Dev Diary 52

Hey all, TD here closing out the month of February with a dev diary.

We currently sit at 1590 statics (+214 since last diary), 40 animations (+2, although GIL has cooked up the rough stages of quite a few that we're not counting yet), and a total of 43,115 words (+4410) for the Ch4Up2 cycle.

It's been a productive couple of weeks, working with Mina has been a treat and enthusiasm remains high. We're in the midst of the fun stuff now and I'm forecasting we'll close out Mina's content in a couple of weeks max and move onto the miscellaneous scenes that follow.

We're about four months into the update cycle by this point (we got things properly rolling at the start of November) and our tentative plan of punishment games - Mina - Veronica seems tenuous. We're just finishing up Week 3 Monday, and when you factor in some other stuff I'd like to squeeze into Week 3 Tuesday before we even get to Veronica's stuff the next night, we'll venture into "uncomfortable about not updating for a long time territory". We haven't made an official decision on ending this cycle after Mina, but I wanted to inform you which way the wind was blowing.

GIL and I have had some lengthy discussions about the speed the story is pushing forward. We're coming up on 3 years of development now, and while we both remain 110% committed to however long it takes to bring everything to a satisfying completion, there are questions of being more mindful of what advances us to the end states we desire. Take the punishment games for example – they are wonderful scenes with a lot of fun character interplay and distinct branching, but certain elements are needlessly inflated when weighed against the more grand, exciting, and interesting things to come. I am extremely proud of those scenes, but the function of introducing the week’s theme with flavor and advancing the Carnation’s relationships with each other certainly didn’t need a multi-stage, multi-branching scene to get it done.

Quite frankly, I have a tendency to go all out at the start of an update and then the later half usually suffers for it. Not talking about how stuff tends to get pushed back into the next update necessarily, but if you’ve ever noticed, things usually start out with complicated branching, with, multiple choices, and gets more streamlined as the update moves along. That has long been the case and it’s something that I’ve been aware of. I may have even mentioned it in a dev diary before… can’t remember. Ideally though, just for our own personal satisfaction of seeing the project progress, 2-3 day updates during the weekday should be the norm.

I’m hoping, now that our asses have finished cashing the check I wrote two updates ago for a loser-dependent game, that I can be more mindful of each scene’s importance and scale it accordingly. This will be especially critical for the later stages of the game’s development, where more meaningful branches will be a necessity and not just a case of my eyes being bigger than our stomach.

Hope none of that is too alarming. This update is like super good and should be a lot of fun to play no matter if you’re on the mean or nice side of our player spectrum.

As always, thank you for for your interest in our project, thank you for the faith and support you put in us, and most certainly thank you for enabling our dream of making a rinky-dink adult visual novel.