Progress Report - Tuesday, June 27, 2023 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone!

I apologize for being a day late with this. I intended to post last night, but wanted to actually get the Epilogue QTE fully fleshed out and functional, so I could show it off in a video.

I, uhh, didn't expect that to take almost 4 hours to do. By the time I was finally done with it, it was past time for me to go to bed. So, that's why the post is today!

First things first, though:

Overbreed

When I made last week's post, I had gotten Sequence B up to the orgasm. I expected it to be a jump and a skip to get from there into the narrative connection between Sequences B and C, but I forgot just how involved the orgasm section of Sequence B is.

In the end, that orgasm ended up with a runtime of 2.5 minutes. Which I find rather hilarious, because it's supposed to be an accelerated timelapse of her blowing and swallowing her own jizz for about 5 minutes. I could just double the runtime of each sequence and just make it realtime.

I'm not going to, but I could.

After that, I did have a bit of writer's block when it came to actually connecting the various ideas that the B->C narrative tissue needed to hit. But I came up with a solution that, while I'm not 100% happy with it, I think it works well enough, and introduces a few moving pieces that are important to the overall narrative but were basically just "also mention this" in my high-level notes.

I'm bad about doing things like that in my high-level notes. They're often just an outline. Sometimes adapting an outline is easy. Sometimes it isn't. Anyone whose does any substantial creative writing can hopefully back me up on that.

Perhaps most famously, the entire sex sequence of Blue Star Episode 2, in my outline, was simply drafted as "And then they banged." The entire sex sequence was pretty much ad-libbed, put together by myself as I animated it, one position and line of dialogue at a time. It's a fun way to write, but it's anathema to planning and organizing.

That's one of the biggest reasons why I storyboard now. Especially since I tried the same thing with Blue Star Episode 3 and ended up tossing out several minutes of fully written, animated, voiced, and edited footage because it killed the pacing. I lost a few hundred dollars and a few dozen hours on that faux pas. After that is when I started to focus on actually planning out my projects. Storyboarding is an extension of that.

Surprises are fun when they're spontaneous and harmless. They're less fun when you have hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours of time you can't get back on the line. So I want to minimize those production surprises as much as I can.

Epilogue

As this week's Progress Report header image and opening notes suggest, I've been getting some work done on Epilogue. The highlight of this week's progress is quick-time events!

Right now, I just have a simple decision timer, but I think it adds a fair bit actually. Especially since the rest of Epilogue (and Life is Strange as a whole) tends to be very at-your-own pace, I think it's a nice change of pace to get a little bit of pressure to make a decision.

And I think it's especially important to moderate when the timer is used. I've mentioned previously that I have been playing other story games, such as Telltale's Walking Dead, As Dusk Falls, and Tell Me Why. I've been taking note of things all these games do and how I feel about them, and absorbing ideas I like while discarding ones I don't.

One of the things I don't really care about, which is something both Walking Dead and even True Colors does, is having a timer on every decision. There are decisions where it makes sense, but like 95% of the decisions in these games, there is no reason for them to have a timer. It's just unnecessary stress, and a bit of a red herring at that because the timers are usually so long you have to actively try to run them out.

To the point that I've seen these games literally implement a button for skipping the timer, usually in the form of a "[...]" button. At that point, do you even really need the timer? Just make it another option.

There is a similar phenomenon I've seen these games use, especially the later Walking Dead games, where characters will continue to talk while you're deciding. Usually things along the nature of them just sort of meandering and hemming and hawing, pushing you one way or the other to decide (EG either "It's okay if you're not sure" or "come on, tell me what you're thinking"). And it is both incessant--basically non-stop--and annoying. It breaks my concentration and makes it harder for me to decide, because I'm trying to pay attention to what they're saying (or trying to ignore them) while thinking through my process.

I understand the thought process behind that. They're trying to make the player's decision-making diegetic, part of the universe. The time we spend as players reading through the text options, is time the character is spending just standing there with a blank expression on their face. I understand that.

However, I personally don't think of decision-making in games to be diegetic. In real life, we don't have a small list of predefined, prewritten prompts pop up in front of our eyes when we're making a decision. We don't have to sit and contemplate what the author intends with each of our predetermined decisions. We don't have to try and figure out what the tone of the delivery of these predestined decisions are.

In real life, we just say what we're going to say, because we're the ones saying it. Not a third party whose decided for us what we can and can't say. And as such, I don't consider the decision-making pauses to be diegetic. They're a compromise between the writer and the player, a concession the writer makes to give the player some limited, constrained input.

My personal interpretation of the pauses for decision-making is that time should effectively pause for these decisions--unless, of course, they are explicitly time-sensitive. Such as, for example, two people fighting over a gun and you need to make a snap decision about what to do about it.

And so that is the design philosophy I am taking with Epilogue. Unless a decision explicitly needs to be time-sensitive, they diegetically pause time to allow the player to properly process their decisions and decide what they think their Max would say.

With that in mind, this whole QTE actually leverages a bunch of existing systems. The only new mechanism introduced is the timer itself, and its automated fail-state jump. Everything else seen here is actually leveraging the existing decision system, which I think is a clever and clean way to manage it.

It fucks up the graph a little bit, with the loop between the "Look at Chloe" and "Look at Gun", but the graph is internal so who cares. I'm the only person who will ever see it. Similarly, it technically clutters up the internal record-keeping, which tracks every decision the player makes. But it's only two entries, and it's not exactly hard for me to decide to just never make a decision depend on whether or not you looked at Chloe during the fight. That's about the extent of the ramifications of that.

With that in mind, here is the current state of the confrontation dialogue tree I shared last week. Red X's mean I've implemented them.

I've got about half the tree implemented so far. I'm quite pleased with how it's coming along, but fuck me if it isn't a lot of writing and posing.

I've deviated a little bit from the tree. The biggest change is I've decided to have Max putting the gun away only be an option after the engagement is over, otherwise I think it's too functionally identical to tossing the gun. Plus, having Max just straight up attempt to rob the guy is an interesting proposal.

Won't lie, I kinda want to implement stat tracking into the prototype and see how many people actually go that way.

Once I am done implementing the full tree, I intend to go back and add personality markers to it all. This confrontation is a defining moment for Max's personality, and I intend to reflect that by having a lot of weighted decisions, as well as unique outcomes for a handful of these decisions, such as Chloe hurting her hand from punching the guy and whether or not Max keeps the gun, if it comes up.

I also intend to go back and implement that notifications system I discussed last week--this confrontation not only sculpts Max's personality, but also Chloe's opinions of Max. This one confrontation won't ruin their friendship obviously, but it could make the difference between Chloe feeling like she can rely on Max to cover her, or if she feels like Max is too gentle-spirited to back her up in a fight. Because I can assure you, this won't be the only fight that Chloe's hot-headedness gets her into.

And then finally on the note of going back and implementing things, I am going to need to implement some sort of scrolling mechanisms for actions. Because, uhh, there's a lot of them now. Too many to fit on the screen, in fact.

I might implement a category system, since there are a lot of related categories such as music, texts, and now QTEs. But that's really just kicking the can down the road. I will need to implement some sort of scrolling or pagination eventually.

Not looking forward to either solution, because the way these menus are built is rather... rigid. There's a lot of code in a lot of places to make it work. I might have to rip it all out and rebuild the menu system entirely to make it more flexible. Which I'm also not looking forward to.

Overall though, I am very pleased with where Epilogue is headed, both in terms of writing and in terms of development. It's slow, but that's what happens when you only spend maybe 8 hours a week on it. And that's on a good week, I've had a few weeks where I just didn't put any time into it at all.

I'd love to dedicate more time to it--I've had more fun putting this together than I have had putting together any of my animation projects in a very long time--but I know myself and I know my audience well enough at this point to know that's a poor utilization of time.

And so we march on. I focus on the projects I know I can finish and I know people are interested in and I know will pay the bills, and tinker away at the projects that I'm less certain on all three fronts of in the wee hours of the morn.

On the subject of being pleased though, I have actually decided to share with you all the four immediate outcomes of this QTE: grabbing the gun, calling out the gun, stopping Chloe, and failing the event. You can click here to watch it, and I've also attached it to the bottom of this post.

Just do be aware of the text-to-speech voices. It's a big ask I know, but try to imagine everything being properly voice-acted. I hope I've built enough good will over the years for you all to trust me that the final product would sound absolutely fantastic, compared to this very rough and internal build.

Life is Strange Videos

Right so I'm gonna be rather quick on this one.

The exhibitionism idea I discussed last week has been elevated to a full on-stream project (potentially). The storyboard for it is 4 minutes already and none of the actual exhibitionism has even started yet - I am for minivids to be about 4 minutes in their entirety.

I just love what I have so far and the characterization, and I don't want to cut any of it. I also don't want to cut short the ideas for the exhibitionism, which means that it's just not going to be a minivid at all.

Right now, I am currently exploring a Kate Marsh minivid idea. Don't have anything to share there yet, writing is still very nascent.

Family Medical Stuff

Gonna be rather brief here, too.

Long story short, my mum had a stroke when I was in middle school, she wasn't even 40 years old at the time. That is uncharacteristically young for strokes, and the doctors were very blunt in telling us that if she's having them this young, she's likely to have more over the rest of her life.

True to form, she's had two more strokes since then, with the latest being back in April. Of the three, this last one was far and away the least destructive stroke. Indeed, the doctors were so unconcerned about it that their attention was immediately captured by something else:

Apparently, as evidenced by her bloodwork, my mum had a heart attack sometime in the past. This was news to all of us, most of all her, but apparently that's a thing that can happen. So in the weeks between then and now, the doctors have been running tests to investigate the damage done to her heart, since they consider that more important than the damage caused by this most recent stroke.

As of yesterday, the doctors elected that my mum should have heart bypass surgery, to mitigate and minimize damage. They haven't even scheduled it out yet, so I don't know when that will be.

But my father works a hectic schedule, and so he won't be able to reliably take care of her as she recovers from that surgery. We don't know how long of a recovery it'd take or what it'd be like, and so we are just pre-emptively planning for me to take a few weeks off from my work to spend time with my folks and help her as she recovers.

To be perfectly clear, my mother is doing fine right now. The best way to describe her state right now is honestly annoyed - she just wants to stay home and play The Sims, dammit. She's not even concerned about the bypass surgery - it is what it is, and if it means she gets more time to play Banished, then she's all for it. Even if it will be inconvenient for a few days.

I get a lot of my stubbornness from her, universe bless her.

But I do just want you all to be aware that it is very likely my productivity is going to basically hit nil during the time I am with my family. Once I know when that will be, and for how long, I will let you all know. It should be before next week that we learn more and figure it all out.

That's all for now. Until next time, everyone!