Developer's Journal #6 (Patreon)

Hello everyone.

I am still working on the same bar scene.  Total postwork completed renders for that scene are now at 168.  I redid the lighting on a number of the renders from last week, and most of them were one to three hour renders, so I lost a couple of days on that, but I am happy with the reworks.  There's still quite a bit left in this scene, but I'm at a point now in the dialogue where I'm able to reuse a lot of renders from earlier in the scene either in full or in part, so the rest of the scene should move faster.  Playing through the bar scene takes me about twenty minutes and there are 435 lines of dialogue.  If you've noticed I do like to change expressions quite frequently, so that much dialogue requires a lot of renders, even if a lot of them are just small variants of pose/expression.  So that's me explaining to you why I am now in my third week of working on this scene.

I did finish the script for Part Five.  The ending is one of the most [REDACTED] moments in the game, in my opinion, so it was [REDACTED] to write.  I should note one caveat, and that is that there are a handful of social events throughout the game that I've got plotted but not scripted.  For example, in Part Two you'll have the option to visit Donna Lee's museum.  I haven't identified/built the set for the museum yet, and I really feel like I need to see that before I can be sure exactly how the social interaction there will go down.  But other than those few isolated events, Parts One through Five are all scripted.  Here are some current stats for the script according to the Ren'py Lint tool:

"The game contains 10,080 dialogue blocks, containing 91,369 words and 480,308 characters, for an average of 9.1 words and 48 characters per block.  The game contains 50 menus..."

I'm debating whether to continue including a preview image in every Developer's Journal post.  The reason is that if there are several months between game updates then I'd be releasing anywhere from 16 to 24ish preview images per update.  There's a risk there of spoiling the fun of the new episode if you've already seen a lot of images from a lot of different scenes.  The other approach would be the one I'm taking with this week's preview image.  It's pretty similar to last week's, so it doesn't really spoil any additional content.  But that raises the question of whether you're even interested in previews that are similar to stuff you've already seen.

I might just be weird about this--I'm the guy who plugs his ears and closes his eyes when a Marvel movie trailer comes on.  But right now I'm leaning towards maybe just a couple of preview images each month.  If you have any strong feelings on this issue let me know in the comments or on Discord.

Thank you for your support!