TinkeringTurian
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What's up?
🕑 Added 2019-01-10 17:08:17 +0000 UTCIt's ya boi VixenCowboy42069 with another update post. Remember to like, subscribe, ring'a ding ding that bell button, retweet, reblog, link it to your friends on facebook, and post a copy on reddit. Anyway, dumb memes aside, things are going decently well. Scaffolding will hopefully be finished tomorrow, and then (re)writing can commence on Saturday.
I don't know how long it'll take to rewrite the entire scene, but the base content is pretty darn decent, so it shouldn't take too long. Whatever the case, I'll have a new update ready for you guys come not next Monday, but the Monday after that. The twenty-first, two weeks after the previous update. It might come earlier, but definitely no later than that. I'll have a more precise estimate early next week.
There's also Cassidy's character sheet and backstory to look forward to. Should be coming out five days from now. I don't think her backstory'll be as big as some of the others, but it'll still be plenty interesting, I feel like. It delves a bit deeper into her husband, and her mother. You'll see.
Anyway, onto that look into the development process of Kobold Adventure that I promised you guys a long while back. So, a full scene is composed of various different parts. I will now explain these parts, how they effect the end result, why I think they're important to the overall experience, and how they come into being.
First and foremost, there is the writing. The thing I slave away at, day and night, to churn out and to perfect. I am not the only one who writes for Kobold Adventure, but every word currently in the game was written or re-written by me, to ensure a consistent style of writing, and to polish the quality to well beyond shining.
There are guest-writers currently working their fingers off to provide their own scenes; which I will eventually end up implementing into the base game. Heck, the scene that I'm working on right now was guest-written! On average, guest-written scenes take about sixty percent of the time per word, compared to a scene written from scratch. Guest writers get to see their idea implemented in the game, I get a slightly lighter workload, and you guys get more content. Everybody wins!
All guest written concepts get pre-approved by me, and then the guest-writers get free reign to work on it for as long as they'd like. If you have a knack for writing, and you want to help ease development along, hit me up on the Discord, or on Steam, pitch your idea to me, and we'll see about getting it into Kobold Adventure.
Guest-written scenes are unique, in that they have the actual writing done before the scene gets programmed. And that brings us to the second component of a scene in Kobold Adventure. The programming. This is something that's done exclusively by me, because I am the only person insane enough to know the intricacies of the pseudo-engine I've built over the past year and a half.
The bigger the scene, the more programming required to make it tick. Every choice, and every fragment, has hand-written code behind it. Scaffolding, as I've taken to calling it. The entire process could be streamlined, but I personally prefer it this way for a few reasons. First off, I need a cooldown after writing, and scaffolding scenes is pretty darn relaxing.
Secondly, it allows for greater freedom in what I do within a scene itself. Re-arrange the choice buttons to form a triangle? Not an issue. A mini-game? No problemo. Fuck with the UI? Darn straight. Basically, I can get the game to do whatever the heck I want, whenever the heck I want. And that, is in my opinion, a very valuable aspect of my current work method.
Furthermore, manually scaffolding adds a personal touch to each and every scene. A bit of soul that'd be missing if I industrialize the entire ordeal. There's a bunch of other reasons why I do things the way I do them on the programming front, but these are the main ones. Onto the next component.
Art. Doodles, full-size drawings, illustrated backgrounds. Often made after a scene is in place, images serve two purposes. They add to immersion, and they show the reader what is going on at any given time. Guest artists, and our resident main artist Sneaky, make sure you can see the trials and harships the kobold is going through, instead of having to read about them.
Character sheets are a bit different, in that they are made while the accompanying background story is being written. Sneaky draws the character, I write about them, and together we determine their stats and trivia.
Fan art is also a tad unique. It can depict anything, including stuff not in the game. Not official art, it doesn't meet the strict quality requirements that are put on images in the base game. With the artist's permission, their rendering of Moe, or whatever they chose to depict, is added to the game's fan art gallery for all to see.
Within this category, I'd also place themes, which are sets of colors the game can transition to. Sneaky often approves of themes, or fixes the colorful messes I pump out. He's such a blessing to have around.
Do you have the raw talent needed to create works of art? Want to make the game look better? Feel like drawing a background, or rendering a scene? Or do you just want to see Moe in a situation that'd never happen in the game itself? Why not try your hand at drawing something for Kobold Adventure? Note that only with Sneaky's strict approval will your image be added to the game itself, but don't let that scare you off! Give it a try! At worst, your beautiful work will end up in the fan art gallery.
Last, but definitely not least, is the music. Kobold Adventure has some brilliant background tracks. Some were taken from freesound (individual credits for the freesound artists can be found on the credits page), but most of the new thematic music was made by the project's sole audio artist: Cello.
If you haven't unmuted the game (the crossed out speaker icon in the bottom left), then I suggest you do so as soon as you can. As with all of the other aspects of the game, the music ties everything together into a delightful whole.
And that, my friends and fans, is Kobold Adventure. A collection of inspired works by passionate people, who try their very hardest, to deliver a thrilling story with highs and lows, death and despair, glory and fame, kobolds and humans and everything in between. Thank you all for your continued interest in the game, and I'll see you guys during the next episode of this youtube let's play series.
