Dev Log #1 - What's Going On?

Hey everyone,

So now that I know how to use these devlogs, I hope I can keep everyone updated if you're following (or just curious)!

To start off, thank you so much for everyone who has tried the game, and happy fifty days since publishing! I've honestly been blown away by how many people have downloaded it and told me how much they're excited for the full release.

Speaking of the full release, there's some good news and bad news.

Bad news first: The full release is still quite a ways away. Certainly not for another month or two, it's hard for me to say. Writing has been slowed way down for a couple of reasons. The main one is realizing i really need to pace myself better on this. While the full thing is currently hovering around forty-thousand words (that's not including the thirty or so thousand for the demo), there's going to be a LOT more. That's great! I set out to write a stupidly long visual novel both as a major exercise in writing (and one I'm honestly very proud of), and an exercise in programming (mostly to get over my aversion to Python. Still don't care for it much, my brain works better with C based languages. But this is a really long tangent). The other reason is that there has been way too much Class of '09 in my life. In case you're not here from AO3, I've written FOUR other fics for 09 (KawasakiWitchGirl btw, shameless plug) , with a word count totaling to 75,391. That's very quickly about to DOUBLE. Needless to say, I could use a very long vacation from these white teenagers. Thankfully, after this project that's exactly what I'll be doing! Probably forever. Unless something really makes me come back.

The good news: Development, despite what I just said, is going very smoothly! In the next section I'll break things down, but forty thousand words written since the demo released is pretty good! That's a bit under one thousand words a day, but I did take a week or so long break in that time. For some extra bonus news, I'm still hoping to release the full thing around the end of May or early June. Knowing me, it'll end up being some random Tuesday in the middle of June with absolutely no fan-fair from me. I'm a bit weird like that. The reason for that timeframe is that most of my audience would be hitting summer break. I'm aware most of the people interested in this would be teenagers and college kids, a demographic I am MUCH older than. So hopefully that release window will mesh will with those schedules. (In 2009 I was a baby scene kid just discovering Hollywood Undead and S3RL and Millionaries, if you really wanted to date me.)

So, what's going on with the game? I'm really glad you asked.

Right now I'm still in the writing phase. In my infinite wisdom, I decided to not write the entire damn thing before trying to put it into a visual novel. Lesson learned, but I'll forget it anyways.

After all of that writing I have left to do (don't worry though, the outline I have makes this go a lot faster), what's next? Editing. And editing. And more editing. The editing for the demo took three times as long as the writing, at least. In my defense, the amount of entire rewrites and restructures I had to do for that thing was impressive, and something I will never repeat ever if I can help it. So we can safely cross that off for the full release.

After that comes the programming. Now, most of the time spent scripting the demo was just learning how to use Ren'py, then wrestling with Python, then finally speedrunning through typing up the script. You can tell I did that because of all the typos. To be honest, I should have pushed a new build of the demo fixing them, but I figured I'll just snatch everything up in the final release. Hope that won't turn out to be the wrong choice.

Anyways, after 90% of the game is done comes the last 10%. Unfortunately, the last 10% takes up about 90% of the effort. That'll be: bug squashing, typo fixing, quality control, and praying the couple people who play it early have good things to say. If not, I don't know! So that's always the most stressful.

I don't think these devlogs have a character limit, which is very bad news for my productivity, but GREAT news for me, because I really really really love talking and adding useless details. So look forward to more, there is a TON I could talk about for this project, and hopefully some useful insights if you want to make a visual novel or 09 fan vn for yourself.

I hope to have new devlogs at completely random times, for maximum user enjoyment. There's also quite a few long-from discussion options, so expect random and incredibly long posts that really don't matter, but I have a lot of fun doing them anyways :)

-Saki