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[mobilelast]

Nice to see how organized you keep things (at least compared to the parody of a process I'm working with).

I recently bumped into an interesting looking watercolor post-processing effect: https://github.com/keijiro/KinoAqua (inspired by https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltyGRV). Subtle use of something similar might fit in here.

[JobLeonard]

> Devlog anniversary

Congrats!

[Alain]

Devlog anniversary

Another unnumbered update as I finished some more stuff and it happens to be the day, but no big fanfare this time



That's the current progress. I've more or less finished the last prep I needed to get started on the schedules now… Got branches working as well as milestones so that I can group some events as relative to some named starting time (i.e. "when the big ship arrives") and then I can just move that around and have the events move with it.

Today I roughed out some of the characters I need for the café. Need a few more and then I'll start trying to schedule 'em! They're not all supposed to have the same eyes and so on so they look more alike now than they will later, but you can differentiate between them already and maybe you recognise some from earlier sketches

Even though they are a work in progress, the characters are already quite diverse and easy to be told apart, which I think is great. Happy anniversary

[oldblood]

Congrats on another year of Ao! (And the new characters are already shaping up nicely! Great progress.)

[oahda]

Thanks, everyone!

Nice to see how organized you keep things (at least compared to the parody of a process I'm working with).

I try my best

I recently bumped into an interesting looking watercolor post-processing effect: https://github.com/keijiro/KinoAqua (inspired by https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ltyGRV). Subtle use of something similar might fit in here.

Oh, these are lovely. Always nice to have more references too. I'm going to have to clean up the code of mine a lot at some point.

[oahda]

61

Evaluation & screenwriting

February is over, so a quick final look at the task board…



Both of the last two columns can be considered as "finished". The sole task "in progress" is the open-ended "schedule NPC timelines for the café" and the rest (besides some greyboxing) are bug fixes or desired tooling that can safely be migrated to the next board; I just needed to jot them down somewhere in the meantime.

So I think this worked out well. The scheduling task is finished in the sense that I did as much as I could within the time limit, but I didn't get far before I realised that I can't wing it completely.

This leads us to the next task, which won't need a board...

Detailed script

All the writing I've done so far is very high-level. I know where characters are when, and roughly what they need to say and do, but until now I haven't scripted any conversation or interaction in detail. This is what I want to do now, since it's much faster to iterate on paper than in the actual game

Screenplay

Since the game is basically like a big 360 movie when you explore the past, my conclusion was to simply write scenes just like a film script. Since I'm focussing on the café now, it's all just one long interior scene.



Since I have all that language stuff I decided to try and write the dialogue as they would actually speak it in order to keep things within their own cultural and linguistic framework. Helps me get some work done on that as well. But I'm okay with doing it in a clumsy or incomplete way so that it doesn't hamper progress, adding notes to insert missing words or names later if I can't immediately think of them.

Software

I've played with Celtx in the past but apparently that became paid and more limited (including web only) since then and I just wanted a desktop application to save local files. In the end I found WriterSolo, which is what you see in the above screenshot. Working well so far!

Plan

I'm only a few days in but it's been fun so far! Cool to finally figure these things out and come up with details I haven't previously been at a low enough level to fully consider. I've also found minor timeline mismatches and patched them up. Trying to weave some of the background that I outlined in the character update into the conversations but I still want to make sure that almost everything they say is actually relevant to something. Going back and forth to fine-tune~

So I'll be working on this until further notice.

[Alain]

I've played with Celtx in the past but apparently that became paid and more limited (including web only) since then and I just wanted a desktop application to save local files. In the end I found WriterSolo, which is what you see in the above screenshot. Working well so far!

What a blast from the past, I remember writing scripts with Celtx for uni courses! What a shame it is not free anymore. I appreciate the recommendation regarding WriterSolo and will definitely check it out if I am in need for a script writing tool again.

[oldblood]

Wow, WriterSolo looks pretty solid. Never heard of it, will have to look it up. Thanks for sharing!

[ChrisLSound]

I realized today that my Ao tab got closed at some point and I had been forgetting to check in! Just caught up since November…

I’m glad to hear you’ve started embracing the mindset of “just do whatever helps progress be made even if it’s kinda janky”. I’ve very much started embracing that myself lately too. Cool that the tasking you mentioned worked for you. Hope it’s still going okay now! Everything you’ve shown looks great, and I especially love the paintings/drawings you’ve shared.

I’m happy to read this devlog again, and I will make sure to keep it open this time!!!

Happy belated Aonniversary!