Progress Report - May 29, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I mentioned last week how I was going to be out for the weekend, so the work week was going to be a bit anemic compared to the standard. The weekend was fantastic, honestly much better than I anticipated (as someone who doesn't drink, a night out basically bar-crawling isn't exactly an exciting proposition, but spending time with my friends and just bullshitting and encouraging them to drunk-text their wives and fiancees made everything worthwhile).

And, perhaps more importantly, despite the anemic schedule, the work done was anything but anemic!

Claire/Jill is done!

I suppose at some point, I should start referring to it by its official name, which is Refuge. I've just been calling it Claire/Jill for the past 18 months, it's a habit hard to break.

But yes! It's done!

I noted in last week's Progress Report how the 4k render started, and the napkin math was projecting it'd take anywhere from 5 to 10 days to render. It turned out that the render was much closer to the 5-day mark.

In fact, the very last frame finished rendering precisely 3 minutes before I had to leave for the weekend. Talk about awkward timing! I could have had it released by Friday evening!

I wasn't bothered though, since I had officially set my sights on a June 1 release, and we were definitely going to make that.

I'm going to be honest with you all, though. I don't think I can wait that long. I suspect I'm going to end up releasing it tomorrow. All that's left to do - literally all that's left - is adding the credits to the end of the video. I've even color-corrected and watermarked it all, as well as render out the final trailer.

You can check out the trailer a bit early by clicking here. As I promised, that early cut I released on Twitter was going to come back looking and sounding much better. I definitely think I delivered on the visuals, and my sound designer naturally delivered on the audio.

Overall, I am extremely proud of the final product. I know I always say that my most-recently-released video is my best to date, and I do sincerely think that this is my best to date. The story, the writing, the scenes, the lighting, the cinematography, the character arcs, and of course the lewds. I just love all of it.

I always have a list of things I would love to do better if I had infinite time, money, and patience, and make no mistakes I have that list for Refuge as well. But all things considered, it's a pretty small list.

I think, because the video is so big (and as such so expensive to produce), I am going to double the early-access window for it. Instead of 5 days early access, it will be 10 days. I don't think that's unfair. People have waited 18 months since the project began. They can wait 10 days longer. And if they can't, the early access tier is right there, just a click away.

I've also made some significant mechanical progress on the Life is Strange Epilogue project.

Yes, that's right, I implemented a full fucking texting mechanism.

The SMS messages are another staple of the Life is Strange series, so naturally it only makes sense for them to make a return in my own foray into the IP. And while some people found them annoying fluff, I am utilizing the system for important narrative construction.

You can click here to see it in action. Note that I sped up the bulk of the conversation, just for the sake of time. I find the pacing to not be noticeable when actually playing, but I just want to quickly demonstrate all the mechanisms at play here in the video.

Toward that end, there are two mechanisms I have implemented in the phone that the base game didn't have. The first mechanism is making the texts interactive, effectively making them another full-blown story mechanism. True Colors Wavelengths experimented with the idea of allowing replying to texts, but it was very underexplored due to that expansion's obvious budget and time restraints.

I took that idea and ran with it. Building the UI for the decision mechanism was more of a challenge than I care to admit. Wavelengths got around it by making the phone only take up maybe half the screen, and utilizing the base game's dialogue system to crowbar in replying to texts. That resulted in a tiny screen though, and I didn't want that.

I'm a bit ashamed to say that it took me sleeping on it to figure out the duh-obvious solution of having the possible responses just being clickable chat bubbles, right where Max's responses go. It's such an intuitive solution, I don't know why I didn't think of it right away. For that matter, I'm not sure why Deck Nine didn't think of it for Wavelengths, either.

The second mechanism I've implemented is phone-centric plot control. In practice, that means gates and interrupts. Gates that stop the player from progressing until they read the text messages, and interrupts that will forcibly close the phone and propel the narrative forward. There will also be text-conditional-jumps, which will only unlock certain options if certain texts have been read. I haven't implemented that yet though, since I haven't needed it yet. I will, though, since one of the upcoming major choices will be dependent on it.

While implementing the text-messaging system, naturally I had to manage both the player-facing game and the developer-facing editor. Again, I am building the game and editor as a single system. While putting the phone system together, I simply wrote out the conversations directly in code. I wrote a robust, slick chaining system to make it really fluid and frictionless.

When it came time to implement it into the visual editor, though, it quickly became a nightmare. This menu, for example, is terror-inducing.

And that was the least-complicated menu.

I got about halfway through implementing the visual editor, when I came to the conclusion that, since texts are... well.. text-based, it honestly makes more sense to build them with a text editor. So I scrapped the visual editor, and decided to make the text messages be built out-of-engine in a text editor instead. So much for making everything editable in-game. No plan survives engagement with reality I guess.

And since I already had the slick code-based solution for it, I decided to skip over writing a data-parsing language for it, and just have the conversations literally be built in code. So I spun off a separate Javascript file that manages the logic.

Behind the scenes, the text-message system is built in a hierarchy. It looks something like this:

In code, you can see this system rather directly reflected. Here are the first few branches of the Mom conversation above:

Text messages are engaged with by the rest of the game on conversation level, and their progress is saved to the player-data structure (EG saving and loading your current game progress for multiple sessions) on the branch level.

Which is to say, the game designer (me) doesn't directly send messages to you as you progress the game. Instead, the designer sends an entirely new conversation to the player, which is the special "conversation starting branch" you see in the code pic above. Those messages are all immediately generated, and the decision immediately presented.

From there, I have added a lot of little frills surrounding the texting system. The most obvious one is the separate contacts screen, with the number of unread messages and a preview of the last message sent. Then there is the phone icon that appears in the bottom-right whenever you have unread messages, which you can click to directly open the phone. You can also open and close the phone at any time with the escape menu. There's support for images in text messages, which is essential to the plot - Max's big time-jumps require a photograph of herself to work. That's all I will say about it for now. And then finally there are the sounds: whenever a new conversation is started, a phone-vibrate sound is played; and whenever a text message is sent or received, a beep sound is played.

I hesitated on the sounds, but ultimately decided to go for them, and I think it was a good decision. I feared they'd be annoying, but it's honestly nice feedback in the otherwise total silence of the soundscape. And I already have the computer voices reading the dialogue to break the silence, so it's not like they're out of place.

Saving conversations on a branch level has a number of advantages. The first and most obvious advantage is it means I don't have to actually save each and every text message sent and received, which would quickly balloon the save file. Since the branches are saved as their last message is sent, that means the branches are saved in order - meaning I can just navigate the conversation trees and quickly set up all the messages within those branches to restore the phone to its saved state. And, since I am saving on the branch level, I can actually make tweaks to those messages without breaking save files - things like typo fixes or adding and removing entire messages for the sake of flow and clarity. Being able to change things without breaking player saves is always a good thing.

The biggest advantage, though, is it provides a way for me to cleanly hook into the text system from the main game. The aforementions text-based controls, of gating, interrupting, and jumping, all act on a branch-based system. If a branch was reached, then interrupt or allow a jump. If a branch wasn't reached, then gate progress. It's all very easy to work with.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with what all I got done here. I didn't originally plan for the phone system to be so robust, but I definitely think it has a lot of value, and adds even more dimensionality to what is very quickly ballooning to becoming an effectively fully-featured game.

Finally, while this isn't directly related to the mechanical progression, I do think it's worth noting as it is relevant to the higher-level production.

Last week, I made and Tweeted this stylized photoset, titled Timelines: 

As I say in that Tweet, I put it together as a mood piece, to keep focused on where this project is going.

Yes, despite there now being nearly 200 individual steps in this project with no hints of lewd yet, I do intend to make it a lewd game. A ridiculously lewd game, in fact. It just needs time to get there, and honestly I think all the non-lewd only enhances the lewd. It's not a sex game, it's a game with sex, and I think that is a prestigious (and pretentious!) distinction to make.

In the background, I've been thinking about chapters and their titles. In the days following that Tweet, I think I've decided on the title of Chapter 1: Timelines. And I think I know exactly where to put the title card, formally announcing it starting: immediately after Max uses her big brain and time powers to shift the timeline just enough to save Rachel, and she jumps back to the present-day to find herself smack dab in the middle of a threesome, with Rachel and Chloe both tongue-deep in her holes.

I think it's a perfect chapter title. It perfectly introduces the thesis of the Epilogue, and reflects how chapter 1 is largely focused on Max coming to terms with and getting her footing on the ramifications of the changes she made. I don't know what the other chapter titles will be, where they will be placed, or even how many they will be.

But I do know that the heart of the Epilogue, exploring the idea that inspired this entire damn crazy ambition, is going to be a slow burn. Even when the lewds come out in force, it's going to take a while before the reflection really kicks in.

I also know that the first prototype is going to be publicly released to you all here on Patreon sometime shortly after that Chapter 1 title drop. I suspect later drops will probably be more-or-less on a chapter-to-chapter basis, since I imagine by that point I will have all of the major mechanisms designed and implemented, and it'll predominantly just be writing holding back the development.

The only reason why the first drop won't be smoothly on chapter lines (EG dropping everything before the title card, the unspoken Chapter 0 as it were) is because Chapter 0 doesn't fully capture all of the mechanisms I want in the game. And I want the first posting to be a feature-complete vertical slice, showing everything people can expect from the game mechanically, and providing insight into how I am handling the story and hinting at where the story might go.

There's poetry in the releases being chapter-based, since that is how all the previous Life is Strange games have been released up to True Colors. It has its pros and its cons, namely that it trades off the people getting a trickle of content and gives me opportunities to get feedback on what people do and don't like about the mechanisms and writing; in exchange for the droughts in between releases, making it potentially awkward for people to get back into the new chapter after finishing the previous chapters, and having to remember everything that happened, the decisions they made, and how the game itself even plays.

But as a single independent developer whose making this entirely by candlelight, right alongside heavy steamy fully-voiced-and-animated hole-pounding animations during the day, I think it's a reasonable and honestly sane approach.

And then again, do remember that this entire thing is a prototype. The in-the-clouds goal is to fully finish the prototype, have the entire story and all its mechanisms fully fleshed out, and then to go back and basically remake the entire game in a fully 3d engine, with full voice-acting, lip-syncing, sound design, and of course animation.

But I'm not even thinking about that right now. As the very first splash of this prototype says, there's no guarantee that it will even get finished, let alone the final game started. I don't have a great track record when it comes to game development so far.

I won't lie to you all, though. I'm feeling something special about this one. I think if nothing else, my hunger for more Life is Strange is a powerful motivator. If I can't get more official content, then I'll make my own, dammit. "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" is the line of thinking that literally got me into this scene in the first place. It only makes sense for it to drive this ambition as well.

That's all for now!

Look for that Refuge release sometime tomorrow, or at the very latest sometime June 1st. And of course, I will see you all next week!