Weekly report 213

Hi everybody.

I hope you're all doing well and are looking forward to a relaxing weekend.

Last week Chestnut took care of the children full-time allowing me to work both in the evenings and through the night. My plan was to do as much of the reworking and debugging of the first quest as possible, and while I did manage to get a lot of work done, so much of what I did involved small but important bits that I had not even counted on needing to be fixed to add proper foreshadowing to events and dialogues in the story. I also debugged a couple of major issues we had with the way the sprites were being shown in an earlier event.

A few days ago I was asked (I paraphrase): why is the 0.7's polish phase taking longer than usual? I think that's a valid question that other patrons who are not active in our Discord server may also have, and so I'm going to take the rest of this report to repeat my answer here (feel free to ignore the wall of text below and jump to the last paragraph if not interested):  

Our polish phase is divided into two parts: debugging and editing/improvement of the content. If I were to work on the debugging alone, I believe I would be able to fix everything in more or less the same number of days as I took to debug the code of any of our previous releases, proportional to 0.7's word count and number of scenes. In other words, I don't think we have more bugs than usual, but the reason we're taking longer is the editing: we have decided that a number of parts of the content need to be reworked so that they better match the vision we have for Gomira's story. Fortunately, the biggest of those changes, i.e. the ending of Gomira's story, is already done, but I still have some reworking tasks ahead of me before the update is ready for release.

To get a better sense of the changes, here's an example of the improvements I did for the ending of Gomira's second quest which involves confronting the update's final antagonist: in the initial version, the whole thing gets wrapped up in six actions (quick-fire things that happen, shown using a mixture of sprite dialogues and cutscenes). In the polish phase, I changed almost all of those six in some ways and added ten more things that MC and company do (or is done to them) , turning the ending into a proper boss fight. To achieve this, I have made placeholder art (which Chestnut will have to draw), written new dialogues, posed the sprites during those dialogues, and probably caused a handful of bugs (I have to do more testing after I'm done with the first round of polishing). Additionally, I now have to change two things from the beginning of Gomira's second quest to match the objects used in the ending and not have inconsistency issues. Was the changes necessary? Yes. The ending of the story is what people will remember, and in its initial form, it was rather underwhelming when compared to the ending of Gomira's first quest (a quest with a much less imposing antagonist).

The above case is an extreme one, and none of the other changes will be that complicated. Most fixes from the first quest, for example, involve foreshadowing and consistency issues. Plus in our testing phase, we saw that some events just don't work and need improvements/changes. That is not at all unusual and it's something that we do for all our releases; if I remember correctly in one of our previous updates, I even had to redo an entire sex scene's animation during its polish phase because we didn't like it.

As to why we need so many changes, there are several factors, but the main one I believe is the length of the development. For various reasons, 0.7's development has taken longer than planned, and that has meant that by the time I was working on a part of a quest, I had forgotten different aspects of earlier sections. I have been testing and playing the content as often as I possible, of course, but there are always small things that one misses, and hence most of what I have to fix (and I have been fixing this last week) has been these foreshadowing/consistency elements. This would have been less of an issue if our quests weren't related, but that's not the case. In short, taking a long time to make a visual novel, only makes you have to take even longer, to make sure different parts of the story you're trying to tell match each other, plot-wise and also in the emotion you're trying to convey. That's another reason why I think in the future, if we see an update is taking us too long, we should just break it up into smaller releases to avoid this happening again.

Anyway, I'm sorry if this became too long and perhaps it's still vague (it's hard to explain these things without spoiling the plot), but I hope it at least answered some of the questions you might have.

Lastly, from this coming Monday we're going to go back to our normal schedule: Chestnut working in the afternoons, and I working through the night. I promise you that we're doing everything we can to get this done as soon as possible.

That's all.

Have a wonderful weekend
Cheers