Hi all.

Dev Stuff

A quick update on how things are going.

Good.

Nothing hugely exciting to report on that front. Images are coming in as well as animations. Lots of extra characters in the next episode of the Pimp/Harem path. Some of them will be staying and some will only be in for a few renders. Takes a little time to sort out but it will be lots of fun to look at.

From an organisational point of view we are trying some things to help with stuff like consistency and we are also trying out some new animators so we can keep producing the good stuff at the pace we want.

Blog Stuff

Last time I spoke about my writing style. There is one big downside to that free flowing style which is bloat. It is very easy to get in the weeds with a scene. The banter is flowing between the characters. The conversations are lively and the words flow onto the screen with ease and before you know it I have 2000 to 3000 words down.

I’m feeling good. It was a good day and and the writing was easy. Then I read over it…

Oh…

What I thought was witty, and entertaining banter is… slow, unnecessary, maybe even boring.

This is porn.

It is important to keep this in mind. You guys aren't here for some Tarantino style monologue on Theo’s day at work. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Just before I went on my short break, I was struggling with the script. It was loose and unfocussed. I must have rewritten that thing three times. When I came back, I got a clearer view on it. Some of the club scenes I went through and deleted 40%. I went back, it's still too slow. We don't need to spend so long with these one shot characters. Another 20% gone. Even after that I managed to find lines to reduce and condense.

Sometimes it’s something I can do myself. Other times, I need someone like Jim or one of our game testers to be honest with me about how a scene plays out.

Today.

What a start.

I woke up to find that I had messed up and not informed an artist that we already had an animation for a scene they were working on. The characters aren’t in the right place. 

This is a different kind of editing. The fixing my mistakes kind. Animation and art take a long time. Words are quick and cheap. Time to edit the scene and work out how I’m going to get the characters from one place to another. Thankfully, in this case, it was caught early enough that no one else had to change anything. 

By the power of editing

I fixed how the characters interacted in the scene and issue was fixed with only small delays to production. Lessons learned... I hope.

The past is not carved in stone.

The wonderful thing about games is, we can change the story at any point that has already passed. We recently added in a way to skip the Lucia sex scene at the start of the game. Your feedback is important. If we have messed up something, we can always go back and fix it (as long as we agree with you it needs fixing and won’t cost us months of development… There are limits).

So point out when things are wrong. We can edit it.

See you next time. 

Sinburn