Elm and Coda are still alive, we promise. And if you’re reading this, well, so are you!

Behind The Scenes

This Past Year

A lot has happened since our last update in February 2020, when the COVID-19 global health crisis picked up momentum. As with the rest of the world, we’ve had to restructure our lives to flatten the curve. And though that didn’t directly affect our game development as we are a remote team, the changes in our daily lives do impact us, and that’s ok.

This pandemic has and continues to affect all of us in different ways, and we just wanted to give our readers a gentle reminder that self care is key. There is no right way to deal with this, even in lieu of vaccination rollouts and tiered social mandates being issued or lifted.

So please stay safe.

Now, personal events have definitely impacted development and presence. On Coda’s end especially, after wrapping up her last college semester and earning her Visual Arts degree, her ill father unfortunately passed away some months after. Time was needed to healthily grieve and adjust.

But even with all of that hanging overhead, we still managed to chip away at this amazing project. Now we have a major milestone to share:

Main Game Progress

Writing

Common Route:

• Draft Script: 100% ✓
  Word Count: 128,164
  Scenes: 99/99
• First Draft Revision: 100% ✓
• Second Draft Script: 98%
  Word Count: 92,997
  Scenes: 82*/84

*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review.

We completed our review of all 99 scenes! How did we go about that?

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It’s a brand new year and a brand new milestone! We’ve really missed you. Have you missed us? It’s so great to be back!

Last devlog we said we were taking a break for the holidays. And we did, but between new jobs, family, college, and festivities, you couldn’t fully keep us away from the dream! All of December and January, we wrote. And now? 

The common route first draft is finished!

For such a wide and important aspect of our project, this is no small feat. We’ve been at the script for six months counting, and it felt so good to get another step closer every single day. 

Check the facts for yourself:

Main Game Progress

Writing

Common Route: 

• Rough Outline: 100% ✓
• Revised Outline: 100% ✓
• Draft Script: 100% ✓ 
• Words: 128,164 
• Scenes: 99* / 99 

*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.

Did you see that number? Yes, it’s not a mistake. The common route is over 128,000 words! We love every part of it and we’re very proud, but the journey isn’t over yet. 

You might be thinking: “All that and you’ve only done the common route?!”

Yeah—it’s a long journey, but one that we’re happy to share with you! 

Since this is a major milestone, we wanted to share a few words of our experience until now:

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November was very productive! This month was NaNoWriMo, or “National Novel Writing Month”. This is typically a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel during November that a lot of writers and authors choose to do (with varying levels of success). All that creative energy definitely spurred us on this month with our own challenge!

Check out our progress report:

Main Game Progress

Writing

Common Route:

• Rough Outline: 100% ✓
• Revised Outline: 100% ✓
• Draft Script: 50%
• Word Count: 79,506
• Scenes: 50* /100

*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.

We’ve finished 20 scenes this month, which means we’ve completed 50 scenes for our first draft! We’re halfway done! That’s a total of nearly 80,000 words so far, and these numbers are only going to get bigger!

We haven’t been without a small hiccups, but it looks like we’re slowly writing more and more each month. We’re eager to keep up that momentum.

Take a gander at some of our favourite unrevised snippets from this month: 

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So that was October! We’re posting a little early this month in an effort to have more consistency between our updates. From now on, we’ll be focusing on getting a devlog out on the last weekend of every month - regardless of what day it falls on. 

So let’s see how we’ve been getting on, shall we?

Main Game Progress

Writing

Common Route: 

• Rough Outline: 100% ✓
• Revised Outline: 100% ✓
• Draft Script: 50,089
• Scenes: 28 /100 

As you know, our main project Primrose Path, is something we work on during the free time we can find between work and school hours. Every month to reach our goals, we usually put in 60 hours of writing between the two of us. Despite this, Coda has managed to balance taking part in the Spooktober VN Game Jam and the two of us have reached our current total of 50,089 words and 28 scenes ready for internal review. We’re pretty happy with that, but hope to go even further next month.

Last month we had broken up our common route into 98 possible scenes, but after a recount to double-check, turns out that two were missing. Both are rather short and have simply been separated for clarity, so it’s no wonder it slipped us. What luck that we have exactly 100 scenes now! 

Primrose is something we’re quite proud of so far, and seeing ourselves get closer to completion is always exciting. We’ll be hitting that 100 mark in no time.

*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.

As always, let’s take a sneak peak of some of our favourite moments from this month’s script: 

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It’s been a little crazy, but it’s finally that time where we share the exciting things we’ve been up to. We hope you’re ready!

Main Game Progress

Common Route: 

• Rough Outline: 100% ✔
• Revised Outline: 100% ✔
• Draft Script: 40k words
• Scenes : 17* / 98
  
  

Since finalising the common route outline just a few months ago, we’ve continued to press on with the common route script, landing at a very comfortable 40,000 words. That’s 19,000 more than last time! We’re quite proud of this progress, given the fact that between work and part-time education, Primrose Path is being developed in our free time! Elm even had to revise scenes on her phone as she was away for half of the month!

While 40,000 may feel like a lot, we’re not aiming for the common route to be any particular length. It may be worth noting that there are 98 possible scenes in the common route alone, but you’ll probably only see a third of that in your first playthrough. Primrose Path is designed to evolve with your choices and this means the scenes you encounter will change.

On average, our scenes are 1,500 words of adventure and questionable life choices. We’ve been tackling interview scenes, interactive home scenes, and the infamous party scenes this month—all while fleshing out our lovable side characters.

If you took part in the pre-alpha, you may be surprised to find out how different the additional scenes and new characters are. But we truly believe we’re taking this project in the right direction!

*Scenes are counted when they are ready for internal review, qualifying them as complete for the first draft.

Here’s our favorite unrevised draft snips from this past month:

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We’re flipping the script… in more ways than one! We’re proud to show our month’s raw stats—first this time:

Main Game Progress

Common Route:

• Rough Outline: 100%  ✔
• Revised Outline: 100%  ✔
• Draft Script: 21k words

This month we wrote the common route draft script and ended up hitting a cozy word count of 21,000 or so. We’ve taken a fourth week off to review, address side projects, and manage miscellaneous company tasks among other things. The next few months will follow this routine and progress will be listed as a word count. We expect to hit the same word count goals at minimum.

So far we’ve written scenes from The Party, wanting to get into the head space of our men and how they’d interact with the different playable tones of our main character, Lynn Austen.

We’ve also started implementing some of the interactive elements in Lynn’s apartment. Want to watch TV? Channel surf and pick up on world lore—and maybe some crucial clues for characters. It pays to know what’s going on in Primrose Path!

Here’s a couple of our favorite unrevised draft snips from this month:

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Hey, it’s us again—two indie devs with fresh dirt on our visual novel progress. Ready? 

Behind the Scenes

Playtesting Feedback

Last month we closed the pre-alpha Ink build of Primrose Path’s common route outline. It met its purpose of proving the basic concepts of our game were viable and that it interested players in our target demographic. In fact, playtesters gave us overwhelmingly positive feedback in our post-test form about the characters and story. Here are a few quotes from their responses:

“The number of elements of the MC’s [main character’s] life added in to the story in increments helped me not only relate to the MC but also stay interested.”

“There’s a good variety of calmer moments and more outlandish/exciting/otherwise more high tension moment [sic], no issues for me.”

“[T]he clients are a rainbow of people with a few that [sic] very much stand out [to me]”

“By the end, I was definitely considering who I was going to chose as my client and was sad the pre-alpha ended even though I knew it was going to.”

“I 100% would dance [in a mini-game similar to] DDR [Dance Dance Revolution]”

As you can see, the beginnings of Primrose Path went over well and players definitely had a lot of interesting things to say about our mischievous clients! We can’t spoil them here, but you may be able to see for yourself when alpha testing comes to our server in the future! 

Now, for all the good we received, it’s not to say the pre-alpha went without its criticisms:

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Are you ready for an update on what we’ve been doing since last? This is an eventful one for us, so strap in!

Behind the Scenes

Real Life

Elm just got a new job working as a Junior VR/Real-time artist! While that may slow down some things on the Quiet Days team, the new position trains Elm’s skills in 3D architectural visualisation, which can only benefit our workflow for background art! Congrats, Elm!

Playtesting

We’re testing a pre-alpha version of Primrose Path’s common route outline! You can imagine it’s taken up most of our time! This test’s purpose for us is two-fold:

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Looks like it’s time for an update! Let’s take a gander at what we’ve been up to!

Behind The Scenes

Real life

Coda held down the fort at home while Elm was out and about on vacation! Elm went hiking in Switzerland and brought her camera along! Not only was it a beautiful country with breathtaking views of nature in the sublime, it was a great well of resources, and she took many reference photos—like these beauties:

Those images and more, we hope, will better influence our environmental game designs! You’d be surprised by how this inspiration can fold neatly into this:

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Nanoprogress

Well, all of March flew by, and while we’re watching participants of this year’s NaNoRenO celebrate their demos and bite-sized projects, we’re happy to share with you some of the fruits of our labor! We focused on the first third of the game’s Common Route, which is the very beginning of Primrose Path’s story. Here’s some of our mock-up assets we worked on from all of last month:

Character Sprites

We have initial sprite concepts done of the first three characters you’ll meet in-game! From left to right, say hello to:

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