I've started to realize I need to build a lot more scaffolding than I expected for My Violet Summer, my femdom adult visual novel. I'm going to write these devlogs as a bit of accountability to get this project done.
After I finished writing Gas Station Dick Pills, I immediately jumped into writing my next story. I wanted to write a bigger and better story. It was going to have stats, and quests, and free roaming sections!! I ultimately wrangled those ambitions down to just seven in-game days, centered around two characters in a small home, but I still wasn't prepared for the actual scale of the game I had in mind. For context, finishing GSDP took me two weeks from start to finish. I am now on week six for the next game, and I'm still just writing the story!
Free roam
This week, I started writing the "free roam" section for the in-game Monday. This is where the player is able to freely explore the rooms of the house. These are some of the toughest sections to write because I constantly have to jump around the story structure and think about where to go next.
I've found my ink script to become entirely too unwieldy know. The "scaffolding" I mentioned up top is that I've finally decided to split my massive script file into a "story" script with separate files for each in-game day. This will make it a bit easier to track the scenes I still need to write, I hope.
Intro feedback
I've received wonderfully useful feedback from beta readers this week, but their comments unfortunately tended to focus on the intro. This is unavoidable; why wouldn't you start at the beginning of a story? But the result is that I've been inclined to revisit the intro instead of writing the other scenes. I've tweaked some wording slightly and added more choices to improve player agency. I need to be careful though, just because most comments center around the intro doesn't mean that's where all the problems lie. š
Updated backgrounds
I use Unreal Engine with fancy path-traced lighting to make the room backgrounds for My Violet Summer. Even though I'm able to save time by using free assets, this is still a helluva lotta work. Dressing this hallway and figuring out the lighting in the kitchen took me all Sunday afternoon, for example.
Styling
A small flourish I added this week is a divider in the history after picking a choice. This is mostly done to support navigating between rooms. My intent is to have an endless scrolling history instead of clearing it every time we change scenes. This can make it confusing to understand where you've already been. However, this looks pretty shit when the choice text is too long, so I need to rethink how best to support it.
I also added a big fat "Continue" button during the free roam sections. This takes you to the arrow navigation after exhausting any text and choices in the room itself. It looks like this in-game:
I am forever unhappy with how these arrows look. Obviously, the actual images were something I quickly threw together in Gimp, but they're becoming increasingly detached from the spatial navigation. The best way to solve that would be to make the actual doors selectable, but I can only do that by... finishing the goddamn backgrounds. š©
Word count
I use a custom Python script to track my progress. I improved it this week to show an estimated reading time, which is currently between 59 minutes (fast) and 1 hour 22 minutes (normal). I know a script like this would drive some authors insane, but I find it helps me keep on track. Especially during the "rough draft" phase, it's important to see that word count go up as high as it can go, which means writing as much as I can every day. Once the bones of the story are in place, mygoal will be to write negative words every day as I whittle down the bad words until I find the good ones.
Other tools
I already bumped the version number automatically after uploading a new build to Itchio, but now I make an automatic commit too. Yay for small wins!
Saturday push
Dissatisfied with my writing performance during the week, I took my laptop to the public library and wrote smut there for four hours. I managed to add +1,264 words yesterday, for a total of 20,681 player-facing words this week.
Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you next week!