Hey everyone! It's been a really long time since I've made an update of any kind, it seems.  Thankfully, no news is good news (more or less- I'll explain...).  I want to update everyone on where things are at when it comes to Little Shop of Gwen, as well as a couple of other items (?!) in this blog post.

• Little Shop of Gwen
  • After basically taking an entire year off to focus on making it through the school year, I have been cracking down HARD on this game since the start of the summer break. 
  • I had originally wanted to create this game in a game engine that I hadn't used before, so that I could learn a new language at the same time that I was developing it. After about a month with no progress and increased frustration, I decided to see what I might be able to do inside of ren'py, the software that I used to create both Melatia and Bonus Chapter.
  • I've had a lot of success getting back into the flow of creating and writing code, although this game is becoming increasingly complex by the day it seems.
  • I can't tell you just how many systems are invisibly running in the background of this game at this point. For example, I just finished writing code for a "rare customers" system that performs a check before normally generating a random customer to appear. It basically rolls a 100-sided die and if it lands on 100, it calls in a "rare" customer from a smaller list instead. These customers are named characters from previous entries and will have special interactions or qualities, like Sam only showing up if there are energy drinks available and will only buy these, or Mel needing to exclude meat-based snacks.
  • Nearly all of the code is written for the script and systems. There might be some alterations or additions in the future, but as it stands, everything is working properly and I don't think that there's much else to worry about.
  • I have some character images that I made at the start of working on this project, but I'm going to have to remake all of these for a few reasons. Not the end of the world, but it'll take a lot out of me.
  • Backgrounds don't exist yet. They've always been my bane.
  • Every buyable product has art for it. Actually, every item has art, thumbnail art, a full name, a short displayable name for menus, a price, a buying price, and flavor text associated with it. Each one of roughly 50 products...  That all took a while...
  • The only major part that I haven't touched yet is trying to figure out what to do once the story is finished. My main idea is quite intense, which would be to essentially press reset on the game and swap to an incremental-style of game from that point forward. Not sure if it would be worth it, since there isn't much point in continuing past that point aside from "big number go up". There is a cash register upgrade halfway through the game, so I might just plan to have more upgrades that appear. idk.
• Updates to the previous games
  • Okay, let's be honest for a minute. Even after a few updates already, I'm still learning about glitches and errors that occasionally pop up in both Melatia and Bonus Chapter. I'm doing my best to log those so that I can address them once Little Shop is out. One of the major worries that I have about jumping back into those games is that I'm running a newer version of Ren'py which makes some changes to the structure of how things are to be written, and it's not necessarily as easy as clicking a button to revise the script to fit the new rules.
  • If I have to update Bonus Chapter, I might update a couple of the images while I'm at it. Some of them really rub me the wrong way and always have...
  • Melatia: With Love from Lumon had a LOT of cut content from my original plan. What if I did something really stupid?
• Melatia: With Love from Lumon novelization
  • I'm doing something stupid.
  • Literally 5x longer or more.
  • I'm really far into this already.
  • To expand a bit more, give me a moment. Basically, there were many ideas that didn't make the cut for one reason or another, either being hard to translate into the visual novel format, requiring more effort than I deemed it to be worth, or a number of other reasons. I wanted to slowly add these ideas into the universe via smaller comic updates. After the most recent comic (featuring Mel in her youth back on Lumon), I found that I should really just package everything into one place. This is where the novelization comes in.
  • The novelization will essentially be the "definitive edition" of the story, expanding it quite a bit with minimal changes to what already exists. For example, chapter four in the VN features Mel, Erin, and Lise going shopping to find Mel some Earth-appropriate attire. This will still happen in the novel, but the reasoning for shopping is slightly different and will lead into a much longer series of events with Lise.
  • In general, side characters will have larger impacts and "screen time" than they did originally, letting the world be larger than just the small world revolving around Mel and Erin.
  • Jin's story will be written intertwined with Mel's. Not a lot will change here; just as chapters of Jin's story were unlocked at different times in the main game, there will be cuts where we jump to Jin's side of the story before returning to Mel.
  • This will be made available separately from the downloads page here. Not sure what it will look like in the end, but updates will come later. Early adopters of the VN (before it became a free download) will be reached out to for a free copy if interested.
  • Physical copies will only exist if the stars align.

Wow, okay that was a lot to cover all at once. Hopefully, I'll be better at making these updates in smaller and more frequent chunks. Please be patient with me as the school year is starting back up soon and I'll go back to a more loaded daily schedule.

Love you guys, and you'll be hearing more from me soon!