Malevolent Village
Hello! Sorry for not updating you with my progress last week, I wasn't sure what to say at the time because most of the week I had spent writing and taking care of some work that's not necessarily game dev.
As mentioned one week ago, my latest ambition is to finish the Village and the Hub story plots by January/February. The way I'm working towards this is writing a lot in advance, so right now I'm working on texts for the village, even for content that's not going to be available in this month's update.
This approach allows me to have an idea of the art that's required by the upcoming content, so drawing won't lag behind waiting for the writing to be done first.
This week here's what I'm going to do:
Release a new Public Build on Friday, maybe offering a glimpse at the initial content after the crash.
Draw 4 illustrations.
Write one or two more SFW dialogues for outdoors Village with choices that would allow your character to gather the signatures/stamps you need from the Likurieris villagers. They're going to be tougher to get via SFW-means than via NSFW-means.
Write 2-3 NSFW plots for the Village Bar, each of them offering the opportunity to gather more stamps. The way I want it to work is that after doing some tasks in the outdoors area of the Village (as in, outside the Bar), it's going to get darker and your character will feel "unsafe" to be on the streets since Mag'nath's goons may be lurking. So, your character will have to move into the bar and interact with people inside to get the remaining stamps/signatures.
The triggers for the day being darker would be gathering an X amount of stamps, so you can't gather all the stamps in one go before going inside the bar, you'd have to pick between the opportunities that would present themselves, SFW or NSFW, to gather the stamps and each of them would advance time a bit.
Then with whatever I will have written by Monday, I will return to the animation(s), work on them to completion, and then I'll begin adding the dialogues, illustrations, animations to the game in that order.
However, considering there'll be plenty of illustrations available this month, I'd like to pace things out a bit and give myself more time to write in advance so when I'm confident the new build will work fine and include sufficient content, I'll then return to finishing any remaining Village Bar signatures/stamps subplots.
I hope what I've written in here makes sense, the essence of it is that I'm going to spend more time writing and drawing in advance, because it might help boost our overall speed and allow completing Gaia's main story by January/February which I'm sure many of you would like to see, since the next step would be space content.
I'll return with what I've managed to do on Friday, so I wish you all a great week!