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:
Lore Snippets
Primrose Path has deep lore that sprinkles itself across the narrative. Although we still have to go through beta before release, you can look forward to having some special previews long before the game is out. Our Twitter will now include occasional snippets of lore and fictional media which may be referenced in-game. They’ll all be tucked under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, so stay tuned!
Greyson
Everyone’s favourite virtual assistant, Greyson, has joined the World Wide Web! Greyson’s database now regularly Tweets voice assistance snippets as if he was your very own! Isn’t he a sweetheart? Currently, his schedule is once every Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday. You can interact with him here!
Discord
Our discord server is for all current and future Quiet Days’ games! Recently we have been mentioning and voting on early concepts long before releasing them to the public, as well as logging our project tasks to hold our productivity accountable. If being in the know is something that interests you, you can slip on in here.
Accessibility
A major thing we’ve been dealing with this past month is redirecting our design to be more inclusive, via accessibility. Great game design starts when these things are considered ahead of time, rather than as an afterthought.
Currently we are very much open to hearing about what we can do to make visual novels more accessible. We have some ideas and designs of our own for the future, which include mindful options over font choices, audio-related functions, and content warnings.
Share with us your accessibility concerns in video games! Opinions, preferences, and first-hand experiences will be of great help, as we want to make sure people with different abilities and sensibilities can have a chance to enjoy our game!
Main Game Progress
Coding
Coding is underway on the Primrose Path team! Our current focus is introducing the Ink scripting language into our current workflow, which we think will tie into our natural way of writing script while allowing for easier, lighter coding of varied branching narrative. If we succeed in the integrations we have planned, we think this will deepen the level of interactivity for the game overall. Which reminds us:
Outlining
Primrose Path is very much still in the scripting department. We have a very thorough process, where we create a heavily detailed draft outline that covers the overall entire game. (It’s currently a whopping 30,000 words, but this amount goes up and down as we fill in and delete what’s transferred to the clean outline.) We then take this, revise, and transfer it to a ‘clean’ outline, which breaks down each scene on a beat by beat basis. Only then do we move onto script.
On that note, we’re rather happy to say that the common route of our draft guideline document is fully complete! Work on that route’s clean outline is nearly finished at a pretty 5,500 words or so. That’s an easy read, as we’ve had to boil it down from tens of thousands of words, weeks of discussion, and countless passing ideas!
Common Route:
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
• Clean Outline: 66%
The Artist:
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
With The Artist’s route draft outline 100% completed, we’ve come a long way since the plotline’s inception. The Artist is a bisexual love interest named Matthias Barousse, a soft-spoken social butterfly best known for his interactive media exhibits—and a bit of a playboy reputation in the community. His route is a tightrope walk between perceptions of good intentions and questionable engagements as rumors about his sex life come to the fore. Is he a good Samaritan or a master manipulator? He’ll say it’s not his place to judge—is it yours?
And we can’t forget to put a face to the name:
Artwork
The beguiling and provocative multimedia artist, Matthias Barousse
It’s another rough sketch, but here’s an initial concept for The Artist. We’ll be playing around with his look in the future, but Matt for certain likes parkas and has long locks to glide your fingers through.
In other news, we ran a poll on Twitter to see which hairstyles people preferred for another love interest, Ezra Safir, the Executive Assistant. Based on both the poll and written responses in spaces where the poll was shared, the methodical organizer and jazz enthusiast will be sporting this:
That low bun and undercut looks good on him! You guys have pretty great taste!
Coda also took the time to whip up fan art (yes, our own fan art; hear us out) of your best friend, Priya, gearing up for your makeover like any other grown woman in her late twenties:
Was asking Priya, of all people, a mistake? You’ll have plenty of time to think on that as she blocks the only exit out of the bedroom.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!
Socials
- Micro-updates on Twitter!
♦ Factoids with Greyson!
- Live art development on Twitch!
- Art logging on Instagram!
- Ask us anything here!
- Continue the discussion on Discord!
- Master thread on Lemma Soft!