Hi guys, hope you all had a great month 💛
As I said previously, this update was focused on adding content to the already stablished mechanics in the game, I did everything possible to add a little bit of everything. So, let's talk about what I learned about time consumption:
As expected, new enemies are definitely the most time consuming, followed by events.
The thing with enemies is that first you need to find a good album: There needs to be an introduction of the girl, preferably a happy ending, multiple photos in similar position, picture orientation, little presence of the male figure and reasonable overall quality... A good album doesn't have to tick all these boxes, but the more the better.Then downloading the pictures, often individually. After that, they're cropped and converted, sometimes it is necessary to do some editing so that they are a little more "canonically correct", either by removing objects or adjusting the lighting to improve the sense of continuity of the encounter.
Another time consuming action is developing the girl's personality: Trying to tell a story with the images available. This requires images to be rearranged multiple times, which ones will be deleted, which ones can be used more than once, and which dialogue fits with which image... Sometimes it is necessary to rethink certain interactions because there are no photos matching what is happening.
Next step is tie the story/personality to some mechanic present in the game, which will be the girl's gimmick. Not every girl needs to have a gimmick, but I try to avoid encounters being too similar to each other.
Finally, the easiest is the coding itself, once you have all the above figured it out, translating to pyhton and ren'py is relatively easy.
Events tend to take a little longer for the same reason, it is not the coding that is hard, but finding a good album and trying to tell a story with what you got.
Events like the Fountain and the Statue are relatively quick to do because they don't have a story. Yeah, sometimes you have to improve an already established mechanic to make the event work or tweak a couple of old lines, which can be annoying but it doesn't take THAT long when compared to the Lost Girl event or the new Mirian event.
Bad Endings are kinda easy once you know what to do. Because it is a linear event, all you have to do is deal with the images and come up with text, this one really depends on the day. Sometimes you're exploding with ideas, the next day you can stare at the screen for an hour and nothing comes up.
With this you already understand how the creation process works and how much time each new addition takes. What's making me lose track of time is probably these adjustments to old lines of code that need to be made, besides, the more enemies in the game, the harder it is to create a unique encounter, so the creative process takes a little longer with each update.
Anyway, I'm almost done with a new boss for the new area. I'll probably still be able to squeeze in some new images for dreams but I think that's it, new traits and side-jobs will have to wait for the next update...
Speaking about update, the release of version 0.70 will be scheduled for Monday, December 4th.
Thank you so much for taking the time and reading this devlog, let me know if there are any questions and have a great end of the month ❤❤
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