Side profiles were easier to figure out than they would have been at the beginning of the year. Knowing roughly how screens work in Ren’Py makes a big difference.
Word Count: 1800 words.
This needs to be my primary focus this week. I’m looking for subject matter experts to deal cautiously with the themes, which are frequently misinterpreted by the wider world, but whether I’m doing this on my own or getting help with the regional history, completing a rough draft would be good.
Sprites: 2/? serviceable.
Too many speaking characters are in my mental sketch of the story. I’m not sure yet what to do about that.
Backgrounds: 2/6 sketched out.
I’m reconsidering how I want these to look / be made. Digitally painted, watercolor and colored pencils , or pencil sketch on yellow paper? Typing this out, I realize I don’t have the skills for the last option in the list, the middle might be too difficult for the reader to see through the text background with my limited skills in the media, and the first is the easiest with the digital photos I already have on hand to paint from.
Audio: 3/? songs collected, none cleaned up or re-recorded. Sound effects to be determined by how the story goes.
As a sidenote (or rant), it’s upsetting how much folk culture is slipping away, badly documented.
One example is how recordings and articles about them are disappearing from the US Library of Congress, a federal archive of cultural history. Every time I’m hit with a 404 error page and what looks like phishing attempt from the current regime, I want to roar. They don’t need my email to report missing pages that describes the mutual influences of Black / White folk music around the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries or a description of an overtly queer pre-Hays code film. Finding broken links has been an automated process for decades. And, JFC, I poke at archives enough to clearly see the pattern of what goes missing.
Another example is how ignorant the explanations online come across. Ignoring the obvious AI junk: Redditors say “The Red Rocking Chair” is about a no-good wife being sent away by a man who chooses to raise a child alone. Maybe there’s a version like that. The oldest recordings that are easily accessible are for a nursing song about a working father grieving as he takes care of a newborn while waiting to afford a burial for the body of his dead wife.
“Sugar in the Corn” can be about a drunkard getting in trouble around a farmstead, but older versions are also certainly about male homosexuality. The song is sung in different ways, from erotically queer to comically straight when government censorship hit. The way the much older song was recorded in the 1930s, the only way the singer didn’t know it was about men eagerly having sex with men would have been too young or oblivious of the meaning of the lines that he faithfully sung.
Anyhoo….
GUI: Where most of attention has been. I’m trying to resist the temptation to animate everything. But you know, it would be fun….