting task, especially when lacking experience in a game engine or coding. I’m not particularly phased by this notion. Everyone who does great things now, had to learn at some point. None of us were born knowing code. When you think of it like that, it seems pretty straightforward.
This daily journal is a breakdown of how we look at creating projects in Unity and familiarising ourselves with that environment.
Through this blog I will probably not explain the very basics, but I hope to cover most of them. The topics I will discuss assume your familiar with some asset authoring tools or 3D software such as 3DsMax, Maya and understand the purpose and function of game engines such as Unreal. It will not cover aspects of 3D game art creation. Simply because this is what I already know. Although, occasionally I may mention things as a sort of refresher.
Despite working in Industry, Unity is a complete fresh start for me.
My usual go to of familiarising myself with anything is to read the entire documentation at least once so I know the depth of what I’m dealing with on a surface level. Many people do not like to learn or work this way, and they’re probably right to.
So why am I doing this?
Well, first of all. If you stumbled upon this, then you might already know I’m working on a project I call Primrose, but I also have another project nicknamed Companion.
With these in mind, I will be talking about Unity basics and development that is relevant to these projects - both 2D narrative heavy games.
I might make other mini games along the way, as a method of experimentation. No matter what, I’ll document it here and post daily. It helps me remember.
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!
