Posted September 12, 2024 by codanon
This is more of a personal dev log so if you don't want to read boring nonsense, just skip to the end.
It's been, what, like a year since the last big update? At this rate Yandaredev will finish his game before Coda 1.0 sees the light of day. So what gives? Where have I been for the past year? Everywhere! I left my job that was giving me a heccin' depression and have been wandering the streets and hiking the Appalachian trail and adjacent areas for a lot of that time which has done wonders for my mental health. The pessimistic tone of Coda's writing stems from the stress I endured from that job and as I'm revising the script now I've noticed I'm more inclined to write more positive and upbeat scenes. Coda has gone through several revisions throughout its development and this should be the last one. I'm reviewing every line, reorganizing the structure of the story, fixing a lot of flaws, and using a new writing style that I'm pleased with for once. There's a new prologue with a new character, the start of the game is a lot longer, the characters are more compelling, and your choices will be more reactive and consequential. I'm not sure how far into the full story I'll get before releasing a new update but I do want to take it a fair bit past the stopping point in the current demo.
I'll be going back to university soon, so I'm trying to get as much work done on Coda before then. I should still have plenty of time to write however, just not as much time as I would like. Between surviving in the wild and enjoying my life for the first time, I haven't really even touched the script in a while until a few weeks ago. Thankfully a programmer has been helping me with a few things, one of which is a pretty big new feature that will make playing through the game more dynamic and somewhat unique to each save file. I learned a ton of tricks while working on that Night in the Woods based VN I released a demo of a few months ago that I'll be applying to Coda. I will also continue work on that VN as well, but Coda is my top priority.
Now for the dreadful part. In the past I've always tried to make the presentation more impressive in regards to the visuals with each update. I'd get tons of new art and be excited to show them off. Unfortunately, this does not really work when I can't pay my artists due to my lack of funds. So far I've spent a couple thousands dollars on Coda but I'm unable to continue paying out of pocket for the time being. I did manage to get new art for Rose but a few assets in the upcoming update will be placeholders I've drawn myself, and I sure ain't an artist. I've been doodling more lately but I'm still years away from the level of skill of the sprite artists. I may open a patreon or something soon to help fund more art for the game. I've also talked with the artists about maybe making some merchandise but I think we're a long way off from that. Something small like stickers or keychains. I would like to have a standee of Mishka on my desk though...
So to sum up, a *major* revision is coming... I want to say 2 months from now but to me deadlines are more like suggestions so we'll see how that goes. I took a hiatus from working on Coda but now I'm back and it will be better than ever.