Quest Failed: Chapter Two - Dev Log #152

Hiya there! How are we all doing today? I'm hoping to get back on the wagon with at least semi-frequent dev logs again, and am going to gently ease myself into things while I continue to hammer away at Chapter Two's script!

Alongside keeping you up to date with development of the game, I'm also going to do what I did in the past too and occasionally dip into doing more of those fun character overviews that were well-received before, along with potentially more lore-style posts! Because not only do they make for a nice change of pace and help inform you of the ever-growing world of Quest Failed--but they're also just a super fun writing exercise in general for me, too, and help me to translate a lot of my rough and sloppily written notes and thoughts on things into something far more organised and tangible! So if there's anything on that front that you'd like to see written up in excessive, rambling detail as per my writing style, haha, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll see if I can factor it into a future post!

So, moving along! What have I been up to since the last dev log? Welllll--as the attached image might give away, I lived up to my promise of pursuing the gallery feature in Chapter Two and immediately after posting that last dev log, I dedicated a small chunk of time to just sitting down, getting over my fear of untangling some of the messier elements of Chapter Two's UI scripting, and  put together a functioning gallery screen. Yay! I couldn't attach a video directly to Patreon, as uploading it to Youtube would have been too risky with some of the suggestive imagery in the gallery image panels, but you can see the gallery in motion with animations on a brief Twitter video here: https://twitter.com/Frost_Works/status/1498811774719639558/

Fancy, huh? It was something that was long overdo--and I hope it makes future builds of Chapter Two go a bit smoother for people when they won't have to worry about maintaining a ton of save files to be able to revisit the scenes they might enjoy. It wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it'd be to implement--even starting from scratch and having to piece together all the separate UI elements. Goes to show that sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and delve head-first into something to find out it really wasn't all that scary, haha. You'll also see 57 panels here, each detailing a separate CG scene between h-scenes and story scenes, which I think puts into perspective just how much content the game has so far. And this isn't all of the CG scenes fully implemented yet! I'm going to really enjoy seeing how packed the gallery is on a fully complete save file, and being able to just scroll through tons of pretty thumbnails.

Now--I'll be the first to admit that while the gallery is functional, it isn't as smooth as it could be. There's a few quirks involving the page number scrolling system, and the sub-menu navigation that leads to the gallery, depending on a few factors...but it doesn't in any way interfere with the end user experience. A lot of people might not even notice the quirks. But I most certainly do, and they'll bug me to the end of time if I don't eventually fix them, haha. But they're not critical issues--and more just things I'll slowly tend to here and there, as I didn't want the gallery implementation to eat up more than a day or two's worth of time.

Scene replays also come with their own set of quirks compared to Chapter One, because a lot of scenes in Chapter Two now have small little visual differences, or extra lines, depending on certain conditions met within the game. The issue here lies within the fact that when you're accessing these scenes, you're technically doing so from outside of the main game loop--so a lot of crucial variables and choices aren't initialised, so sometimes the game might not know what to do if it has to determine if a choice was made...and then sees that no choice was given whatsoever, and then things come crashing down. This isn't as dire as it sounds, though! And while I'll have to test each scene individually, to make sure they all function outside of the main game loop--the solution is quite simple in a lot of cases! I basically just have to have a toggle that determines if you're actually 'in-game', or just accessing from the gallery. And if you are determined to be outside of the game, it'll be able to slightly change up how it reads certain statements, and prevent them from crashing! Simple, right?

I understand the technical talk probably isn't tooooo engaging for some--but I felt since I'm delving into the development and all, some people might enjoy reading what kind of extra work goes into things behind the scenes! Let me know if it's something you'd like to see more of to, or if the technical rambling detracts from things. I'll try to scale that aspect of the dev logs back if that's the case, haha.

I believe I mentioned I was working with an audio engineer as well now, and that's going nicely, too! As one of the largest issues that Chapter Two has had thus far was its unbalanced audio mixing, with music drastically drowning out voice clips at times--and it being quite difficult to tone down the music all at once due to many tracks coming from so many different sources with no real shared volume threshold. I'm still experimenting with the audio engineer on that front to see what sounds best, but so far we've been tweaking all of the music audio so that it's softer, and then processing the vocals a bit more to try and boost them from being drowned out at default volume. Still a work in progress on that front, but any new solutions we attempt are slotted into the game neatly so you'll be able to hear the results yourself too--even if they're not final! The audio engineer is also helping piece together sound effects and ambient loops that may have otherwise been too specific to find on the internet, which really helps with the atmosphere of a few places. Especially new areas that are coming up! While it may be small in the grand scheme of things, I find it really adds to the production values of the game and elevates it a bit more from its scrappy predecessor, haha.

On the subject of audio, I mentioned that I sent scripts out over the course of last month. And while some VAs are still slotting things into their schedules, I have over an hour's worth of audio submitted already between several scenes, including quite a large h-scene with two characters that have over a combined 160 lines. Lots of fun! My aim here is to add the lines as I receive them, so that the workload of processing, clipping and inserting the voices doesn't end up feeling too overwhelming at once.

Finally, on top of all of this, I've been forging away on writing! With the climax of the story having been written in the last alpha build, most of the scenes now are essentially the main story winding down and opening itself up for what's to come in the third instalment. Even still, though, one scene that I'm writing right now is still quite an important, emotional scene and helps to fill in a lot of blanks that people may have had surrounding certain characters and aspects of the plot! This is done by way of several questions you can ask a particular character so that I could more easily categorise certain aspects of what they tell Matt. As they've had a fairly quiet role in the story thus far, and now is the time for talking--so I wanted it not to feel like you're getting exposition dumped at you by the truckload. Always a challenge in writing! But I think by balancing it out with more casual elements of conversation in between, and not getting TOO bogged down in tons of different information being thrown at you once, that I've hit a pretty nice balance! Depending on your choices made, you'll either be hearing one side of a complex story, or two sides to it, so you can make your own judgement from there! I'm not an expert in weaving this kind of more complicated tale by any means, though, so I guess it'll be up to you guys to determine if I've stuck the landing or not with all the stuff I've attempted to write about, haha.

My hope for the foreseeable future is to wrap up everything surrounding the main scenario, so that the game can technically be played from beginning to end without any interruptions and be 'completable'. Even if not all the side content is fully implemented yet. I think the game will be in a much better state by then--and at that point maybe I can start looking at opening up to more eyes and expanding the playtesting as I worked to finish the rest of the content.

It's been a heckkkkkk of a journey, but I can't tell you how good it feels to be fleshing out stuff I planned years ago. Sorry again for being something of a slow turtle of a developer. This really did get out of hand in recent years, huh?

Look forward to next week with the monthly bonus art as per usual, and maybe a new dev log too if I feel I have enough to share at the time!

Until next time!