Progress Report 2022.11.28: Getting Stuff Finished!

Hi friends,

The last couple of weeks have been quite busy! I’m almost fully recovered from my surgery, have made a lot of progress on the Episode 3 Scene 1 material, and took a little vacation last week to reset and refresh. I hit my NaNoWriMo quota last week. I typically write between 45k and 60k words a month, but it’s been a struggle over the past few months to get back to normal writing levels after I caught Covid in August. I’m quite pleased to be back to my regular writing regimen.

Game Updates

The Aeran branch is (FINALLY!!!) complete. I finished this up early last week before heading out on my vacation. Considering I’ve been working on this branch since June, it’s a relief to finally have it done. Together, there’s about 174k words of cumulative content for this branch alone to cover all the variations. Both files have been through the initial editing/proofreading process and are waiting for the second round of edits before I can code it.

I have returned to work on the Veyer branch. Going back to this branch has been a little tricky. It’s early content was the first thing I wrote for Episode 3 and it’s a very different headspace to be in than the Aeran branch. Because of the direction of some dialogue loops on the Aeran branch, I have had to do significant edits on the Veyer branch to ensure that the player is receiving the same information, albeit delivered in a different way. I’ve been doing more editing/re-writing than I have drafting of new material, which will be how the rest of the Veyer branch will progress.

To demonstrate what this looks like:

It helps to have two monitors for this. 

Here on my screen I have the Veyer branch file open (V2), plus two variations of the same scene from the Aeran branch. One has Veyer and Aeran present (A1), the other has Aeran and Zenaida present (A2). To recreate this scene for the V2 variation, I have to remove Aeran from the existing skeleton completely, then merge Veyer’s dialogue lines from A1 with Zenaida’s from A2. Because they both deliver similar exposition, I have to decide who gets to say what and how having both of them in the same scene shifts the direction.

I am hoping to have the fired version of the travelling scene done by the end of the week (if not sooner), so I can move on to the hired version and finish off the Veyer branch. I’m excited to move onto the Melchior branch so I can get back to writing fresh content instead of recycling and editing around the skeletons of existing content.

Other Updates

As mentioned earlier, I took a short vacation last week to get out of the city and have a bit of a reset. It was a lovely few days off and it was nice to escape my office for once! November is wet and cold in my region, but even with the grey skies, my partner and I had a good time exploring the coastal wilderness and enjoying the views.

Unfortunately, I still cannot reliably estimate when the next update will be. Moving into December, my priority will be finishing Episode 3 Scene 1. For those in the Apprentice+ and Wayfarer+ tiers, this may mean that you won’t get bonus content and/or a short story in December. I cannot guarantee that I will have the time to produce it while finishing the alpha update.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. As always, thank you all so much for your support. 💕