3 September 2024

This week has passed in a bit of a blur, full of attempting to coordinate a team with very little time on my hands due to other project commitments! However, there have been a few key events and moments that I've documented below that have really helped clarify this project's vision, structure and scope and get the team excited about pushing into some of the meatier bits of development once life settles down around us a bit!

• Meeting with Flaire (Monster + Dialogue Artist) & Liam (Sound Designer): Last Sunday, I held a 2 hour meeting with both of these lovely people, giving them the full rundown + pitch on the concept, their roles, and discussed their ideas regarding collaboration. They were both super excited and told me it was extremely helpful, and suggested some more regular, in-person meetings for those who can make them at some other coffee shop locations in the city. I plan to hold more team meetings on a bi-weekly basis, perhaps either via booking a larger table at The Rose Eastend or Page & Turner, so we can all converse, catch up, discuss any sticking points and motivate each other whilst we're still all working remotely.


• Discord Server Creation: Liam has previous experience moderating and running servers and suggested starting one during our meeting, which I eagerly jumped on as an opportunity (I figured it was only a matter of time!). Will act as a central place to compartmentalize resources, share and collaborate on ideas, and communicate with other team members, with the Trello board acting alongside it for those who want to use it to keep track of the progress on more role-specific tasks people are working on. He also suggested the brilliant idea (in my eyes) of opening the server up to the public later down the road to give people a bit more of a transparent look into what goes into developing a game! He has volunteered to run the server which is a terrific help, and I can't wait to see how it evolves alongside the project!


• Scope & Timeline Change: Another discussion at our Sunday meeting was changing the timeline to be working towards a demo release, on the 25.12.24, instead of a release candidate. Wow - a game being delayed? Unheard of!?!!!! Jokes aside, we believe that this demo release (consisting likely of the opening scenes of the game, which start pretty intense and horrific, alongside some condensed gameplay for the first few "meals" before some sort of abrupt end) would couple perfectly with a kickstarter launch to help generate a fanbase that is invested (financially & interest-wise) in the game. This would also help with marketing, and to pay the team & accommodate extra dev work to get the final game over the line!



Old Timeline:



August Tasks Progress:

• Overall Story Structure: ✅ Working on cutting it down and, once I've got on top of managing the team a bit more, starting to write each section.
• Character Art Prototypes: ✅ Continued to work with skye on these, see below updates.
• BG Art Prototypes: ✅ Have a document full of photos I've taken around hospital, and applied the sketchify tool to - see previous entry. Have booked in a time in December (next available) to set dress and take photos within a hospital room to act as the MC's main living space. It being in a few months is actually advantageous as the space around her can be informed by how we write her character (personality, hobbies, etc. - how she makes it her own).
• Making a Test Game: ❌ Did not get time. Pushed to next month.

New Timeline

• Meeting planned with Skye (Character Artist): See below for some more concept art of the main character. Am meeting with Skye to go over key influences to the style that I'd like her to try and draw from, just to make the design pop a little bit more in it's visual uniqueness, as well as mesh better with the sketch-ified background art. I am collating a pinterest moodboard of similar works to show her and discuss what positions & poses she should mainly focus on, and how to incrementally make various facial components (e.g. kinds of eyes, nose movements, mouth positions etc.) & layer them onto a few base faces to make more varied expressions possible in the actual VN.

That's all from me this week, and I'll check in soon! :3