Working Through The Scenes

"AHHHHHH! I WANNA PLAY ELDEN RING!"

"Do your work. Gaben will have it on 25% off by summer anyway!"

Overview

As I write this log, I'm listening to various Yu-Gi-Oh theme songs! This week was a good week for writing as well, I am well into episode 2 of /Conspiracy/ Girls, doing up the stage movements for everyone.

We Keep Moving Forward

This week, I focused on getting the stage movements for /Conspiracy/ Girls up. A really important milestone was reached since I finally coded the very first Delaroux Theater, and I really like the result!

Within the story, Delaroux Theater is a special place where Madison explains various conspiracy-related terms to her accomplice, Ayano, in wacky and ridiculous ways. If there was a scene that encapsules what /Conspiracy/ Girls is about, it would be the Delaroux Theaters, it makes you laugh, and it makes you think at the same time!

Step by step, the story is taking shape; one thing I have been noting down during this first run-through of stage movements is places where I can insert CG, and thinking about special effects (sound and movement) that I can add during the refinement phase. I note all these down in a mega-document I call my "special effects shed"

The Current Phase We Are On

Exploratory (Vision) -> Scriptwriting (Set Design) -> Create Placeholders -> Stage Movements (Play Design) -> Refinement (Development)

If I follow Magic's way of doing sets, I am currently in the Play Design stage, at around the midpoint of EP2. There is a very long journey ahead of me yet... But for the first time I feel like I can definitely make the deadline of a summer/ autumn release!

Of course, this means I have to start commissioning art soon. I also find that I need an extra episode between EP2 and EP1, to flesh out the characters and the motivations of the bad guys a little more. When I reach EP4 in play design, I'll come back and work on that abit. Right now the ideas are rattling in my mind, but not very clearly.

I am currently locked out of a lot of choice, but I think that the original artists for Conspiracy Girls are quite good, so if nothing is wrong, I'll like to have them come back. Mostly because language, I like speaking in English, it's really hard to communicate with Japanese mangaka because my Japanese is terribad.

That's the point of having placeholders after all. I am a very visual person, so I need placeholders to make things work. And also, I would like the book to work on a placeholder level, so that when the art is done, I can just replace all the placeholders and go straight to publishing on Steam.

Setting Up A Podcast?

I finally got off my lazy bum and started a podcast...! It's not much, but I enjoyed listening to Mark Rosewater's drive to work, so I thought the whole process of making /Conspiracy/ Girls would be interesting to other people as well. I'll start advertising the podcast when I have three episodes up here.

Mostly because I don't know if I have the energy to put up a podcast as well as write my book, but I do want to try! I get a little drained of energy and talking to a mike seems like a good way to do something different from writing and scripting.

Last Scene

Things are still looking up, especially after I published that podcast. Feels like next week will be a good one too! At this pace, I am doing about half and episode a week? That seems a little slow, but we are still on schedule, because it , means I am done with all the coding in two months, with a lot of time for refinement. I'll start ordering art when I reach the end of EP4.

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