Devlog #3 📚 Implementation

Hope everyone is once again staying cool in this dreadful summer.

In case you just stumbled upon this, I am Adrienne, also known as insertdisc5! I am the creator of timeloop RPG In Stars and Time, and now am working on my next game, memory visual novel Truth Scrapper. It’s gonna be a good one.

DAY 4 (out of 11-ish) IS FINALLY DONE AND IMPLEMENTED. This is the moment in the game where the story and character development picks up in a new way. And the Romance Sections are starting to get somewhere… It was so fun to get all this in the game!

So… What does it mean to say that a day is “done and implemented”? Take my hand. I will explain.

WRITING:

First is writing the damn day. The first step of this first step is writing down bullet points of what happens during that day! What will happen? How does this further the mystery? How do the characters develop, and how does their relationship develop? Depending on what the player makes Sosotte remembers, will Sosotte be more attracted to Amour or Betz? In what way? Etc etc.

Once I have those bullet points written down, it’s time to actually write the scenes! Thankfully, I am getting to the Fun Parts of the game, so some of those Day 4+ scenes have been written down for a while. As I write, too, I usually realize I didn’t foreshadow some parts well enough, so I tend to rewrite some old scenes from previous days too. Day 1 has changed a lot since I first wrote it…

(Part of my script. As you can tell, this has no caps because it's easier for me to write without thinking about it too much at this stage. I will regret it later)

This part takes me maybe… 3 weeks, a month? Longest part for sure.

ART:

Now that I have all those scenes written out, I need to do ART!!! Thankfully, the artstyle for this game is pretty simple for me to do, and having the backgrounds be collages of stock pictures make the background work a breeze. Day 4 in particular was VERY HEAVY with art, so that one took some time. (20+ backgrounds, 2 new characters and their myriad of expressions, 20+ illustrations and all their variations…!!!)

Steam post image (This sweet thang is from Day 4)

This part takes me around 2 weeks!

IMPLEMENTATION:

Now that all the text is written, and the art has been done… WE GOTTA ADD ALL THAT INTO THE GAME!!!

I divide this work into a few parts:

-Add all the text and dialogue in the game, which means copy/paste, but also adding all those pesky quotes so the software can recognize this as text. I also add the character tags (here, “a” and “s”) to let Ren’py know who’s talking, as well as {w} to tell Ren’py “hey I want the player to have to press a button before the rest of the sentence appears”.

-Add all the damn code. Which means: adding when a point and click section appears and how it works, adding any “if AmourPoints>BetzPoints then do this”, etc.

-Add all the expression changes.

So for the above, the white text can be translated as “Character Amour, side pose, eyes “hm”, mouth “eh”. Here’s Amour’s “callsaul” pose, named after a certain guy.

During the implementation stage, adding expressions is the part that takes the longest amount of time by far.

-Add all the glossary/case entries. Truth Scrapper has many words and Sosotte needs to remember them all, and so the game has a glossary full of the many words, which needs to update as you find the new words.

-And finally, add all the music and sound effects. PHEW

This took a week this time because I exhausted myself doing it, but this usually takes me more like 2.

EDITING:

And then I usually spend a week or two playing through the ENTIRE game to make sure it’s good. I usually make a lot of edits, and so I have to play it through a second time, and a third time…

AND THEN WE’RE DONE. PHEW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is how I go about things.

Anyway I finished Day 4 so I’m taking a break for a couple weeks. Heehee <3 Thanks for reading

DON'T FORGET TO WISHLIST THE GAME ALSO IT REALLY HELPS BECAUSE STEAM’S ALGORITHM IS MORE LIKELY TO SHOW OFF GAMES WITH A HIGH AMOUNT OF WISHLISTS THATS THE REASON WHY GAME DEVS ALWAYS ASK TO WISHLIST!!! OKAY BYE!!!!

Links! 📚 Official Website 📚 Join the Discord 📚 Sign up for my mailing list 📚 Follow Truth Scrapper on Bluesky 📚 Follow ME on Bluesky