Devblog #68

Okay, these last week's was a very productive one for me. I would consider every week where I wrote more than 2000 words as a great success, but this one was productive in more than one department.

But first things first: writing. I continued writing the second Trial and the progress is slower than I would want it to be, but it is still steady. I also started planning Violet's seventh event. I doubt I will be able to finish it before the next update, but let's cross our fingers.

The most exciting thing for me personally, however, was that I also had a major breakthrough in another part of the game that was lacking for some time now. I know that many of you expressed the lack of acknowledgment of the MC's growth. I did add a bit of that into the small snippets you get at the end of your classes and activities, but I always felt that it wasn't enough. The other issue that was plaguing the game for a while was the lack of random events during classes. Very few classes had any events aside from the introduction at the beginning of the game. And those that did—only had one. So adding the acknowledgment of the player's growth as a student was an obvious thing to add there.

This was a solution that came to me a few weeks ago, but that was as far as it went. I added the 'you got good' events into my plan, but I could not figure out how to approach them. That was until we decided to watch Legally Blonde last week. Yes, that 2000s movie, which I barely remembered watching. But watching it turned out to be more than a good time with an old comedy movie. It also helped me find that missing part to my 'growth acknowledgment' conundrum. If I wanted to show that someone had grown, I also needed to show how they were bad at something. So that's exactly what I did. I added the events that would acknowledge the MC's skills lacking at the start of their journey (this would also, hopefully, help with the issue that many players did not understand that 30 is a very low stat), and the professors would then acknowledge your growth as your stats reach higher values. This simple addition made writing these events much easier, and I have already written 3 out of 14. Still a few to go, but they are going pretty well so far, so I am hopeful.

Also, I noticed a shocking resemblance between Professor Dulgren and Professor Stromwell from Legally Blonde. I cannot be the only one.

On the non-writing side, following advice from one of our supporters, I decided to try and incorporate GitHub into my work process. It turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I expected it to be, but my progress towards that goal has borne some fruit already. First, I updated my Visual Studio Code, and it turned out to come with a nice Copilot AI. I had to quickly disable its autofill feature, because it tried writing whole events for me, and it is very difficult to write when someone constantly screams dumb ideas into your ear. But it was pretty good at checking the code for small errors, and it found a few insignificant but still nasty bugs in my code.

Shady Two was still busy with finishing Gwen's introductory artwork, which still needs some time but has all of its major background issues solved, and is now on a straight line to the finish. And she also started working on the sports outfit and a new pose for Aisling, for one of the other events during Sports class. Here's a small preview for that.

Sports outfits are planned for all of the girls (maybe not Violet, since she doesn't really do sports), and they will come eventually. But not yet. For now, this is all I have for you.

I'll see you next week.

Shady Character One, out!