May 4th, 2024 Update - An Eventful Week!
Hey guys, just wanted to keep you up to date with what I’ve gotten done this week. First off, the entire scene of Alvarez’s therapy session, and the final flashback of the night that Kate died, is finished. I got the entire scene done this week, which honestly, I’m very happy with. On top of that, there have been complaints of word bulk in my story, and there was one scene in particular I agreed with that. I was still pretty new to coding when I wrote the first half of this story, and I’d say I only really started to get the hang of it when I implemented text box investigations.
Lance’s after funeral scene has been stripped down from a total of around 260k words, to a total of about 22k words. Now, that is a TOTAL, and that does not affect how many words you see in the scene. I had lots of stuff copy and pasted in that scene in particular, but the average wordcount per playthrough is still the same. In fact, I was even able to add in a brand new small flirt choice at the end since I had the extra room. So technically, there’s more content than there was before.
I’ve also fixed a couple of grammatical and spelling errors in the warehouse scene, and I’ve begun sinking my teeth into the Lance extra scene. I’ve slightly modified that extra scene list from how it was previously, and I’m pretty sure this is the final version of it. Just as a reminder, those extra scenes are going to be released here to view for the Agent Tier before they’re released with an update.
I’m going to post a picture of the updated scenes list, as well as a picture of a small snippet from the flashback for the $3 Civilian Tier and above Patreon Subscribers. Thank you for sticking with me!
Stay Brilliant,
-Vi
Thank you! My ideas with the extra scenes were to essentially give people a bit of a thing to work towards in the game. A reason to go back, try new routes, etc. For instance, there are scenes heavily involving Alvarez you can unlock by doing Ryder’s route, and there are scenes heavily involving Hawks that you can get by doing Lance’s route, etc. They’re kind of like collectibles that expand the characters and the world with scenes that weren’t pivotal to the main story.
I do love the TBI (Text Box Investigation) mechanic, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a pain to implement at first. Even now, I know when there’s a TBI, there’s a good chance I’ve missed a game breaking bug within it, because I can’t randomtest that part of the game without it going in an endless loop, so I have to test it all manually.
But now that I’ve fully gotten the hang of that mechanic, it’s genuinely really fun to put in and pretty barebones once you know the code for it. To anyone wanting to implement it into their games, I promise that it seems a lot more complex on the surface than it actually is. I just know that it’s going to be a staple for this book and for future installments, and will be the thing mechanically that makes it unique from other mystery stories on here, which is what I wanted at the end of the day. Not that it’s a better system than other CoG games, but that it’s a different system than them.
I was playing L.A. Noire when I implemented this system, and it’s all because I kind of wanted to capture the feeling of something like that, where you piece things together along the way. So, thank you L.A. Noire!
Thank you very much! These will be fixed with the next update! The half sentence in the last image you posted is because sometimes CSIDE starts autosaving the chapter in the middle of you writing, and you can’t write anything while the chapter is saving, so sometimes a couple words are skipped because of it. Not complaining about that, btw. I love that it autosaves and it’s an easy enough fix once I know about it.
I’m very glad to hear it! I try not to make the TBI’s too flowery or anything, although I do throw in details about the room the PC is investigating that aren’t relevant to the case, because they might look relevant. Essentially, red herrings to keep people on their toes and make them think a bit more about the clues they’ve gathered, and decide what’s important to the case and what just looks like it’s important to the case.
