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ShoH Update and Name Poll (February #1)
🕑 Added 2022-02-15 00:15:57 +0000 UTCHi everybody, Happy Valentine's Day! Can you tell that it's one of my favorite holidays? I just love the visuals and the aesthetics and the colors and the vibes! 💖🌸💝💐💌 I hope you're all having a very good day and start to your week!
Just a brief update on how ShoH things are going this month!
- We're a little behind on this month's goody (just by a few days--but I promise it will be worth it)! I'll give you a hint: it's part of a series of more illustrated codex entries, and they'll be the most complex ones yet!... 👀
- Halek's character sheet commission (which you all voted on) will hopefully be finished sometime in March!
- Ayla and Tallys's character cards are underway and they're looking gorgeous! 😩 (However, I'm not sure if they'll be done in time for me to send them out to Vice Commanders and Commanders next month, so I'll have to figure out something else to print for mailing before then!)
- Trouble's theme song won this round of the musical commission polls, so I'll be opening up suggestions for his song very soon so we can start composing it!
- We're got other asset and art commissions for the game in the works, but I'll stay mum on those for now... All I can say is that things are looking incredible! 😏
- I am very pleased with how Chapter 7 of the alpha build has been progressing so far! It's been fun and cathartic to finally meet Mimir, and I've had a lot of fun writing out scenes with the boys as well! I think we're more than halfway done with the chapter overall... Now things can start ramping up towards the discovery phase, revelations, and an explosive climax!
- A new short story series starts this month! I am extremely excited to present a brand-new AU take on the story that I've never thought of or experimented with before, and which I can guarantee is going to be a unique experience...
- And finally, the Twine conversion of the game has been puttering along in the background while I've been working on all of this! I think I'm finally comfortable enough with Twine coding that things don't feel so overwhelming, and porting the actual text of the game has become simple enough! I am still struggling with more advanced mechanisms, like fashioning an inventory and an interactive map exactly how I want it, but I hired my expert professional coder brother-in-law to help me out when he has the time, so we've been putting our heads together on that! The biggest time-consumer for me is still figuring out CSS and HTML, still having had no education or experience whatsoever with either of those things and not making the time to actual go through formal lessons or tutorials... but I'm slowly, painstakingly ironing things out through trial and error... There have definitely been some obstacles, but I'm confident that if I'm patient and don't rush things, it'll get done to the standard that I ultimately envision! I think I sometimes let my perfectionist tendencies cloud my judgment and get me down, especially when I compare this "rough draft" to more polished and experienced products, but I won't let that stop me!!! I was a beginner at ChoiceScript once, too, and while starting over from scratch is an uncomfortable feeling for me, it helps me forcibly learn to be forgiving and patient with myself and to not try to rush the process to get to AAA-level polish as soon as possible! I'm getting there! It will be a long while before anyone sees that version of the game, but I'm already 100% confident that it's better than the ChoiceScript version as-is! And thanks to all the little features that Twine offers, I've been able to make small tweaks to the prologue of the story, too (like helpful tutorial popups to help explain things better, more elaboration and differentiation between different backgrounds, etc.)! I just started porting the beginning of Chapter 1, so we're getting there, slowly but surely!
And that's that for my update so far! As we creep along towards pulling together all of the threads of Chapter 7, I'm starting to think of Chapter 8 (and, please help me, I feel some ideas of side missions/other chapters bubbling up--DON'T LET ME PUT IN ANOTHER STORY CHAPTER FOR GOD'S SAKE). And whenever I start thinking of future chapters, I think of the characters that will appear in them that don't have names or appearances yet--and that's where you all come in!
So, how about it? Want to help me name yet another character? He's Guard-kun's boss (if you didn't know, Guard-kun's coming next chapter), the Commissioner of the Vice Guard... And as you can probably guess, he's not great. No idea what he looks like or even what his personality is like yet, but he's probably a dick. I mean, he's the head of the Vice Guard.
I do know his first name is Halchon! So you'll be deciding his last name, which is chiefly how MC and co. will address him.
What do you think? Commissioner Halchon ____________?
