Development Log #2 - Game that still hasn't got a name... the writing continues

Well, I still haven't got a title, so it's a bit strange writing a devlog XD

Anyway, I didn't say all that much about the story in my last post, so I'll take this post as an opportunity to get into that a bit.

I can't say toooooo much right now because I'm still writing. But things that almost definitely won't change - There is a small cast of characters, four main characters, who are aged between 21 and 29. And the geographical setting is modern-day (or near future) United Kingdom.

I want to get a few different locations in, currently there are scenes in 5 or 6 different places around the UK, I don't know if that will be the case in the final version, but I am excited to work on something that has a feel of a journey as part of the plot.

Everything else is spoilers :P

Well, not really, but it'll be a few months before I can write a synopsis that has a plot hook for people to read. I find writing difficult at times, but writing synopsis' for my own stories is much harder O.O

Writing for visual novels.

There are things that I'm doing which should make my life easier when I convert my script from a google doc into a ren'py script file. I have already given the characters tags, which I use for the dialogue, like so:

B "I brought all the ones I have, help yourself."

H "Ah, thanks man"

Which should save some considerable amount of time! The other text (narration) I will have to do some further modifying of, including escaping out all of the characters that would otherwise break the script file. (it'll be time consuming, but not too bad). https://www.renpy.org/doc/html/text.html#escape-characters Documentation is very helpful for things like that! As is your fav text editors find and replace function! :D

Now that I am doing a first pass at editing, I'm also adding and bold and italics using the ren'py syntax {b}bold{/b} and {i}italic{/i}.

Another thing that comes to mind when writing for a visual novel is how often to describe sights and sounds. A lot of the time I'll choose to show things through the art or music rather than narration. For now, I'm putting in plenty of description of sights so that I can later make an art assets checklist! And with sound... that's something I'll get into probably in my next post! If I was planning to do a foley track I'd add sound descriptions at this drafting/first edit stage - but I doubt I'll be using sound effects like 'footsteps' or 'glass cracking' - I wouldn't attempt that unless I had some real recording experience or a really strong desire to make those things part of the experience - I have neither.

I'll end this post with my current word count because I don't have any art or music to share today, sorry! (I have been making music though, more than I've been writing or editing over the last 2 weeks for sure.)

13161

Ok. Till next time.