Steam and Shadow [WIP] [24k Words] [2023-06-11 Dev diary added!]

I thoroughly enjoyed your demo. Your descriptions of the world are so rich and tactile. I can practically smell the inside of that train car. I really like how you’ve taken the time to describe people’s clothes. It’s such a small detail that adds so much depth to the characters. I think you’re doing a great job and I can’t wait for the next update!

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Dev Diary - 2023/05/21


Well, it's been an interesting week for me. Posting the first chapter of my story went far better than expected, and I've already released 4 minor patches to fix a few issues around gender variables and my own terrible grasp of the rules of the English language.

I’m grateful to each and every person that’s read the demo version so far, and especially for those who took time out of their days to provide feedback. You’re all wonderful :slight_smile:

As for future work, I’ve finished planning the second chapter and written a few thousand words of it. This is going to introduce two more of the ROs (leaving only one main RO to be introduced), and let the MC take the lead on their first mission.
Hopefully this will allow me to present a much better picture of how the rest of the game will play out, with some investigation, some chatter, and a few different approaches to your objective.

It will also hopefully include the first of our war flashbacks - these are optional scenes when the MC is talking with other soldiers, allowing them to reminisce about the war, expand the backstory, and work out exactly how our MC feels about the war when they’re given a chance to actually express themselves.

My current optimistic goal is to deliver this second chapter at the end of June, though that will depend entirely on how much capacity I have left over from work.

As a closing note, I’ve added a quick poll to see which of our flashbacks should be included first. Keep in mind these won’t be massive, but they should be some nice scenes so you as the player can get a better idea of what the war was like.

  • Flashback A - The city of Rothenburg before the war
  • Flashback B - The fall of the airship Valiant
  • Flashback C - The retreat

0 voters

9 Likes

Dev Diary - 2023/05/28


Time for another dev diary. I plan to make these a weekly thing even if there's little to say, just to keep people in the loop with regards to development and assure you all that work is still on-going.

I’ve written a couple of thousand more words of chapter 2, slow going I know, but I’ve always been a slow writer and it’s remarkably busy at work these days - leaving very little opportunity to write a for a few minutes here and there.

Our total words currently sits at 30,301. This should start climbing a bit faster when I reach the meat of the chapter and our first investigation picks up.

Finally, I’ve closed the poll from the previous dev diary. There was a tie between Flashback B & Flashback C, which I settled with a coin flip in favour of Flashback B - The fall of the airship Valiant. This will be the first optional flashback to be written, though the others of course will be included later down the line.

10 Likes

Dev Diary - 2023/06/04


Another week down, another minor amount of progress.

This week has been spent on conversations. This is the first time the player gets to sit down and have the standard RPG style conversation with a few of the characters, without any external pressure, so it’s important to me that I get this section right.

Establishing voices for the newly appearing characters is proving to be more difficult than I imagined, so a good chunk of writing for Beck & Watkins (the newly introduced characters) was written and then immediately deleted when it wasn’t up to snuff.

I had originally planned for the MC to pick one character here to talk to, but I’ve scrapped that plan in favour of allowed them to talk to as many people as they like, with no limits on the number of conversation options they can choose. Not every character will answer your questions, but there’s not going to be any “And suddenly it’s time to leave” sort of situation.

15 Likes

@Blunderbutts saves are turned off

Thanks for letting me know - This should be fixed now.
You might have to Ctrl-F5 to reload it.

@Blunderbutts can you add more than three default saves?

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I’ll update it to 5 to match most other WIPs when I do my next update. :slight_smile:

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Dev Diary - 2023/06/11


Our slowest week yet - My real job is picking up which cuts into my writing time, and we've had the first real summer weekend here in the UK, so instead of writing I've been in pub gardens drinking cider.

On the bright side I’ve nearly completed the first of the hub conversations, and I’ve expanded out my notes for later in the chapter. Still hoping to get at least something out at the end of the month.

13 Likes

Dev Diary - 2023/06/25


Unfortunately work has taken off in a massive way these past few weeks.

Today is the first day since the last dev diary that I’ve had a chance to sit down and write at all, so we’re only at about a thousand more words than we were two weeks ago, which has put a real damper on my ambition to get the second chapter out at the end of this month.

I do at least have some time off coming, even if its only a couple of days, hopefully that will let me get a solid chunk of writing done, even if we are going to miss the original goal of the end of the month.

10 Likes

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