July Wrap - Up

Hallo! Time for the July wrap-up!

Ramble

Welp. I did the thing. I finished the writing.

I used "finished" loosely. I will obviously be making more edits as I play through the game and as others play through and find issues.

But at this point the drafting and major revisions are done.

Phase 1 of development is complete.

I will be honest in that I expected to be done with this writing like..in April or something. I have been writing this thing every day and it still took this long. It is, of course, a lot longer than expected. My initial word count goal was like 350,000. I then moved that to 450,000 which this demo page still says I think...

The *draft* (not the coded word count) ended 650,000+ 

So yeah. We will get into the coded word count and everything else below.

Summary

• Finished Drafting Noel's ending
  • Finished Editing Noel's ending
  • Imported to Renpy
• Edited Kav's ending
  • Imported to Renpy
• Finished Drafting Raif's ending
  • Finished Editing Raif's ending
  • Imported to Renpy
• Finished Drafting Yren's ending
  • Finished Editing Yren's ending
  • Imported to Renpy
• Sprite Tweaks
• Prepped more BGs and imported to Renpy for testing
• Added more UI tweaks
  • New glossary
  • New Save/Load screens
• Additional BGs and sketches
• Continuing Yren playthrough
• Working on a long TO DO list of fiddly things.

Writing

So the big news this month. The writing is D O N E.

And by done, I mean that it's mostly done. I still have to do my own playtest. And then I have to get others to playtest. This will invariably mean more edits. But the big revisions are done.

The draft is done. 

I was able to draft and revise the remaining endings. I also proofread and imported them into the game.

The final (current) *coded* word count is....*drumroll*

616,000 words.

That is probably going to change still because as I do my personal playthroughs of the routes, I will inevitably cut things and add things and change stuff. I may add additional choice menus (I've already like...three as I play through Yren's path). That will obviously give the word count a boost...

And so on.

That said, I am essentially concluding the "writing" portion of development. From here on out it is art, assets, coding, features, and testing.

Artwork

Received new BGs and BG sketches, of course. Backgrounds are nearly 80% complete.

Haven't really done any other artwork since I've been focused on the revising and getting the script formatted.

Other

New Glossary Design. So one thing that I've added is this small "preview" screen for the glossary articles. When you click an article, this is what pops up now. It gives you a short summary of the glossary articles and you can then choose to read the whole thing if you want.

This preview isn't as useful for short entries but for long entries like the planet classification one, it lets people see enough info to get the general idea without shoving you into a massive article.

Another UI thing added this month is a new style of save screen. So there are a couple of cool features with this save screen. The first is that, as you can see, there are different pages for the different characters. 

For a game like this one where a lot of people may be playing multiple routes concurrently, I thought it would be beneficial to allow for simple organisation of save slots. This way you can keep your playthroughs for the different characters separate. Additionally, you can easily add more save slots when you reach the end of the available empty slots. 

There are more QOL features to come in the next few weeks. I have a good friend helping me code some of the things that are either outside my ability or that, frankly, I just don't wanna do. Because I don't actually like UI coding that much. 🤣

FINALLY.

I have started on an incredibly long to do list of big and small things that have to be complete before I can release chapter one. Some things are pretty major like "Do the CGs" and some things are a less major like "Code in the in-game achievements."

There are things like "add any new glossary articles" or "make the game guide." 

There are also a few large find/replace events that must happen to correct inconsistent spelling of things. There is a word, "Yenshe'lí" that appears quite a lot in the script. At some point I got lazy and stopped putting the accent on the "i" so now I have to fix that.

So I am doing a lot of that stuff right now too.

Upcoming month(s)

August will be a month of playtesting, art creation, and UI and "The Long List of Fiddly Stuff."

Until I finished revisions, my playtest of Yren's route largely consisted of about 2 hours a night after I was done writing.

The playtest will increase in duration each day. Realistically I can't just sit and playtest for hours on end. I will probably be alternating between playtesting and working on features and art.

And also working through that big list of stuff.

Things pick up speed once the writing is done because a lot of the other things I have to do just won't take as long as writing...616,000 words...and then revising 616,000 words.

(Sadly...play testing 616,000 words does unfortunately take a fair bit of time though.) 

So yeah. Everything about this game is taking longer than expected. And it's been quite tricky to predict how long things will take. But we are making progress. Yay!

 One Last Thing

Finally, I want to draw attention to a dev duo I've known for a while now. Their debut project is in Kickstarter right now.
Please do yourself a favour and check it out the demo. It is a must play for anyone who is interested in backing!  

In their own words, here is a description of the game:

In this romantic dark-comedy murder-mystery game, you guide a villainess who cannot remember what story she is trapped in... or who is trying to kill her. Can you find clues, seduce potential enemies, fight off fiends, and calm angry furniture while solving the mystery of this world?

Save the Villainess has a two to three hour demo that is now available for you to try on its Kickstarter page. In the demo, you can meet up to four different suspects and love interests, including a Crown Prince, a Duke of the North, a Childhood Friend, and a Servant. The full game will include even more love interests, including a mysterious woman…

That's all for this month. See you next time!