It’s Friday again.

Going to plod out a general timeline of things and whatnots. So a month ago I started in on MayWolf. Having been slowly debugging my Novembear entry alongside other various projects/commissions. I wasn’t planning on joining, but I was hitting a bit of a low point in that I detest bug-finding. I hear the rule is that it’s ten times easier to write bugs than to find them. So new thing, filled with the new opportunities to write even more bugs for myself.

So on the 6th of May I created this:

It usually starts here. And what I really know for sure was that this was what the entire thing hinged on…

Everything else grew out of my desire to do that one thing. I feel accomplished. Truth be told, I also aimed to do less branching. It sort of helped that there were only two characters, because even adding a third character tends to have me dialing around the What-If machine in my head. While I generally keep characters down to something that they represent, the theme of ‘Light in the Darkness’ steered me to just keeping it a dialogue between two aspects.

Influence Map in hand, it was off to the races.

My initial take was that I wanted to do a 3D version and test out 3D Models with Naninovel. The gap between what I want my 3D art to look like vs where it is currently is uncomfortably wider than I’d like to release into the wild. But also that I can sculpt, texture, rig… kind of light… a model in two to three days is maybe something I should sit down and practice getting my designs down.

So it’s Live2D in the Pinch Hitter seat (That might not be the right terminology, I’m not a sportsball enthusiast). Live2D takes me maybe roughly two days to get a working rig, nothing overly complex, but I did run into some issue in that I could have designed the characters to be a lot more expressive, since some of the extreme expressions end up getting filed down due to the nature of how that works. If you’re familiar with gesture drawing, it’s why they tell you to push the gesture out, because of the inherent tendency to make things more rigid as you spend more time with it. Remy’s model went suspiciously easily, Donny’s a drastic change. A shorter muzzle should be easier, yet it just made all the deformers look very askew. I ended up playing with the model until the final week–even while telling myself “this is good enough” and “it has its flaws but it’s shippable.”

Backgrounds are Blender into CSP and touching it up a little with some shaders in Unity. Rendered with transparency and dropped into CSP for color grading. I should probably just use LUTs… Anyway, it’s nothing incredibly complicated.

Okay, it’s Saturday now… (for the post–not a chronicle of the game jam… The Friday thing is a nod to the late great David Lynch)

Story. I juggled around some ideas, all with kind of the backroads of the general America swirling about. Someone who wants to have some clean clothes at the end times came to ahead. Who and what we are while facing down the apocalypse has many facets. Who and what we are after an apocalyptic event is also a space to tell stories. And that’s when it hit me.

Writing-wise. Draft one was slightly under the wire at 1937 words. I’d asked Icefang to do a preliminary reading of it. Which, was on the 28th… because I’m slow at writing. Actually, he pointed out that some words like ‘bucketlist’ are one word… which thinned my already threadbare script!! It’s fine. IT’S FINE. breathe in breathe out

Due to timing I could only take his quick fixes. But they came in handy because he did find a handful of bugs where a command wasn’t properly indented. Definitely because there were a lot less choices than in November, less rogue variables could pop up.

I feel like there’s a conversation to be had about use of Prose here… a dialogue per se.

The earnest answer is that writing a VN for me feels more akin to directing a stage play than it does adapting a novel to have visual elements. Nothing wrong with other methods, me in particular it feels right that these are actors. The backgrounds are the stage. I made the characters, and directly in charge of their animations.

When it comes to stuff like wordcounts… maybe this is a hot take… a story only needs as many words as it needs to communicate the idea.

The night before the due date, I made a change to the way eyes are handled, since initially I built to pupils into the iris. The change would allow the characters eye movements to give their expressions at the edges a better sense of looking in those directions. However, I attached them to the wrong parameter, causing a cascade of issues with each character’s animations. I managed to correct a handful of them and hurriedly attach them back into the script. Honestly, I do want to make better looping animations for the characters to take on… but this might just be a refinement that I use on my main project.

When it hit the actual due date, I nearly forgot that I was going to a book-signing event an hour away for Matt Dinniman (<3 DCC). And a great reminder of the world around us, and being able to experience things, bring them back into our own stories.

Take it wherever you will go.