Devblog #90 (Patreon)

Hey Wizards! Shady Character One here!

I believe it has been a while since I last posted any kind of comprehensive progress report. Sometimes it is useful to take a proper look at what you have done in the past two years. Wait, what? Two years?! That doesn't sound right. Let me check the calendar real quick. Yep, it has been roughly two years since we started the development of the game. Welp. Back then, I was aiming for a two-to-three-year development cycle. That looks a bit too optimistic in hindsight. Granted, back then the game was planned as a smaller endeavor. The events should’ve been smaller. I didn’t even start working on any of the Trials properly and didn’t know how much work they would take. I didn’t consider that it would be harder to plan events further into the game. And of course, I didn’t consider that every single project inevitably slows down as the first burst of inspiration fades. But still, let’s take a look at how this year went compared to the previous one.

This year, the script grew from ~80,000 to about ~137,000 (probably even more now) words. So that’s around 57 thousand words, compared to the 80 of the first year. Yeah, as I expected, the pace really did drop somewhat. Not by that much, but I was actually expecting that I would pick up the pace instead of dropping it.

There were only 12 class events, whereas now we have 26. An increase of more than double. All of those are much more robust than most of the initial 12.

Random events that occur during the rest of the activities grew in number too, from 12 to 19. Not as significant of an improvement, but again, most of these are at least bigger than the old ones on average.

Miscellaneous events - smaller plot-related events like finding jobs or small plot progressions - grew in number significantly too. From fewer than 10 events to a noticeable 21 (maybe even more, depending on what you would count as an “event”).

But where I really dropped the ball is the girls’ storylines. Around this time last year, we had 35 girl events available. Today we have 42. Yes, even considering that the average length of the events grew, that would still barely be 30% of the progress I made last year.

There are 4 more events already written and simply waiting for the final touches and artworks from Shady Two. Like the event featuring this new hairstyle for Aisling. But even with them, it is just 11 new events. I will need to focus more in that direction. It is difficult to write girl events, especially since most of them are reaching important points in their stories.

So yeah, this year was not as bad as I expected it to be before I started looking at the numbers - and especially considering that we had a lot of non-development difficulties in the last twelve months. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

But enough of the past - let’s talk about the future. As I said earlier, I was planning for a 2-3 year development. What is my prognosis now? Let’s take a look at our total progress for the game in two years:

As you can see, we are about halfway done on all the values aside from the endings, which I haven’t done any work on at all. The 400,000 words total is my very rough estimate and it might go up or down, likely down, as we get closer to the finish line. Also, the number of miscellaneous events is always growing, though not by much, so we might be closer to 50% there instead of 70%. So what are we looking at here? I will still decide to remain optimistic and say that I might actually be done in two more years. Pushing the development length to 4 years total instead of 3. Not as bad as I feared. I doubt that I’ll be able to work even slower than I was this year. Laughs nervously

I would like to thank all of you who keep supporting the game. Your engagement, comments, suggestions, contributions, and donations really help us keep going with this project despite everything life throws our way. You are the best.

I’ll see you all next week.

Until then, Shady Character One, out!