REC/REW ReWRITE update #4

Year 3, day

Tonight's update is... a bit of a letdown.

As I mentioned in my previous log, I overcame one hurdle on the way to this update - the other one however proved tougher than expected (read: I'm still searching for a VST that quite fits my idea for a certain thing I'm working on), so I chose to omit that part for now.

Still, it's quite a relevant update: around 10k words and a brand new concept that's bound to accompany the reader through the whole game until the final arc. Right now... yeah, just think it's my own weird quirk. Don't fret over the reason why I'd build a second GUI and everything =P

As for the thing that's still missing: I'm not abandoning it, I just want to make it perfect - after all, it'll basically spoil the whole game. Only in hindsight, though.

Additional things I plan to add (other than a new game-day and the closure to the first half of our main character's investigation):

• Customized, character-based text speed: each character will "talk" at a different speed  - text of more hesitant, introspective characters will be slower than that of more exuberant ones. First step of a project to make text speed dynamic and appropriate for each character's specific mood, add slight variations (after all it's not like people constantly talk with the same speed, right?)
• "Strategic" in-text pauses instead of punctuation tricks: so far I've been using punctuation to enforce a "reading rhythm" - characters looking for the right word, hesitating, feeling awkward... well, other than possibly being weird to the eyes of native English readers, it's also the wrong way to deal with text pacing in Ren'Py. Starting from the next update I'll begin replacing weird commas and dots with properly timed in-text pauses (which means I'll make a lot of random tries until the vibes feel right - to me, at least). 
• Better use of the {fast} tag: similarly, I'll hide a lot of line breaks with the {fast} tag. Don't know why I've been overlooking this so far, honestly... 

All these points are works in progress: eventually the whole script will see this stuff implemented (both the web version and the downloadable one.

Well, that's all for tonight. Should the next update stretch past the end of the year, take this post as my best wishes for a merry Christmas & happy New Year.

And of course, expect the unexpected.