Chapter 1 Final Draft Complete

 NO MORE EDITING FOR REAL THIS TIME

NO MORE 

It's just lines and squiggles bro it's not that hard lol

 Find a really great piece of art online, save its image to your computer. Then open the image, look at it, and wonder, "How the hell is it even possible to paint colors and textures like this?"

Now zoom in. Those ripples on the water? Those soft strands of hair? Those shifting patches reds and blues on human skin? Those blades of grass? The entirety of the piece's complex and beautiful interpretations of light and shadow? It's all LINES and SQUIGGLES.

Up close, everything looks like BABY MODE MS PAINT BULLSHIT. Every detail that pulled you into the piece and took your breath away is actually RANDOM-LOOKING ASSORTMENTS OF COLOR AS APPLIED BY A FINGER PAINTING CHIMP. How could anyone think to arrange it all like this? How the hell does it all add up to a coherent, aesthetically-pleasing painting?

Is my perception of light fucked? Too complicated? Too unclear? What is optics? Do I even understand physics or have I been PLAYING MYSELF THIS WHOLE DAMN TIME, STRUGGLING TO IMPROVE MY OWN ART WHILE NOT ADOPTING AN ACTUAL ARTISTIC MINDSET? 

Literally the first thing they tell you in middle school art class is that we often aren't truly SEEING the things around us, just LOOKING at them. The amount of times you've looked at something is positively correlated with the amount of details that get filtered during sensory processing—this is the main reason why people struggle drawing human bodies despite inhabiting such a body and being surrounded by other human bodies for most of their lives. When you engage with artistic theory and/or take an art class, you learn how to perceive and draw humans figures through abstraction, by capturing the gist of the form and dynamics of a body with representational lines, curves, shapes, and polyhedrons. Everything in art is founded on abstraction, and it takes surprisingly little to convey whatever you're trying to depict if you're strategic with abstractions. It's similar to how scientific and mathematical models aim to reproduce complex physical phenomena: they take in as few parameters as they can get away with to capture the essential behavior. 

The fundamentals build up skill over time. You get better at seeing, perceiving, and analyzing the world around you, breaking everything up into simple patterns and somehow getting closer to depicting it accurately (both in terms of hardcore realism and aesthetic goals, aka getting better at making something look good and more accurate to your mental vision of it). At its core, improving at art involves unshackling yourself from the filters, assumptions, and heuristics, looking beyond the energy-conserving cognitive shortcuts. Look beyond yourself, and you might just get a little closer to seeing things as they actually are.

 Alright then, seems like a pretty straightforward technique. I'll try it out now...

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...Wow this looks like shit

Non-update

 I was originally going to wait until I finished something significant to write another blog post, but I figured I should put this out now since progress has been moving very very slowly again. The project is not dead, I am just worn out by school and have been spending a lot of my free time unwinding from all the cringe ass homework I've been doing (as well as working on my senior project, which is going terribly because I'm trying to write Mathematica code to model various systems to include in the project paper, and I fucking suck at Mathematica, I have to get the first draft done in two weeks and if I don't learn to code quick enough I'm going to have to post screenshots of models from other papers [with citations of course if it comes to this] or draw the models manually, both of which will make me look like a complete dipshit). In terms of progress, I am about 80% done with the draft for the last alternate route in Chapter 1 and about 10% done with editing for said route, but on the bright side I'm done with both the drafts and editing for all the other routes. I will probably make a more detailed post once I finish this route, though I might try to finish up some other stuff before posting it too idk yet.

Writing Style Aesthetics: Artifice vs. Verisimilitude

 For those who only want to see updates, here's a quick rundown of what I've been working on: editing for the Chapter 1 true route, first drafts for the final two alt routes, BGM/sound design edits, art drafts and design finalization. I'll try my best to make a Christmas Miracle happen and have something significant to show off or announce within the next few days. Feel free to ignore the rest of this post.

Something that's been tormenting me since I started writing Chapter 1 one is the quality of said writing---not in terms of my skill (or at least I hope not) but rather in how I'm limiting myself to a certain style. Chapter 1's protagonist is canonically not very good with the language arts and has a stilted, awkward way of communicating, so I'm not sure it would be "in character" to write anything particularly poetic or beautiful from her point of view. Of course, good prosaic styles exist (Hemingway and whatnot), but I'm not talking those forms of prose when I say this character is bad at communicating. If you were to read an essay she produced for a school project or something like that, you'd quickly clock it as a result of the nationwide budget cuts to education. If you've ever come across American teachers complaining about No Child Left Behind in response to their students' papers, then you should have a decent idea of what her work is like.

That's all well and good, and I think it's fine to cast shitty writers as protagonists, but what would this entail for her in-game narration? 

This is the opening chapter of the game. This is going to be everyone's first experience with the game, and it's inevitably going to color their expectations for the rest of it. What does it say about BFD and its writer if the writing blows major dick and is awful to read in the very first chapter?

I've been holding back when working on the Chapter 1 drafts in the name of "verisimilitude", or for maintaining a semblance of realism in the narration. Limiting my normal writing style to this extent has been quite eye-opening in terms of both my own skill and my conception of what "good writing" looks like, but at the same time, it's also been painful. Granted, I haven't written seriously in a long time, which dulls the pain a little. But still, it feels like I'm half-assing a very important part of the very first chapter of my very first game. I'm often left wondering if I should slacken this commitment to realism in favor of literary artifice; this includes things like more poetic descriptions and following standard English grammar rules, stuff that the Chapter 1 protagonist would almost never use if she were actually in charge of writing from her own perspective.

Of course, this isn't a unique phenomenon. The issue of accurately translating thoughts and conceptions into something tangible has plagued artists since the dawn of time. It's like nothing ever comes out as good as you imagine it, and you'll never be satisfied with your work no matter how much time you spend polishing it. In the words of the legendary Leonardohen Skynyrd DiCaprio, "Art is never finished, only abandoned."

These issues in BFD's writing come in a couple different forms. I don't feel like going into all of them, but I'll highlight an example that should make my point clearer.

In writing circles, there are occasional debates about how much character dialogues should take from conversations in real life. Real speech is inundated with meaningless filler, which some argue should be eschewed in literary speech; this refers to things like "uh", "um", "like", or basically anything used to pad out statements when one is trying to put their thoughts into words. If you make a character say something like "Uh I um went to the store and uh I bought some uh milk and uh...", they'll come off as nervous, confused, or zonked. Even if real people talk like that regardless of personality or mood, they'll be interpreted in a specific light by readers because these types of filler words have been encoded as temperament signifiers in the sphere of language arts. They also tend to make sentences really annoying to read. However, if used in the right contexts, filler words can make dialogue sound more natural while also being easy on the eyes. The "right contexts" in question come about through the actual behaviors and feelings of the characters, and in certain mediums, they can come through the technical requirements and/or properties of a given medium. For visual novels with voice acting, filler words are often included liberally since the script being read by the audience is the same script used by the voice actors. Their inclusion can make the game's narration easier to follow since minimizing the differences between the written and spoken words can make the reading experience smoother (this is also likely why moans, screams, and various onomatopoeias are spelled out in H-scene dialogues).

In BFD, you'll see characters spouting filler words a lot. I chose to model the dialogue after the standard in other visual novels, which involves liberal filler word usage as described above. BFD doesn't have voice acting, but most other visual novels without voice acting use this same style. Maybe this is just my personal preference, but I feel that this style works well in the visual novel format; the on-screen depiction of characters' expressions supplements the filler in a way that wouldn't work in a purely textual medium. Plus, it allows me to convey emotions and moods in a more subtle way, expanding the potential circumstances in which many sprite and CG assets are used.

Again, this is not the only issue I've been dealing with in Chapter 1, and it is not representative of the issues with Chapter 1's writing as a whole. If anything, I made this post to organize some of my thoughts on imitating nature and art and which one I should prioritize in certain situations.

Doing some editing of the true route draft

 This shit is so ass bro 😭

Excuse me

 

It's been almost three months since I last posted an update, what the fuck is going on⁉️

Dear readers, I've been wondering that myself. What the fuck IS going on? Why is my time management so ass??

So basically, I'm a fifth year college student (failed a required class only offered once a year because I'm stupid and gay), and I'm also a double major taking my two major-specific senior thesis classes. On top of that, since I'm stupid and gay, I have to spend a lot of time working on assignments/studying to keep up with the non-thesis work. Of course, this is not a strong enough excuse to halt game development entirely, so I haven't been on hiatus or anything like that; I'm just stuck working at a very slow pace right now because of school.

 For the record, I'm still aiming for the chapter 1 release to be on January 16 for Appreciate a Dragon Day (or on January 29 for the Chinese New Year of the Snake if I need a little extra time). However, I want to make it clear that this slowing down of development might make those deadlines a little difficult, and I figured I'd post this now as a warning. I didn't think it was worthwhile to post this at all at first since I wanted to focus on actual progress (plus these kinds of announcements tend to make devs look flaky and unreliable), but I came around to the idea that this would be a good record of acknowledgement---acknowledgement of my personal life getting in the way of timely development before the deadlines close in. 

I hope you all understand, but you are free to call me a dumb lazy bitch anyway since I'm only in this situation due to being bad at school lol

More Art

 

Just wanted to share some more practice art I made since I got the style nailed down. Above is a portion of chapter 1's protagonist.