May Devlog

Hallo everyone!! Time for the May wrap-up and progress report.

Ramble

Still editing BUT...making progress. ╰(*°▽°*)╯

Summary

• Working on Ch 10 edit
• Received a new BG
• Received new BG sketches

Writing

So I am currently working on revising Chapter 10 and have currently gone through about 70% of the content. (A little more, but it's like 72.4% or something. So let's round down. LoL)

One of the first things I had to do in this chapter was write several ending scenarios for players who don't end up in any of the LI routes. This is sort of the final off-ramp spot for the no-LI options. The scene where those endings happen ended up being about 7200 words in length. A small portion of that was already written but most of it was drafted when I started working on Chapter 10.

This means that I will probably go through it one more time to revise and clean it up before putting it in the game.

After getting that done, I have been working on revising the common and character content.

I went ahead and gave all the common content a second read and clean-up even though I had previously done an edit of it. And I did the same for Asher's content, which was also already revised once but needed a few additional fixes. 

I've gone through all of the character-exclusive content for Daaz, Kav, and Noel.

And I'm currently starting on Raif's scenes.

Each LI in this chapter has about 12000 words of content. None of that content is duplicated - though similar events do happen (particularly in the third scene) all the content is fully re-drafted for each character. This means all 12000 words for each character have to be read through and revised. It's not like there's 12000 words per character but half of it is made up of direct repeats from other routes.

Originally Chapter 7 was the longest chapter in the game but it has been surpassed by Chapter 10, which I did expect so I'm not surprised by that. I say that the characters have 12000 words of content, but bear in mind that the rough draft versions of the scenes only have about 8000 - 8500 words. I've been fleshing them out pretty significantly.

This is because a lot of times when I'm drafting, the dialogue is a bit sparse and there's not as much banter or back and forth as I might generally prefer for character interactions. Additionally, love scenes tend to be a little more lacking in detail on the rough drafts because I'm mostly focused on blocking out the scene and actions rather than trying to make it flow well.

Most of the fleshing out in Chapter 10 is in the LI scenes (particularly scene 1, where the love scene happens, and scene 2 where there is a date that is getting fleshed out with cute/sweet dialogue bits, etc.)

Because I'm doing my best to roughly match word counts, it means I've been pretty clearly able to estimate about how long this chapter is going to be in the end and how much I'm likely to add.

Currently the chapter is about 84,000 words - that's pre-coded of course. Probably closer to 80k coded. It is going to be a bit longer than this once Raif and Yren are done.

The current length of the project as a whole is a little more than 560,000 words. I am still thinking it's going to be close to 600,000 pre-coded once I get the ending sequences drafted. I still don't really know what the coded word count will be. 

We'll find out!

Anyway! I'm about ¾ of the way through Chapter 10 and will hopefully wrap up by the end of the week.

At that point I will be focusing on revising and drafting the ending sequences (which take up chapters 11, 12, and 13. 

These three chapters are a bit shorter than the rest of the chapters in the game because there's no "common" content in them. So yeah. 

Writing is progressing. Slowly. But we are kind of rounding that final bend.

Artwork

Received two new sketches and a new BG - a couple of general locations and one specific one that I think may only appear in some of the endings. 💪💪

Upcoming month(s)

I should finish up Chapter 10 by my next update for sure. I am close to 70% of the way through it but it's a big chapter and I'm doing a lot of fleshing out through the character scenes.

After this I'll be focusing on the ending sequences. I'm so excited because it feels like I'm finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with the writing for this project that was supposed to be 300,000 words. 

Well. We've slightly surpassed that. By a small amount. A smidge, even.

I am ready to ascend from the depths of Editing Purgatory. Nearly there. Nearly have...served my time. I am nearly free.

I'm looking forward to seeing where things will stand a month from now.

See you then!