Omedetou

Gave it what I could with the weather cutting power and net for just shy of a week. But there are bugs galore, I'm sure. Several sections of it were written on an ancient Surface that overheats after a few minutes of YouTube. Going to sound like complaining, but I do sort of wish it had more time on the end of the month rather than the start--as I was trying to finish an October drawing challenge.

But that's the thing, it's a challenge, so what's a challenge without severe weather, or the impending ruin of society. It's all the more reason to try to do more with what time we have. And I'm regularly challenging myself by doing all the things I know I'm -not- supposed to do.

Upgrading/Updating software. Namely Blender 4.3--and the Grease Pencil 3 rewrite. That caused a day of headaches--right before the five-hour drive for the holidays. I'd still like to try out the Brush Stroke tools to see if it can achieve the look I want. And then Unity 6 / Naninovel 1.20--though technically I still ended up exporting the project with Unity 2022.3. There were a lot of features in Naninovel that I wanted to use because they make writing that much easier.

Choices where you can put the outcome in directly indented under it and remain on a branch? That's excellent. That's even more intuitive than Inky. But the sacrifice for that was that I also had to go back and figure out what broke things going between the versions. But those were gambles I made, and somewhat lost--like a few days. Not that I could actually get anything out for anyone to Alpha Read or Alpha Test it even if I somehow mobile hotspotted it. 

So for documentation purposes and a review--mostly for myself. Anyone who wants to join a somewhat detail account of how I work is most welcome to comment or observe. I like starting with an Influence Map--just a general vibes thing for me. Not necessarily for the aesthetics nor for the story. Because they're easy enough things to stray away from. My goal was to try something a little more abstract. And in retrospect I Saw The TV Glow should have definitely taken up more space than Edith Finch. Nobody even died--allegedly. They could all be dead. Who knows? But once the vibes were established, I kind of knew the shape of what I wanted to write. And I am a plotter, but I run by the seat of my pants between the two plots. And that's definitely my major hurdle every time I sit down to write. That there just isn't enough connective tissue between two things. Part of it must be an innate distrust that people will follow--and partially my reasoning for choosing a more Theater of the Absurd approach for this story--which can just as easily fall flat. But I shouldn't be afraid of those things.

Still, the length of time for my writing is very slow, and it probably gets compounded that I want to think about writing less like prose--and more like a screenplay. Screenplays are filled with white space. Jumping into a character to not only work out their psyche but also try to hone their word choice. I know for a fact that one of the characters loses their voice I had intended initially--but that's what editing is for.

Next up, Sprites. So I tried to keep myself from designing characters before they're more committed to their written counterpart. But I also used to get comments on how folks imagined my characters as different species.. and at the very least I should maintain shape recognition--you know, square features means this character is more solid, pointier/sharpier characters are more menacing, so on and so forth. I want to represent different body types and not feel like it has to say anything about who they are. Heavy-set people aren't inherently lazy or incapable of working out, and someone who's made of knives isn't more prone to violence.

Another slow-down that I have is wanting to construct sprites layer by layer--sort of like Doomsday prepping but with character components. Who knows if I might need a character to flash everyone else. I didn't wait for the writing to be done--because sometimes I need to shift gears in order to let that one other brain cell cool off. CSP says I have 10.5 hours on the above drawing. Really a quarter of it is trying out different fits. I think I end up way committed to "what would this person actually wear with within their means"--and I don't think of myself as fashion forward. My sibling has stopped me on several occasions and turned me around before allowing me out the door. And I'm older by nearly 4 years.

All the grey bases were done in the first week, before power was lost. And ugh... the... sprites... were... done... a... few... hours before I uploaded. *cough* I did end up compromising by doing the arms and the clothing in the same pass. Maybe less compromise, more "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck?" Really I should have just done them as one sprite model with a blank head... I know logically that I wasn't intending on breaking them down so I could animate them or whatever, but just in case... I might want to do a swimsuit volleyball spin off.

One of the main reasons I hesitated to draw expressions immediately, is because sometimes it's not backed up by the text--like oh I drew a whole bunch of Genie from Aladdin expressions... but the character is more of a Jafar. But I also need to maybe draw out some sort of Venn diagram of expressions they might use. I might jot down "Melancholy" one day, and tomorrow my notes say, "Wearily Contemplating the meaning of Human Existence". I don't think I'd get that microscopic. But it's also not entirely too foreign when my notes don't have symmetry.

Backgrounds. Blender but I've started using a Material setup called "Sturdy" to give it... well... texture. I decided that I'd just use the lighting within a 3D program to do the shadows for me. As much as I would love to have a master's understanding of light and shadow, I don't necessarily find it as rewarding as finishing up some projects. I definitely figure there won't be enough time to do both. But my process now includes rendering in Blender with Light and the Material--and then doing a pass with Grease Pencil Line art, and then importing that SVG into Clip Studio, where you can alter the brush shape to give that a more textured look as well.

Though I did also run into an issue where Blender 4.3's Grease Pencil does not export out the SVG as the same resolution of the camera the way it has in 4.2--which is wildly frustrating when being told that the new Grease Pencil is lighter weight--and yea... 4.2 and older were absolutely memory hogs.

Coding, Coding, Coding. Still not much of a coder. I used to know my way around HTML--actually that's a lie. I used to be pretty good with ActionScript3 (Flash's programming language). Naninovel takes so much off of this plate, it doesn't feel like coding at all, just gotta keep a notebook next to me of what variables I've used and what type they are... maybe a slight hint at what it's supposed to do. And I suppose if you've made it this far, me suggesting that character having a little extra dialogue depending on choices made isn't actually too much of a spoiler.

Naninovel 1.20? Has so much going on for it as well. Moving the need for single line "knots" which is an Inky term. Or nesting If statements is a real boon. I feel that i cannot overstate how much Naninovel does for me. I really enjoyed TyranoScript (the language that is the foundation for TyranoBuilder. They are writer friendly tools for someone who basically is just doing a little light HTML here and there, but otherwise it's just giving stage-directions. Unity? Not a great company--but a little bit like life--we need to extract what we can in the time that we have. I cannot sit around "Waiting for Godot."

Okay, but I was in the midst of bug hunting the day leading up to having to post my game jam. Some things appeared to be bypassing some if/than's--only to learn that pointing to a boolean that doesn't exist does in fact, not return a false for not being instantiated. So small things like finding those and inserting the false flags.

And as much as I love Naninovel--the documentation still needs quite a bit of work. Examples of things that can only be found in their Release notes and nowhere else, or examples that don't explain why the outcome is the way it is.

But this penultimately leads me to: AHHH, I ran out of time. There are probably several broken chains--I did not see any in the automatic flowchart that Naninovel builds--but I'm also not certain that there might be some combination of choices that just result it a crash. I didn't even get time to sort for music. BUT, the ultimate lesson here--aside from constructing Anti-Bomb Cyclone technology--is getting more practice at a smaller compartmentalized build of something and applying it to my main project.

I don't feel bad for the effort that I managed to squeeze into this--and I accept that in a lot of ways I failed to do what I set out to. But knowing my tools better, and ugh... not dragging anyone else down with me due to whatever circumstances... is what I needed out of this exercise.

Now, off to bed--I've been awake for like 30 hours.

Thank you spending some time with me while I sit in the Shinji Chair.