Crescent Bay Broadcast - March 23rd, 2024

Hey guys. Sorry for not posting anything in February. I just kept pushing off writing that month's update, telling myself that I was so close to finishing things that I should just wait until then. Repeat that a couple of times and then the month is simply gone.

A good chunk of my time in Febuary and a bit of early March was spent finishing up the Rust project I mentioned in the last update. It's now fully complete, and I have it running in a staging environment for full validation. While knowing Rust isn't immediately useful to TSoH (all the gameplay code is written in GDScript), once the Rust multimedia community makes some more progress, I may attempt to rewrite my somewhat hacky existing C++ codebase with one written in Rust. More details in the last post.

Aside from that, I've (basically) finished the environment and Jess. While I still think there is some very minor work to be done, they're both effectively complete.

Jess has lost her heterochromia, her skin was lightened, a stripe was added to her hair (white or purple I'm not certain on, but I'm heavily leaning white), and some soft freckles were added. Just like I said in the last update, I am not fully satisfied with how her model compares to what I have in my head. This is just the best result I've gotten so far. Any further iterations will likely make her model unrecognizable from what you see now, so I'll call this attempt at modeling her finished.

With writing, things are going decently. I had some spats of inspiration and was able to pump out 3 scenes, though only one of those scenes is for Chapter 1. The other two are for events which are going to occur later on in Chapter 2 or 3. Lots of work to do still, but it's progress.

And I think that is about it for these last two months. There are of course other minor things such as standard code maintenance and reviews of existing scripts, but nothing worth writing a significant amount about.

Crescent Bay Broadcast - January 15th, 2024

Hello there! I hope your holidays were good. I admittedly spent less time working on this project than I'd have liked, but family is family, holidays are holidays, and when you add the two together, life gets hectic.

That said I have been getting some things done with two that I can actually show off:

• Environments: During the holiday sales, I purchased a terrain creation tool to add to my toolbox. It certainly requires some artist skill I that haven't yet developed with it, but it looks to be quite powerful. Attached is a gif showing some progress I've made while learning it.
• Characters: Alongside Alice and Katie, there is one final love interest: Jess. She's always been a bit problematic since while I can very comfortably write her, I frankly have no mental image of her appearance. I've attached what I'll call the "current draft." I'm definitely not 100% on it and she'll very likely have some more overhauls.

I have also been learning Rust (the programming language). Although this has no immediate usefulness for TSoH, I expect that I'll be writing some Godot extensions in it at some point in the medium to near-term future. Godot lacks the ability to natively load modern video codecs, and I recently implemented support myself with an extension written in C++. However, that implementation has some quirks with multithreading which a Rust rewrite may (or quite possibly may not) help with.

Crescent Bay Broadcast - November 24th, 2024

Hello there! This is the start of what I've decided on calling the Crescent Bay Broadcast (Crescent Bay being the ficticious town that The Story of Her takes place in.) These will be a periodic newsletter providing a general overview of progress, retrospectives, and anything else I feel warrants discussion. While I'm not committing to any particular schedule just yet, I would like to make one to two each month, and I think I'll keep them public.

As of writing, it's been around a week since I dropped the demo release, so let's discuss what's been going on since then.

First of all, a good amount of that time has admittedly been spent recovering from the intense crunch I put myself under to push that build out the door. While I did not expect it to be so exhausting, looking back on my commit graph, it turns out that it was 6 straight weeks of very heavy development. While I don't intend to make that same mistake again, given that I didn't realize how hard it was until I was done, we'll just have to see.

Regarding Chapter 1, while I haven't been doing much with the files over this past week, it's not as if I'm starting from scratch. Currently, Chapter 1 is planned to have 11 scenes, of which 7 were already written before work on the demo even started. The total word count of the written scenes is at ~11.5k so far with a reading time of ~40 minutes.

(Keep in mind that the script is first written as a screenplay which includes actions, visual elements, and comments. Those extra details are used in rendering but get stripped out when copying to the VN build.)