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some clear patterns are starting to emerge in how i write VNs; all the best stuff happens in the edit. i write something that i feel like has some good bones but is frustrating and lackluster in ways i can't quite figure out, and then i get to the point where i'm styling all the text and seeing how it flows onscreen and suddenly the ideas firehose comes on and i get blasted into the stratosphere. this is how it happened with Potion Stand Story, and Iron Company Chapter 1, and i think it's probably a pretty typical pattern. but as someone who is now 33 and didn't get medicated for ADHD until 26, finishing stuff is still a little new to me. there's always a bit of panic before the edit where i'm like WHAT IF IT'S BAD WHAT IF IT ISN'T AS GOOD AS THE LAST THING AAAAAAAA WHAT IF THE GOOD THING WAS A FLUKE
i am MOST OF THE WAY through editing chapter 2. i've reached the final conflict. but it's a real frog-in-well situation. "at this rate i'll be done in a few days," i say, and then more ideas pop up and i write more. i kept reaching the halfway point and then writing something new so the halfway point was just where i was at for several days LMAO
editing is where the text styling happens, where i put in all the little pauses and decide which letters should wiggle and which ones should stay still and which ones should be big or red or italic.
i need you to do something for me: when you play a video game that has more than just bold and italicized text, when it has little pauses and wiggles and things i need you to psychically beam appreciation at whoever did that, because that is SO MUCH WORK AND TESTING OH MY GOD I HAD NO IDEA UNTIL I WAS DOING IT MYSELF. even though i have some pretty standardized practices at this point (0.4s pause after long sentence, 0.3s pause after short sentence, 0.2 pause after a comma, 0.1 pause when someone st-{w=0.1}stutters, various shake intensities for different moods, specific size increases and decreases depending on the volume i want to imply they're speaking at) every single line has to be tested and scrutinized for flow. and it takes. a long time. it's a lot of copy-paste. i've set up some code snippets in VSCode now (finally made the switch from Atom, which got abandoned last year RIP in peas) but i haven't actually finished doing that (tedious; somehow more tedious to me than what i'm doing-- i never claimed that i make any sense as a person). so a lot of times i'm just copy and pasting in all this shit:
shoutout to VSCode for pansexual syntax highlighting. i have an Obsidian document set up with click-to-copy code snippets which has been saving me some time but it's still... it's a lot. you know. 5000+ lines of code and most of them need text styling.
currently the chapter is 5886 lines of code. by comparison, chapter 1 is 5511... and i'm definitely Not Done so that gap is going to keep widening. i don't think it'll be significantly longer playtime-- some of the branches in this one represent pretty big chunks and it's hard to actually tell. we'll see! it'll be pure text for the time being (text comes first, everything else is second to text and i don't think i'm gonna let myself do art for any other chapters until i get chapter 1 into a state i consider pretty finished) so i hope you're ready for some questionable descriptions of images i haven't drawn again.
i did put in one sound though, because i couldn't stop myself. you'll see. or hear i guess
also: there's another possible bad end. i think i'll probably be sneaking at least one into each chapter. this one's a lot easier to blunder into, because i am evil, and i want to make you anxious when you make choices. my previous philosophy was "messy success > littering the game with game overs" but Slay The Princess has made me into sickos.jpg and i can have a little game overs as a treat.
when i start to feel burned out on copy-paste and testing i switch over to working on these discord emoji lol
i am MOST OF THE WAY through editing chapter 2. i've reached the final conflict. but it's a real frog-in-well situation. "at this rate i'll be done in a few days," i say, and then more ideas pop up and i write more. i kept reaching the halfway point and then writing something new so the halfway point was just where i was at for several days LMAO
editing is where the text styling happens, where i put in all the little pauses and decide which letters should wiggle and which ones should stay still and which ones should be big or red or italic.
i need you to do something for me: when you play a video game that has more than just bold and italicized text, when it has little pauses and wiggles and things i need you to psychically beam appreciation at whoever did that, because that is SO MUCH WORK AND TESTING OH MY GOD I HAD NO IDEA UNTIL I WAS DOING IT MYSELF. even though i have some pretty standardized practices at this point (0.4s pause after long sentence, 0.3s pause after short sentence, 0.2 pause after a comma, 0.1 pause when someone st-{w=0.1}stutters, various shake intensities for different moods, specific size increases and decreases depending on the volume i want to imply they're speaking at) every single line has to be tested and scrutinized for flow. and it takes. a long time. it's a lot of copy-paste. i've set up some code snippets in VSCode now (finally made the switch from Atom, which got abandoned last year RIP in peas) but i haven't actually finished doing that (tedious; somehow more tedious to me than what i'm doing-- i never claimed that i make any sense as a person). so a lot of times i'm just copy and pasting in all this shit:
shoutout to VSCode for pansexual syntax highlighting. i have an Obsidian document set up with click-to-copy code snippets which has been saving me some time but it's still... it's a lot. you know. 5000+ lines of code and most of them need text styling.
currently the chapter is 5886 lines of code. by comparison, chapter 1 is 5511... and i'm definitely Not Done so that gap is going to keep widening. i don't think it'll be significantly longer playtime-- some of the branches in this one represent pretty big chunks and it's hard to actually tell. we'll see! it'll be pure text for the time being (text comes first, everything else is second to text and i don't think i'm gonna let myself do art for any other chapters until i get chapter 1 into a state i consider pretty finished) so i hope you're ready for some questionable descriptions of images i haven't drawn again.
i did put in one sound though, because i couldn't stop myself. you'll see. or hear i guess
also: there's another possible bad end. i think i'll probably be sneaking at least one into each chapter. this one's a lot easier to blunder into, because i am evil, and i want to make you anxious when you make choices. my previous philosophy was "messy success > littering the game with game overs" but Slay The Princess has made me into sickos.jpg and i can have a little game overs as a treat.
when i start to feel burned out on copy-paste and testing i switch over to working on these discord emoji lol
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