Progress Report!

Tonight, I finally got to work on the continuation of the Day 1 Remake. The hardest thing with writing has been finding a good groove. Sometimes, it's so hard to know where to even begin. In past, when I've struggled, I've forced out anything I can with little regard for quality because at least it's something, and it's much easier to improve upon something than to start with nothing. My process these days prevents anything I actively consider subpar from even being seen by the team, let alone seeing any kind of actual release. I have no doubt the high bar I continue to set for myself has contributed to my difficulties in maintaining a good and timely pace when developing content.

But anyway, that was largely a digression. The point I was getting to was that I made a start tonight and that start bloomed into several thousand words across more than 300 lines that are without a doubt the strongest thing I've produced in a long while. Now here's the most interesting part about this. I haven't progressed beyond the train station yet. This is to say there are more than 300 additional lines between when Adrian disembarks the train and when he actually leaves the station with Diego. 

I hadn't intended to make any major changes to the canonical events that occur on Day 1 with this remake, though changes in Days 2 - 5 were always probable. Despite this, I experimented with a change on a whim and wound up with some fantastic results. What is the change? Well, the station is now an entire chapter of its own where Axel chooses to instead stay with Adrian while he waits for Diego to arrive. And in this version, Diego is very, very... very late. 

Naturally, Axel gets a ton more screen time here in addition to his extended appearance during the train journey. By the end of Day 1, Adrian and Axel will have already become friends and have spent a good length of time getting to know one another. There are far more moments here that showcase his character and his specific qualities. We see that he is caring and empathetic, enthusiastic, passionate, naive, selfless to a fault, and far more besides. 

And then... Diego arrives. Right off the bat, far more is done to address how he has changed since Adrian last saw him, but, more importantly, we get some of the best dialogue I've written maybe ever. From the moment he first appears, he comes out swinging in a quintessentially "Diego" way, initially lying to excuse his lateness only to be called out on the lie by Axel, after which he confesses the truth... he was so excited for Adrian's arrival that he could barely sleep. That is until sleep got the better of him mere hours before Adrian was due to arrive.

It's rare for me to feel I've nailed something so thoroughly in my first rough pass. While I expect some fine-tuning to take place in the earlier parts of the chapter, I anticipate that everything at the station following Diego's arrival will ship almost completely unchanged.  And if there was any doubt about how strongly I feel about this material, when have I ever been this candid with early work-in-progress material? If I'm not mistaken, this might be the first in-editor screenshot I've posted on Patreon to date.

Either way, I'm very excited about how this new section is turning out. It's late now and I'll be retiring for the night, but I can say with confidence that it will only take one further session before this chapter releases to the team for review. Assuming the team likes what they see, it's feasible we could then prepare it for release. In the immediate future, I am hoping to be able to drop a few builds in more rapid succession than we have done prior. I know that some may be concerned with our move away from scheduled releases and believe me, I understand those concerns. That is part of why I'd like to do so - to set a good example and as a show of good faith. In the long run, we want this to be seen as a positive change in Sileo's trajectory and what better way than to drop what I feel to be one of the best chapters I've written in a long, long time a mere two weeks following our previous content release? 

Full steam ahead. See you in a few days with a new build.