One Year Progress Update

It's not been precisely a year since development started (things in the demo aren't going to be 1:1, there are parts I already knew I'd be changing for sure as I was making it, but the structure is still there, so development of the demo contributes to development of the full game), but it's been a year since I released the demo!  So, how's work on it been going since then?

I'll be honest.  Not as much progress as I would've liked.  A huge chunk of the year that's passed has been focused less on development and more on resolving dental problems.  That's not even done yet, but it's finally back to a point where I'm not constantly in agony, so... that's good.  I can work more easily again, now.

A lot of what has been done has gone towards fine tuning what the whole thing will be like in my head, both in terms of art style and narrative structure.

It'll for sure be something like this (not accounting for secret routes- I plan to have those, but I want to finish at least outlining the main ones before I worry about how I'll implement them).  A scene focused on yourself and how you're handling your new home situation, splitting off into a section about you and whichever woman you've gotten the most good graces with, converging back into the next scene about you, splitting off again, and so on.  (I think most dating sims function like this, though I have very little firsthand experience with the genre outside games that flip it on its head- I consider this to be something of a friendship sim at its core, though.)  I'm just uncertain about how many times to repeat that process.  I've got a lot of ideas about possible interactions, about thoughts our protagonist can have about their current life, but I want to balance that with the length.

I want to encourage multiple playthroughs, but I need to ensure doing so won't be miserable for the player!  Especially after some games I've looked into more recently in the year that's passed (*cough* the mortuary assistant *cough* and postal 3 to a lesser extent *cough cough*) that also encourage multiple playthroughs, but aren't great to actually play more than once, at least in a short enough timespan to remember what exactly is different.

Visual novels, in this regard, have the benefit of not asking you to actively do much, and in the case of ones built in Ren'Py, making it easier for you to skip past what you already saw on previous playthroughs.  I still want to make it not miserable for those who do decide to savor what they've already seen, though.  Even games you adore can get sickening- anyone who looks at literally any of my other accounts will know I've been getting really into ULTRAKILL recently (autisticly), and I've honestly been struggling to not get burnt out on it from over-exposing myself, despite me earnestly considering it to be The Perfect Video Game.  Like, in the previous paragraph, I've even resorted to getting into Postal.  It's rough.

There's not been any new assets made for The Full Game yet (maybe I've started on a song or two? I can't really remember), but I've been doing a lot of fine-tuning on how I'll want it to look.  Both the art style and my art skills in general are continuously developing!  Here's a comparison of a recent WIP to the sprite from the demo I had to reference for the colors, for example.


Horrid.  The more recent art may have the benefit of "tidier lineart than I typically like to do", but that can only do so much, especially when I personally care very little about "niceness" when it comes to visuals (have you watched any of vewn's animations?).

Anyway, the point is that practice is an important part of making this look good, and I've been doing plenty of that.  Not as much "tangible progress on the game", sure, but a) I won't know exactly what art I'll even need until I write a lot more and b) the release of the whole thing's probably going to be a ways out anyway as I'm doing everything alone, so if I did start on that now, there'd probably be some massive jumps in quality from asset to asset.  Also c) remember the part where I told you I had health problems for a huge chunk of this year?  yea--
OH also d) concept art for future things is also part of that practice, some of which you can already see for $5 or more a month on my ko-fi I keep forgetting to update the main demo page about..

Speaking of practice-  I've been practicing with other smaller projects from time to time as well!  Some related directly to SSSy, like slash slash slashy and snip snow snip, but some not related at all, like I decided to learn Twine really quick (though that could become a benefit- I've seen a framework elsewhere on itch to use Twine to speed up coding Ren'Py games), I've got an experimental webcomic simmering on the backburner, andddddddddd I've more recently started writing an even shorter visual novel.  That idea's too fresh to say anything about, but it'll be smaller, cheaper, and hopefully give me the further experience to ensure that Snip Snip Snippy is as good of a game as I want it to be!  I've already got a few other games under my belt, sure, but none that entail this amount of polish, so it doesn't hurt.

All that is nice to talk about, and I hope it's as nice for you to read about, but it's a lot harder to quantify progress in terms of these things, at least without spoiling the whole game all at once.  So, what can I quantify?  Why, writing, of course.  All that I just talked about ties directly to how the writing's going- polishing the story outline will help me connect whatever stray scenes I've written, writing more gives me an idea of what art and music I'll need to create later in development, and taking breaks from writing this to make something else keeps me from losing my mind on top of potentially inspiring me more.

The google doc containing the script from the demo is 8,127 words long.  This includes comments and whatever bits of code I remembered off the top of my head well enough to write directly in there, and doesn't include any proofreading I did after converting all that into code.  Like I said up at the top, a lot of that will remain more or less the same, besides making sure it matches whatever quality my writing's at once I'm done.  What I know will be very different is Bevelyne's route (can't lock you into a death that early, can I?).  The portion that'll be rewritten is 338, and what I have written for what'll replace it is currently sitting at 505 words, 167 words longer.  This brings the mostly complete "first chapter" to a total of 8,294 words between all three routes.

Due to remaining uncertainty about the length, most everything past "chapter one" is barely-connected scenes scattered between separate documents.  This is easier on my brain until I get things more solidified.  The tallies for those are:

That's 5,725 words for everything past "chapter one", and 14,019 words across the whole game thus far.

I have no wordcount range I'm hoping to ultimately hit, so I can't really say what fraction of the final product I'm at here.  Hell, there's a couple of these scenes I'm not sure will survive the final cut.  But here's what I can say for sure... that's a whole lot longer than most of my posted writing over the years.  My fanfics (if you know 'em you know 'em) usually land in the 1k-5k range, for example.  Even if I can't make as many solid promises as I'd like to be able to do by now, at the very least, I understand why, and I'm still very impressed with what I have managed.

Here's hoping the next however many years of me working on this go smoother.  And thank you to everyone who's been looking forward to it, whether you played the demo day one or just stumbled across it recently.

One last thing- I made something small for the occasion as well, not just all this technical talk.