ENG - Extended devlog 15/06/24

Hey there!😄

Wow! The week went by soo fast! Alma and I took a few days to “rest” (not easy to do so with a full time job and our other responsibilities), but now we are full of energy to keep working on TYL!😎

We are really excited because the game got much more attention on itch.io than we expected (we actually expected no attention at all, to be honest haha 😅 Pessimists much?). Starting next Monday, we’ll start working on chapter 2, and as we promised on our short devlog, we wanted to tell you about our work process, if it can be called that xD We like to go with the flow a little bit too much.

Let’s do a list because lists are great for chaotic people like us:

    1. We usually start outlining the chapter’s content: how many days will the chapter have, and how many chats will each day include.

    2. Then, we let our creative side take control! One by one, we write the first draft of every chat. We LOVE this part of the process. It feels great to let the story slowly unfold, and we have so much fun with the character’s banter (and adding silly choices, of course).

    3. After the first draft is finished, then it’s time to revise it! Here we add, take out or completely change some parts of the story until we are happy with the final result. We like to take our time with this stage!

    4. Adding some flavor: here we decide which pictures will the characters send, add extra little bits of story just for funsies, write status changes… And we make sure the chats feel as real as possible.

    5. Time to edit! Correcting typos, incrongruences, things we forgot to add or change… Ugh. This is probably the most boring part of all! But even though we loathe it, we make sure the text is perfect before moving onto the next stage.

    6. Programming: or as we like to call it, “bringing the gang to life”! Not much to share about this as it can get somewhat boring (I find it relaxing for some reason, but I think I’m just weird). This stage is one of the longest, just second to the translation one!

    7. Playtesting, playtesting… and MORE playtesting: we have a love-hate relationship with playtesting. As we can’t afford play testers, we do it ourselves and oh god isn’t it time cosuming! It’s amazing to finally play the whole thing in one go, but doing it so many times (and not in a “having fun” way, but in a “working” way) can get exhausting. Even so, it’s a vital part of the process. We surely don’t want the game crashing on you guys!

    8. Translating: The final step of the way, and also the hardest one for us. As you know (and you probably noticed), English is not our native language. We can’t afford a translator either, so we decided to translate the game ourselves for now. So, we’re really really sorry if some things sound… weird. We are really doing our best!

And that’s it! It’s hard work, but we are doing what we love most, so motivation keeps us going! For chapter 2 we will probably work on each day separately, so that we can publish more frequent updates of the game here on Patreon! We can’t share much about it yet, but we already decided on chapter 2’s first day title: The Schrödinger Kiss.

That’s all for now! We’ll share more with you next Friday!

Love ya’ll!!!🥰

Vera  <3