Devlog #2 (Patreon)

Hey there,

time for another devlog aka dev diary! Today I would like to give you a little more insight into the workflow I've established for myself over the past few weeks. I'm sure not all of you are going to be interested in that particular topic, but I feel like it may help you understand what to expect in the future as well as the process behind creating each upcoming update.

 In the very beginning of this journey, my organizing was a hot mess to say the least. I had absolutely no experience at all when it came to game development. Besides learning 3D art design, coding in Ren'Py, writing dialogue I also had to figure out how to be efficient and how to organize myself. Didn't even think about obvious things like folder structure, setting up priorities, scheduling, bla bla bla. And I'm still learning.

I basically just did what came to my mind first. Sometimes even in the middle of working on something, a thought entered my mind and I would just stop working on whatever it was I was working on, and switched to another part of the project, just because it seemed more fun . That approach went downhill pretty fast as you can imagine. I got lost in all the stuff that needed to be done, forgot to finish certain things while overdoing others. In hindsight, I can't even believe that I have been able to publish anything at all that way. But here we are. One rocky start later.

Let's get into the process of making the game. I will add screenshots too, so you can imagine exactly how I do it. As of right now, it goes like this:

Writing a rough outline where I want each character to go storywise. Writing down ideas for a scene. Writing some dialogue or at least an idea for a dialogue. This takes one or two days, depending on my creativity mostly.

Whenever I'm somewhat happy (I will never be fully happy, haha) with what I've been able to come up with, I'll begin to set up the character sprites in DAZ3D (clothing, new expressions if necessary, all that kind of stuff). Then I'll put them into the render queue and render them either immediately or overnight if I'm too busy with other stuff. That usually only takes one day, or more like half a day. Except for the four different outfits Summer had to choose from in the last update. That was a bitch to set up, pardon my french.

Now this is where the fun part begins. Setting up the scenes in DAZ3D. Organizing DAZ itself is quite some endeavor. Getting lost in all your assets is a massive problem and time consuming as hell. So I had to create a folder structure for myself which took me, and I'm being serious right now, a whole week until I was somewhat satisfied with the outcome. I was about to put myself into a mental care institution afterwards. But now I feel quite comfortable navigating DAZ. Creating scenes can be mindblowingly dull and tedious at times, but the finished render almost always makes up for it. Frankly, I could write a whole devlog just talking about how I'm setting up a scene and so on. Not my plan to bore you to death though, so no worries.

As soon as each and every render has been created for the upcoming update, I begin to put it all together in Ren'Py. Some renders have to be edited with Photoshop again before they can be used in game, but so far I've been able to avoid that for the most part. You might be shocked when you hear this, but most of the dialogue in the game, I write "on the fly". What do I mean by that? I write them directly during the code writing process in Ren'Py. I've come to realize that this is the way that works best for me. It makes dialogues feel more lively since I'm basically imagining having a banter with my characters or listening in on them. I already know where the "story" leads, so I can naturally steer them in that direction too. I don't really know if that's an "unorthodox" method of writing dialogue, but who cares as long as it works. This process can take a few days. It's also dependent on my creativity as well as my schedule.

As soon as I'm done with everything, I will add some public domain music tracks if necessary. After that I will create distribution builds and play test it for the next couple of days. This might sound like the best part of the whole process, but it's not. Playing the same stuff over and over again, finding a bug, finding the line of code, fix it... blurgh. I never really understood why programmers complained about bug fixing so much. Now I get it. But lucky me, I have some amazing supporters who are also helping me fixing bugs during the early access period. Thank you so much!!!

I probably could have gone into more details here and there, but I'm sure you got better things to do than reading my... I don't even know what it is. Hope you enjoyed it regardless and got a better insight into the process and I also hope you're going to enjoy your well-earned weekend.

Thanks for your support, everybody! Love y'all ❤❤❤

Flip