Heya everyone!! I hope you're alright and welcome to this third Waterlily on the Froth devlog (gosh, already *cries*)!

Today, rather than the plot or story, I'd like to share more technical stuff, so it might be more interesting if you were curious about the many steps of releasing a game? Anyway, I hope this gives you a good read!

Well, if you guys are new here: I'm developing a "genderbent" version of High School Lolita, narrating the story of a seventeen-year-old young man and a literature teacher engaging into a relationship. Previous devlogs give more details about the plot and the main protagonist (and, in particular, about his differences with Chloé, the protagonist of HSL), so feel free to give them a read if you haven't!

So, when you're a solo dev, there are different things you need to do: write your game, produce and/or collect the different assets, and code everything. But it would be naïve to think the process is: "first, write everything, then collect assets, finally code everything." For example, it happens frequently, while coding, that you get new ideas (it was HSL's case: believe it or not, the change of GUI wasn't a feature planned before I started coding the game and felt it was weird to have horrifying scenes with a cute pastel GUI).

That's why you frequently see solo devs working on their script and on visual assets at the same time, which is a clever thing to do, as it helps you change pace, focus on various tasks and eventually not get bored and/or overwhelmed with one task!

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Well, I could do that, you know, but here is another thing I noticed: those devs very frequently end up redoing all the assets again, therefore losing more time. And in my case, there is something particular I have to consider: I'M NO ARTIST ART IS HARD ARGH HELP

So, long story short, I can't produce art assets, as I will end up replacing them, since the more I draw (and God knows I do), the more my skill improves (yeah seems logical when phrased that way: practice makes you better, who would have thought?), and I know I don't want to waste time... so in the end, I can only work on the script (of which I can't reveal much for spoilers reasons), and ta-dah. The chapters are definitely longer than expected though, but the scenes aren't superfluous, so I'm quite satisfied with it, and of the nuances of Chris as a protagonist (who goes even farther than Chloé when it comes to being a nuanced victim). Part of me also wants to release the chapter 1 as a demo, haha, but I'm just unsure of it, as you'll still have to wait for a while for the game, but if you guys want one, tell me?

Something other than writing I can do, though, is CG-planification, and coding the structure of the game (+ implement the text, but I generally implement it alongside the visuals, so I know I'll need to edit later).  If HSL had a total of 10 CGs (which is more than honest for a 20k word-game in my opinion), the first chapter of WOTF has four CGs planned for 7k words, which is kinda equivalent, but now remember this game has seven common route chapters and three endings in 3 chapters? So, it will also be a lot of work, haha, but I'm excited! For now, see you in the next devlog, and here are the planned CGs (of course, it's just me making VEEEERY rough sketches for concept, it should go without saying that they don't reflect the final in-game quality edfvgbhgfdrgv):