When Stars Collide
July Wrap - Up
Hallo! Time for the July wrap-up!
Ramble
Welp. I did the thing. I finished the writing.
I used "finished" loosely. I will obviously be making more edits as I play through the game and as others play through and find issues.
But at this point the drafting and major revisions are done.
Phase 1 of development is complete.
I will be honest in that I expected to be done with this writing like..in April or something. I have been writing this thing every day and it still took this long. It is, of course, a lot longer than expected. My initial word count goal was like 350,000. I then moved that to 450,000 which this demo page still says I think...
The *draft* (not the coded word count) ended 650,000+
So yeah. We will get into the coded word count and everything else below.
Summary
- Finished Drafting Noel's ending
- Finished Editing Noel's ending
- Imported to Renpy
- Edited Kav's ending
- Imported to Renpy
- Finished Drafting Raif's ending
- Finished Editing Raif's ending
- Imported to Renpy
- Finished Drafting Yren's ending
- Finished Editing Yren's ending
- Imported to Renpy
- Sprite Tweaks
- Prepped more BGs and imported to Renpy for testing
- Added more UI tweaks
- New glossary
- New Save/Load screens
- Additional BGs and sketches
- Continuing Yren playthrough
- Working on a long TO DO list of fiddly things.
Writing
So the big news this month. The writing is D O N E.
And by done, I mean that it's mostly done. I still have to do my own playtest. And then I have to get others to playtest. This will invariably mean more edits. But the big revisions are done.
The draft is done.
I was able to draft and revise the remaining endings. I also proofread and imported them into the game.
The final (current) *coded* word count is....*drumroll*
616,000 words.
That is probably going to change still because as I do my personal playthroughs of the routes, I will inevitably cut things and add things and change stuff. I may add additional choice menus (I've already like...three as I play through Yren's path). That will obviously give the word count a boost...
And so on.
That said, I am essentially concluding the "writing" portion of development. From here on out it is art, assets, coding, features, and testing.
Artwork
Received new BGs and BG sketches, of course. Backgrounds are nearly 80% complete.
Haven't really done any other artwork since I've been focused on the revising and getting the script formatted.
Other
New Glossary Design. So one thing that I've added is this small "preview" screen for the glossary articles. When you click an article, this is what pops up now. It gives you a short summary of the glossary articles and you can then choose to read the whole thing if you want.
This preview isn't as useful for short entries but for long entries like the planet classification one, it lets people see enough info to get the general idea without shoving you into a massive article.
Another UI thing added this month is a new style of save screen. So there are a couple of cool features with this save screen. The first is that, as you can see, there are different pages for the different characters.
For a game like this one where a lot of people may be playing multiple routes concurrently, I thought it would be beneficial to allow for simple organisation of save slots. This way you can keep your playthroughs for the different characters separate. Additionally, you can easily add more save slots when you reach the end of the available empty slots.
There are more QOL features to come in the next few weeks. I have a good friend helping me code some of the things that are either outside my ability or that, frankly, I just don't wanna do. Because I don't actually like UI coding that much. 🤣
FINALLY.
I have started on an incredibly long to do list of big and small things that have to be complete before I can release chapter one. Some things are pretty major like "Do the CGs" and some things are a less major like "Code in the in-game achievements."
There are things like "add any new glossary articles" or "make the game guide."
There are also a few large find/replace events that must happen to correct inconsistent spelling of things. There is a word, "Yenshe'lí" that appears quite a lot in the script. At some point I got lazy and stopped putting the accent on the "i" so now I have to fix that.
So I am doing a lot of that stuff right now too.
Upcoming month(s)
August will be a month of playtesting, art creation, and UI and "The Long List of Fiddly Stuff."
Until I finished revisions, my playtest of Yren's route largely consisted of about 2 hours a night after I was done writing.
The playtest will increase in duration each day. Realistically I can't just sit and playtest for hours on end. I will probably be alternating between playtesting and working on features and art.
And also working through that big list of stuff.
Things pick up speed once the writing is done because a lot of the other things I have to do just won't take as long as writing...616,000 words...and then revising 616,000 words.
(Sadly...play testing 616,000 words does unfortunately take a fair bit of time though.)
So yeah. Everything about this game is taking longer than expected. And it's been quite tricky to predict how long things will take. But we are making progress. Yay!
One Last Thing
Finally, I want to draw attention to a dev duo I've known for a while now. Their debut project is in Kickstarter right now.
Please do yourself a favour and check it out the demo. It is a must play for anyone who is interested in backing!
In their own words, here is a description of the game:
In this romantic dark-comedy murder-mystery game, you guide a villainess who cannot remember what story she is trapped in... or who is trying to kill her. Can you find clues, seduce potential enemies, fight off fiends, and calm angry furniture while solving the mystery of this world?
Save the Villainess has a two to three hour demo that is now available for you to try on its Kickstarter page. In the demo, you can meet up to four different suspects and love interests, including a Crown Prince, a Duke of the North, a Childhood Friend, and a Servant. The full game will include even more love interests, including a mysterious woman…
That's all for this month. See you next time!
Comments
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Congratulations on the writing! I'm looking forward to it. Now I'll dive back into GS yet again while I wait. Thank you for all your hard work! I often recommend it to others.
I have to ask. It seems your projects always end up being considerably larger than intended. [something I very much appreciate] What is it that drives you?
An inability to just...stop typing? 🤣🤣
No, in all seriousness. It's really about love interest amount and branching usually. All games have a inherent structure to them. A shape you can visualise through something like flowcharts if you want to. Writing the game is like revealing that shape, little by little. As a writer, I'm currently half-planner and half-pantser which means I like to let a large portion of the story develop organically as I write. This means I know the story going in but the 'shape' of the game is a mystery.
With GS, though I did go over my target word count by a lot, it was largely due to the three additional LIs. I think I originally said 600k for that game but I knew it would probably be closer to Changeling's length (686k). I didn't want to promise 700k if I couldn't get there so I went with 600k instead. But I did know that game would be more like 675k+. And actually the original six LIs were right at 700k. So that was within the ballpark. The game went over 1,000,000 purely due to the additional LIs. I had difficulty pinning down an *exact* amount but with games this size, honestly, within 50k is definitely a pretty good estimate. I thought it would end up at around 990,000 words and it ended up at 1,037,000 words so I consider my estimate for that game pretty accurate.
With Changeling, it was my first game and I really did not have any idea how to predict anything. I knew what I wanted in terms of hours but had no idea how to translate that to a word count. And at the time, in the VN dev community you couldn't get a straight answer on that topic. Now the community is bigger and it's a little easier to suss out how to convert between play time and word count. So with Changeling I started out thinking I'd hit about 300k but realised that was too short for the amount of love interests and size of story I was aiming for. So I adjusted the word count up to 500k. I was thinking about 75k per route + 50k for a common route. But my issue there was not accounting for any choice branches or endings.
The routes in Changeling *are* about 75,000 words...if you don't count the choices and endings. So I was kind of right...but also not really. Ha ha.
With WSC the issue is completely different. I've never written a game structured this way before and I cannot express to people how *different* it is from the usual structure I use and how hard that made it to predict anything about this game. It was a completely unique experience for me. Where the word count tends to balloon unexpectedly is really the branching and variations...and unexpected love interests popping up. I really did not have a feel for the "shape" of this type of game. I added a love interest. I couldn't predict the branching at all. All of those things combined made it really hard to estimate where this one would end up.
I wanted it to be 300k but realised fast that with that structure, it was going to feel rushed. So I bumped the word count up to 450-500k as the target, thinking that would give me more space to expand the story and slow things down a little. And then I added Kav. So...ㄟ(≧◇≦)ㄏ
This game, more than any other so far, I wasn't able to grasp the "shape" of what I was constructing as I wrote it and that was probably the biggest reason I could never estimate where it was going to end up.
Concrats on (mostly) finishing the writing!
Love how you decided to do the save files tbh. Always feel like theyre a mess and i have to little.
My playtest saves always descend into madness. I am already seeing the benefit of this system now that I can keep each character's test on its own page. (☆▽☆)
Oh wow! Good for you! Its all coming to a head now. Congrats. <3
congratulations!!!! that many words is a huge accomplishment let alone everything else you are doing :DD
Wow! I am impressed by your progress! It seems neverending but you can now see the end of the tunnel. Thank you for working so hard for us. I am extremely grateful 🥲. I really can't wait to see the final game but I will have to be patient because there's still lots to do. Bun the way, I am so keen on your new save screen with save slots for each LI is so clever! Thank you for the new glossary menu too.
By the way, I am already play testing a few VN and IF as a Patreon member mostly but still. Where are the play testers you use from? I would gladly help if you allow it. Please let me know.
Yeah, when you are in the middle of the writing process, it feels like treading water. I call it "writing purgatory" because it absolutely feels like being in limbo. But that is the drawback of working on large games. Well, one of the drawbacks.
I'm also really excited about the save screen. I think it's probably the feature people are most excited about. I think some players are close to asking to be able to romance the save screen. 🤣🤣
So currently I am the only tester. I always do a full play test of my own before anyone else sees it. As far as others go - I have a group of close friends and people I've known for a while that sometimes get alpha access for more of a "beta reading" phase.
And beyond that, in the past, most of the beta testers were from Patreon and Kickstarter. This time around I'm not doing a Kickstarter so it'll be Patreon where most of them come from most likely. I may drag in a few other friends and acquaintances from Discord too.
congrats on the progress!!!
Thank you, Grey! (〃￣︶￣)人(￣︶￣〃)
Congratulations on "finishing" the writing! The save slot organization is genius! Idk how I've never seen anyone else do that! Thanks so much for your hard work and update. :)
Thank you!
Honestly I was having this conversation with some fellow devs recently - I think we just get really comfortable with doing things a specific way and don't tend to deviate from that much.
As soon as the design came to me - and especially after I had it coded - it was just such an obvious solution. I'm also really surprised I've not seen it before. (☆▽☆)
Congratulations, that's amazing progress!!!!
The new save slot system you mentioned is EVERYTHING I've ever wanted in a game like this! This is literally a dream come true lolll
I tend to play multiple routes at the same time and save like it's going out of style, so my save slot screen is always a bit of a confusing mess, despite my best efforts to keep things somewhat orderly. This system is gonna change everything XD
I greatly admire your drive, passion, and work ethic and look forward to reading future devlogs with excitement!
Good luck and take care!!! ^-^
Yay! Honestly the same thing happens with my save slots when I'm play testing. I often try to keep different playthrough separate so I can refer back to them but it always ends up a mess. ┗( T﹏T )┛
This system was born half out of wanting to re-use the design I did for the gallery and half out of a conversation with two fellow devs when we were discussing non-standard Ren'py UIs.
And it just hit me how *useful* this would be to have different pages for the characters. Windchimes was the one who mentioned being able to add additional save slots though. That is honestly such a cool feature. ╰(*°▽°*)╯
Congrats!!! :D
Thank you! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)