Crescent Bay Broadcast - June 28, 2025

Hey, guys. Unfortunately I don't have much to say this month. These last few weeks haven't been great for me mentally, and I haven't had any drive to get any Blender work done for this time. IRL, I've also been dealing with a thief problem which has eaten up much of my time. Luckily, I haven't noticed anything missing (especially nothing of value), however I've had to spend a significant amount of time moving stuff to safer spaces, installing more Claymores cameras, and improving sightlines. Even then, I still think I need a few more cameras and further work done.

Now, it's not as if nothing at all has happened. Despite my mind not being in a state to work on visuals, it has an odd quirk where being sad makes me want to write. As such, I've been working on the script.

There were a lot of rewrites and amendments made, and some more progress overall. One more important rewrite that comes to mind is that of a rather minor plot point that turned into a major pain. Originally, I intended to have a key character (Dave) leave Crescent Bay for the duration of the story, however I've now found that actually works against against the main story that I want to tell. It turns out he is actually a very interesting character and getting rid of him is a tremendous waste. As such, that plot point has been removed and rethought.

Additionally, some of my more challenging scenes had some progress on their writing, and there were some additional "idea" scenes written which may or may not end up used in later chapters.

Just about every scene has had some sort of amendment (some major and others very minor), and there were some further changes made on my many, many outlining documents.

Now that all said, as effectively all the progress this month has just been in text, I don't have any images to attach to this post. I guess I could attach a very blurry image of VSCode or the result of git diff --stat, but I don't believe there's very much interest in either of those. :)

Crescent Bay Broadcast - May 23, 2025

Hey, guys. This month has been kinda shitty, and I haven't gotten as much done as I would have liked since the last update, but there is still some stuff to talk about, so let's do that.

I've largely been working on modeling. I briefly went back to the environment from March and threw together some nodes which allowed me to replace the concrete barriers with guard rails. I really like how it came out. For those interested, I made a (paid) post about the node group which has a bit more information as well as the nodes themselves. (I'll be using that tool more than you probably expect.)

Lately, I've also been working on modeling Crescent Bay itself. Crescent Bay is a rather small town nestled up against the coastline and built into the hills. It can effectively be divided into four main sections which can each be done separately, and of which two are required for Chapter 1, with the others only being needed later on.

1. The main road is a rather large section with a lot of visibility. As such, this one will be a rather large project.
2. The cabin where MC is staying is in the corner of town, where there isn't much going on. The surroundings can be easily handled with my terrain and plant tools, but the structure itself will likely be a challenge if I can't find a sufficient model online.
3. Housing "A" is where Alice lives. I am not entirely certain yet on what I want it to look like, so we'll figure it out it when we get there.
4. Housing "B" is where Katie lives. My plans for it are quite firm, and while it's far from a small project, it shouldn't be too extreme. The terrain can easily be done procedurally, and I actually did a rough sketch of some of the houses several months ago.

(There's also an additional environment outside of Crescent Bay which must be modeled for CH1, but that one should hopefully be rather trivial as I think my asset collection covers most, if not all, of it.)

The work recently has been on the very start of #1. Some pieces of the town need to be custom modeled (these last couple of days have been spent modeling a bridge), but hopefully I can find some assets to purchase for the buildings so that I can avoid having to model everything.

Crescent Bay Broadcast - April 14, 2025

Hey, guys. I'm trying to break that dastardly pattern I had where I was posting every other month, despite stating at the beginning that I'd "like to make one to two each month." For better or worse, however, that means that I'll be writing a lot more about things I tried that simply failed.

So my attempt at redoing Jess' model failed and fell flat on its face. (Insert a pained laugh here.) My main focus was her hair since that was what I was least pleased with, and below is what I came up with. And the feedback was... almost universally negative. Fair enough.

Some people just aren't fans of the short hair and preferred the longer one. A couple others pointed out that she looks very similar to Ines from STWA: Unbroken. While I don't know all the assets Stew uses for her, I do know that hair asset is the exact same. In fact, I previously avoided using it specifically because of that recognition. (Note: If you haven't heard of or played Unbroken, check it out. Stew makes great games and I strongly recommend them.)

Now to be fair with myself, I do think she's very cute and while there are significant problems with this hair, I actually do quite like it. But since just about everyone prefers what I had before, I'll roll back to that. (Note: Between the purple and white stripe from the last post, I decided on the white one.)

Sidenote: While I was working on porting this new hair from Daz to Blender, I made some optimizations to my cards to curves conversion tool which improves performance and gives me a few more artistic controls to play with. At least something useful came out of all this.

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.)

Crescent Bay Broadcast - January 15th, 2025

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 - March 23rd, 2025

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.