Welcome to the Week 3 devlog for HIS LAST MACHINATION! Things have, once more, been progressing apace.

March 15th

• In a very curious twist, the act of concluding casting has had the effect of allowing me to "hear" the characters in my head as they're being written. This is not a 1:1 match so much as just a vague sense of voiceprint, but even that's incredibly neat; previously, each character had their own stylistic flourishes, but I genuinely had no bearing of what anyone sounded like.
• Scene 2.1 was cleaned up, and drafting began on 2.2.

March 16th

• Drafting of 2.2 continued, paired with a realization I can best sum up as "Oh. Dang; I have to make Abram a little meaner" regarding the conversation at the top of the scene.
• The process of continuing 2.2 and leaving certain sections incomplete/marked for drafting at a slightly later date resulted in an amusing duality of "Completely reasonable contextual notes, to be added to the dialogue spreadsheet" mixed with "Extremely silly note-to-self, also featuring a facetious (TM)" (pictured below):

• I elected to write Ending 2 for the game somewhat prematurely/out-of-order (in order to set up the endpoint of certain narrative beats and ensure their "linking point" earlier in the game would not be missed), which ended up marking the first instance of crying whilst working on this project.
  • Was it an inevitability? Yes. Was I still surprised that it happened so soon? Yes.
• As a result of completing the draft of Ending 2, I realized that I needed coverage on one additional CG image for use earlier in the game; Ves was kind enough to confirm that this work would also be logistically possible for them!

March 17th

• Scene 2.1 and Ending 2 were implemented programmatically, albeit without complete asset integration. I made the executive decision not to test Ending 2 at this point by virtue of "I already cried about this yesterday; I have other things to do today!"
• More definitions for sound effects were added for 2.1, 2.2, and the second ending.
• I tinkered with the audio file schema slightly to ensure that Ren'Py would always search within the correct directory for voice files.
  • No such files exist yet, but I realized I hadn't done that designation previously; Ren'Py would have trouble searching for a folder that it didn't even know existed!
• Drafting for scene 2.3 began.

March 18th

• Slightly more material was added to scene 1.5, and more progress was made on 2.3.
• Ending 2 was implemented into the dialogue spreadsheet, which proved slightly unwieldy only because it made character line-totals on the "Session Progress Tracking" tab look slightly wonky.
• Materials for voice actors (specifically, a "crab"/Crab Fit scheduler set for March 25-April 15 and two documentation messages) were prepped for distribution on the 19th.

(My memes continue, this time feat. a cameo from Kylie.)

(A secret benefit of making jam games in a team is sharing in narrative emotional damage together.)

March 19th

• The aforementioned voice actor materials were sent out to the cast via a "@Voice Actors" role-ping in our project management hub. One actor was able to fill out their availability later in the day; the other two are still cross-checking their schedules.
  • All in all, I operate with a philosophy of giving everyone on the team as much advance notice as I can possibly swing when trying to coordinate meetings, sessions, or deliverable deadlines. Realistically, the very limited size of this cast and comparative simplicity of timezone-wrangling (there are only 5 timezones within this team, as opposed to 7-8!) means that scheduling sessions shouldn't take me more than 10-15 minutes at an absolute maximum.
• Drafting for scene 1.5 and scene 2.2 were completely finished (including their flashback sequences, which ended up being the final components written for both).
• All outstanding Day 1 dialogue was implemented in the dialogue spreadsheet, resulting in a total line-count (for just D1 materials) of 68 lines across all characters. 2.2 was also implemented into the spreadsheet; adding 2.1 and 2.2 to the 68-line total (but not including Ending 2's lines) resulted in an updated line count of 112.

March 20th

• Scene 2.3 was completed and implemented into the dialogue spreadsheet, adding another 15 lines to the total count.
• Programmatic implementation took place for scene 2.2, at which point I realized that I still need to circle back to implement scene 1.5 within Ren'Py. Oops!
• Naming conventions for flashback-specific voice files (that require specific audio processing, i.e. not over-CG narration) were established and implemented within the code.
• "# TODO" tags were added to points in which SFX playback is slated to occur, but no playback code has been written yet.
• On a somewhat less serious note: Abram finally received a proper surname, though it won't be referenced frequently in-game. Pietro's had one since last week! I was starting to feel sorry for Abram!

March 21st

• Drafts and concept work for multiple CGs were received; all of them are starting to look spectacular!
• Programmatic implementation for scene 1.5 took place, with flashback audio using the same naming convention established yesterday.
• An initial draft of Ending 1 was completed!
• The current word-count for the script, excluding notes/section headers, appears to be just over 7.5k words.