Shady Characters
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Devblog #18
🕑 Added 2024-11-25 09:51:16 +0000 UTCHey, Wizards!
Shady Character One here!
I am not good at writing prose. Maybe some of you have noticed that. Maybe you didn't. But I am. So, with this sudden revelation, some of you might be eager to ask: "Why the hell did you decide to make a game that is mostly prose, Shady One"? And I will answer: because that the only thing I felt more or less comfortably programming and designing at that point. I am not new to writing per se, but I am much more used to writing scripts. When writing a script, you need to be concise, focus on showing instead of telling. That's what I brought with me into the game when I first started.
But now, after more that half a year of writing events, and getting a bit more comfortable with descriptive side of writing prose, I really found those starting events a bit lacking in substance. The fact that some of them were written during the game's very conception, doesn't help either. The writing style was all over the place, the characters were less defined. Anywho, I was not happy with those.
So I decided to go back a bit, and look over the older events first, before the major update. I definitely didn't want or plan to do any major re-writes. Mostly respecting the people, who spent their time playing the current stories, but also because I hate the idea of re-writes and retcons. So I went, and tried to flesh out the earlier girls' events as much as I could. I tried focusing on the shortest and weakest events first, and tried adding a bit more "meat" to those "bones". Turned out pretty hard to do that when you barely have any bones to work with. But, well, I will do what I can, and even a few new descriptions or lines of dialogue can go a long way, when the original event is barely 400 words long. The results that I came up with so far are already making me feel more satisfied with the events. Especially Gwen's and Aisling's events. Those were the weakest of the bunch in my opinion.
Expanding the events without changing them in any major way is a delicate task though, so it will take a lot of time, and I have only just started. Hopefully, it will benefit the project a lot, and make that early game more appealing even if just a bit.
Shady Two was very busy too. Not only helping me review the events and point at places that might be improved, but also continuing to work on the art. For this weeks update, two more teacher sprites were finally finished as well as more backgrounds. We really hope to fill all the major wholes in the game's art before the December, so we can focus on artworks proper, and more girl-related art. With the addition of McCracken and Mooney to the team, only two faculty workers remain to be drawn now. Let's give Shady Two all of our support in this task.
But that's not all still! We are finally more or less comfortable with adding music to the game! I am still very new to the sound design part of the game, so it might be more that a bit janky and clanky, but I really hope that even the way that I implemented it so far will make the playing experience much more engaging. And I hope that I did not mess up the extraordinary work that our composer Kuro did for us. So... yeah... Do tell me what do you think about the music once you get your hands on the update!
Till next week's devblog!
Shady Character One, out!
