Early April Update

Greetings! As you've likely guessed, 10.4 isn't done yet, but I have been getting a lot of work done on it. I'd said it would probably be out last month, and since it wasn't, everyone who was a $5+ supporter in March - but who no longer is - will get it sent to them via a message. So when will it be done? This month, I hope - I'm going to work hard trying to make it happen, anyway!

After the ceremony event in Plains End, I said I wasn't going to do any more scenes with tons of characters in them, but I couldn't really avoid doing so with the Commercial District reopening. Scenes with lots of characters are rather tedious to make, since it requires knowing where they all are at any given time, ensuring they don't walk over one another, having a large fraction of them turn to look at where people are speaking/interesting things are going on, etc. But it's done, so all that pain is in the past!

The reopening ceremony and the introduction to the Commercial District scenes are right after one another - quite logically - but one thing I'm struggling with is how long they both are, and the fact that they're even longer together. And the latter can get longer still depending on whether or not you accept a quest at the end of the reopening ceremony, and also if you have enough 'relationship' to ask Ana out at the end. One thing I didn't so much like about 10.0 was how many long scripted scenes it had; this is a RPG Maker game, not a visual novel! Somewhere along the line I accepted that this game has become VN-like, but I still want to be careful about leaning too hard into that. What do you think? Do long scripted scenes bother you? Or is it just par for the course at this point?

At any rate, my current project is Ana's date quest, which is the last full quest in this release. (One other can begin at the conclusion of the reopening ceremony, it only has a short scene or two in 10.4.) I'm still in the 'planning how it should go' phase rather than the writing phase - a lot of planning/writing has to take place before I actually start writing the script, especially for important scenes - but hopefully that won't take too much longer. I've had to do a lot of thinking about the different paths the Ana relationship could take, since this is where they could really start to diverge, and I've come up with 3-4 different ones: friend, friend with benefits, and 2 slightly different romance paths. I'm not going to go into much more detail here, I'm just trying to share some of the things I'm working on :)

I am still looking for help on filling out the list of relationship-affecting events, if any of you know the story really well and spot some things I forgot. (I've had precisely zero people respond so far lol. But maybe that just means the list is pretty complete?) If you have any thoughts about the post - like about long scripted scenes, for instance - please let me know. Thank you for your support!