DevLog 18-Dec-2023 (Patreon)

Hello!

Another week is over and I'd like to take some time to give an overall update. Writing is going pretty well, we're over 7k words and I wanna get to 10k by the end of the year. Now, normally, I'd comment on how much that is out of the projected total, but as I've learned recently, this release is not behaving as I anticipated. What I mean by that is that these 7k words barely cover the introductory part of the release, meaning it's mostly just facing the consequences of what happened in day 3. Moreover, the first 5k of those are fully rendered, and yet it's only something like 300ish images. I think a part of that is that I stopped doing a render for every single line of dialogue, but it might also be the more introspective, relationship-focused nature of this release. There's a lot of talking and thinking going on and not a lot of action. Now, this may very well change by the end of the release, but as it stands now, there might be more text than in the previous release, but fewer images. To complicate things further, I want to expand a lot on the erotic scenes to improve them according to the survey, so the image rendering time saved might be taken by the additional animations. Also, while there's a lot of branching due to past choices, there's a single choice in the first 7k words of story, which doesn't feel right. Now, I don't want to add meaningless choices just to have them, but I also don't want to turn this into a kinetic novel, so I need to find some way to add interactivity to this release. Especially skill checks, those are becoming harder and harder to incorporate due to the lack of action. In short, I thought this would get easier as time went on, not harder, but I do appreciate the constant challenge and that it's not becoming stale.

Anyway, next up: Got a few more scenes to render until I catch up to the writing, which I think I'll manage to do this week, meaning that next weekend I'll need to finish the dating/hangout scenes with the girls. I don't know if I'll manage to finish all of them (there's still 3 scenes left), but I've got the week after off work, so I'll be able to focus on the game and keep writing until I'm done. Once that's done, we can get into the drama, which will be much quieter, but somehow wilder than what's happened until now. Also, I've mentioned this before, I think, but man is it fun to write Lilith <3

Hope you're having an awesome day!

--SR