Friday Rambles and Game Dev Update 2024-07-26

It's the Friday Rambles. It was a productive week. I think.

Life Stuff:

Another full week of full rings (Apple Watch Fitness Thing). Basically I just need to do a morning walk/jog every morning and it's basically done. I'm probably going to have to start increasing the distance of my jogs and I think I want to start doing some muscle exercises soon. I read another book of the Dungeon Meshi manga. I've only been reading the physical books, so it takes a while for them to get here since they're all backordered now (for some reason i wonder what). What a good series, though. I could learn so much from it.

Merch Stuff:

As I said I might last week, I made a thank you comic for hitting the 100% funding goal for the Skye Plushie Rerun. And then I made like 3 more comics.

Above: My thank you comic for hitting 200 plushies sold

Of course, my real secret goal is 400, because that's where I get a bigger % cut of the earnings. So I promptly continued the story somehow...

Above: Raising the stakes, courtesy of the Legally Distinct Not-Vogons

And, fully expecting the campaign to not hit 400, I sketched out a failure comic, but then it seemed like it might be possible after all (with close to 300 sold), so I made one more to post before that one:

Above: I'm drawing these in record time, in between writing thousands of words for the extra chapter. But I'm actually enjoying making them and showing little interactions between the characters

And here's the double length failure comic, but I think I'll post it maybe 24 hours before the campaign ends in hopes of some kind of last minute miracle happens. I'll post it here since it's patreon but you have to promise to retweet it when it's finished and posted in a couple days.

Above: A comic that might be posted when Skye fails to sell 400 plushies. I really love how cool Tiger-chan is here. Of course, I'll have to change the setting of the next game if the Earth gets bulldozed out of existence

Above2: I really need to use the "Take my enormous paw" line somewhere in the new chapter

Anyway, I didn't expect to draw that much for this campaign, let alone all of it in a single week, but as in every other one of these campaigns I've done, I ended up drawing way more than I planned on lol. I do love just making stuff up as I go along.

Gamedev stuff:

I wrote a bunch of code to add some new features to the EMVN Engine (TM). The way the "objectives" work in the new chapter are different than in the original story. I'm still not certain on whether I want them to be implemented this way, but I'll have to do a proper playthrough to see if it's interesting and not like, annoying and tedious.

I rearranged a lot of the existing script for the various objectives you hit to progress through the story. The story itself feels less focused this time around, because the ultimate goal of the chapter is a bit more nebulous than just "Draw 6 illustrations". I'm going to have to do a few passes through it to get it as tight as I want it, but I think I might just adjust my goal for this chapter to be more like "have fun discovering the story" instead of "do the objective".

Spoilers about the gameplay and general synopsis of the game, i guess:

So the premise is that Penny is at the office again, and she's working on yet another project, the weekend before it's due. But the twist is that she doesn't even remember what the project is, and...

Above: Oops the "Kira Project Management Software" is down

So Penny now has to somehow remember what her project is, so she can do it.

Above: Calling your friends may or may not be helpful

Right now, there are two different sets of "objectives" you can "collect". The familiar objective is to collect "inspirations" (as in the first chapter) for drawings but they're more lightweight and just things that pop up as Penny sees things that inspire her. And the other is "memories" which will hopefully help her remember what her project is, if she discovers enough of them. This has changed like 3 times already, though, and can change drastically yet again once I do some proper playtesting myself.

Above: Temp art I drew yesterday. It'll have a cute animation

I think next week I'll work on making sure this is all clearly defined within the intro of the chapter so people know what the goal even is.

Above: uh oh. btw I made a super cool parallax background effect for this sequence. it looks really good in motion, if i say so myself.

Of course, as all this is going on, the usual wacky things happen.

Basically the point of the chapter existing is to have a bunch of smaller character interactions and lore, while also bringing the game universe lore up to date to where the Endless Monday universe is currently at, in my head. So I can make Game 2.

I keep changing the requirements for various events and flags and stuff, and the script is now a mess of unused variables and if statements. it's becoming unwieldy. I need to clean it up at some point, but I think it's stable enough at this point that I should be able to progress without too much issue.

Other boring changes I made, that actually mean a lot to me because i care too much:

• Added a new special autosave just for the intro, so if people choose the option that leads to the quick gameover they can reload the autosave to go directly to the choice instead of sitting through the entire intro again. Watching streams, people would often turn on text skipping at this point, basically at the beginning of the entire game, which I didn't like for "dramatic effect" reasons. This involved more work than you might expect.

• Fixed text fast skipping not skipping fast enough in the English version of the original chapter. Which was a longstanding annoyance but was recently fixed in the text rendering library I use so I just cherry picked that change in.

As with the last time I went through this, I vastly underestimated the amount of work left to do. I was hoping to be done by the end of the month, but it's not looking like that's gonna happen. But I'm approaching the end, i think. still. Every big change I make, i think it's getting closer to what I consider "looks good". I do think I need to fix some fundamental problems with the overarching narrative, which I'm confident I can do, but it will need a lot of brainstorming and writing and rewriting. Agh. Wait a minute. Didn't you say you had tens of thousands of words written already? what's all that then? Umm. Well those words are still gonna be in the game, but the connecting glue between them and the compelling reason for the words to exist in the first place need more work. I think once I figure out some mysterious one missing thing, everything else will cascade into place.

i need to go back in my diary to see how i felt about the game back when i was writing the original chapter lol. which i'm considering pretty tight as far as the structure goes. maybe i've just been staring at it too long.

Anyway.

The End

Thanks for your love and support, as always! Next week will be when I announce I've had a breakthrough and everything looks great and I'm so happy with the new chapter and everything. Unless Skye doesn't sell 400 plush dolls in the next 3 days in which case I need to rewrite the entire story of the game to reflect that the Earth no longer exists. Okay, bye!