DevLog Update (Patreon)

Hey all,

Sorry about the silence over here. Hopefully, the selfie series kept things going with the page over the past few weeks. People seemed to enjoy the release of those being spread out so it may be something we do again. I liked the staggered release of them personally. 

I wanted to take some time to check-in and report where we are with the next update as progress has been slow following the lengthy update I did about the piracy shit a few weeks ago. That being said, while the Overview page has not actively shown progress until recently, there's been some experimental things going on behind the scenes related to the game. 

Current Writing

So I know some of you astutely watch the Overview tab and some may have noticed that the outline for v0.16 is now at 100%. We're doing things a bit different this time with the outlining for some major reasons. Chapter 8 of the story has some major shit in it and some things are really important to include. Because of this, I've been both excited but more terrified about writing this part than any other part we've seen so far. This was part of the difficulty I had with the piracy stuff because it hit at one of the worst times for creativity. Normally, my outlines have been super generic. If you want some good quality entertainment, ask Blayke how he feels about my outlines and watch the atrophy of his polite disposition. The early outlines were literally a flow chat with about 20 points on it which ended up turning into 10,000 lines of code. The new outline is incredibly detailed (by my standards) and is currently just over 8 pages for v0.16. How that translates into the length of the actual update is to be determined, this is fresh territory for me but I seriously had to change up some stuff this time around to keep the process fresh and to grow a bit outside of my typically stubborn comfort zone. 

Next, I want to get a majority, if not all of v0.17 outlined in detail as well. While this takes longer, I'm hopeful this will improve the narrative in these parts of the story and improve the cohesion of the story. While I've never written with an outline this detailed, I'm mildly hopeful it will decrease writing time just because I have to plan less in the moment while I'm writing. Odds are, I'll end up starting on the actual rough draft of v0.16 before v0.17 outline is complete but you may see these totals bounce back and forth on the progress bar--just sayin'.

Experiments

While my creativity was straight fucked in the wake of all that drama I posted about before, I ended up working more on art stuff rather than writing. Despite the art improvements in the story, I'll openly say that I've been disappointed with some parts of the CGs, notably those that deal with things that should be wet. For example, characters in the shower are under water but appear to have very dry skin. There's ways to improve this but so far I've been unimpressed with the quality of my skills. I've tinkered around on this a bit and it's still a work-in-progress--some of which will have to be custom built at this point and will only be included in the revision and final draft of the game (For the newer members, the current build is still pre-Alpha and we will redo the entire game once completed). It's no secret that that we're moving towards a beach setting in the near future so I had goals to try and showcase wet skins during the beach scenes and then plans to reuse these during showers, etc. It's just not going as quickly as I wanted. 

I'm also trying to invent some new background characters that you'll hopefully see in the future. These will not be important characters and will probably have zero influence on the story but I do want to try and fill some parts of the school out a bit more and do some experimenting. While that slows things down a bit, it is something that most of you will probably agree needs to happen. There's all kinds of complications that go with that as well including their own appearance or clothing. Also, the types of models we use may have different bone structures so posing becomes something I have to either purchase more packs for to do quickly or manually pose all of them (basically it's an argument of time vs. money). 

So things are moving forward again at the typical rate at this point, just approaching things a bit differently for these 2 releases. I anticipate a more detailed DevLog again soon that will hopefully outline more of the plans specific to v0.16 and what to expect. Right now, this is more of a generic update on where we are, what our current plan is, and why. Again, sorry for the delay and we really appreciate the support that you guys have provided  to us individually and as a team.

-Aaryn