Saturday devlog

Hey everyone! Baku here.

The script is officially finished! Hooray, hooray, hooray! It seems I have absolutely no sense of proportion and no idea when to actually stop, because I've gone and written another 80 pages of script for you. But hear me out... I want to give you as much as possible, as quickly as possible, so I'm constantly torn between efficiency and sheer volume.

That said, I'm really happy with how it turned out! The quests and the choices within them will genuinely affect the story and unlock new paths in the game. And down the line, when there are even more of them, replaying the game and trying out different variations will be even more exciting!

The main story events were no walk in the park, though. Because of the lore, I suddenly found myself writing several pages of massive infodump, completely forgetting that in storytelling, it's important to show, not tell. I had to rewrite a lot of it multiple times, and there's still a tiny bit of infodump left in there. Hopefully, you won't hold it against me.

Overall, it's pretty tough to fit everything into the story neatly, and I'm honestly a little envious of our previous writer, who was so good at it. BUT — at least I'm crafting the story the way I see it in my head, and overall, I'm really enjoying how it's unfolding. I love all my characters, and I love it when they sometimes practically take my hand and show me how they'd act in a given situation. For example, in one quest outline, Ilias was written as not realizing who was posting the requests on the board — but once that "skeleton" started growing "flesh," I realized Ilias isn't actually that clueless, and he started figuring out who the anonymous client was on his own. Or, in another plot outline, I had written that the plant wouldn't help Ilias no matter what, but then I realized it simply couldn't refuse to help him in such a critical moment. After all, he's not a villain — he's just overly arrogant.

So, what's left for me now is to replay the game from scratch and iron out all the rough edges that my story continuation introduced, as well as draw and polish various pieces of art. I might end up doing some of that after the new version drops, but I'm worried I'm giving you too many "rough draft" versions and that you're not getting enough polished content. And I really want you to see that work is progressing and that I'm not just standing still.

So that's about it.

Have a great weekend, everyone, and thanks for reading our devlogs!