Hey all, let’s try this again. I had been thinking of giving an update on ESR, but barring handing out story spoilers, I wasn’t sure what else to say besides “it’s coming along”, which feels pretty lame to keep saying over the course of years.
So I think it’s worth at least spoiling one thing: how much content is planned for the game (counting all story paths), how far we’ve come, and how much is left. By putting up some actual numbers, we can give you all a real sense of progress, and also encourage ourselves to keep a steady pace and make those numbers go up.
Here’s how we work. In general, we need to take a few passes through the story to complete it:
- Main scene planning and writing
- Scripting the scenes in Ren’Py
- Additional visual and sound effects, mostly for battles
- Other writing: Koishi advice, stat boosting, and slight dialogue variations depending on story path
For the most part, the writers do passes 1 and 4, I’m the one doing pass 2, and Graph does pass 3.
Pass 1 takes the most work, naturally, but it’s also quite far along at this point. Pass 2 takes several hours per scene, including cut-in management, minimal visual/sound effects, and some writing checks/proofreading. Passes 3 and 4 depend on the scene and how ambitious we get. On some scenes, the writers do 1 and most of 4 together. 1, 2, and 3 have to be done in order though.
Our latest demo, Demo 3.0, has 27% of the planned game scenes. By my count, here’s how we’re doing:
- Pass 1, main writing: 85%
- Pass 2, scripting: 48%
- Pass 3, effects: 38%
- Pass 4, other writing: 27% (with haphazard completion afterward)
And there’s other tasks which we could count separately – character cut-ins, CGs, music and general programming (menus and GUI, image definitions, audio playing, etc.):
- Cut-ins: Nothing major missing, and I wager our expression ranges are already above average for VNs. So this is basically done. If we think of any other cut-ins that could be particularly useful, we’d ask Graph and he’ll decide if he’s up for it.
- CG art: About 78%, varying a bit depending on how the rest of the writing pans out.
- Music: I believe this has been good to go for a while, with a couple of pieces ready which haven’t appeared up to Demo 3.
- General programming: Things still basically work. But since we have such large volumes of scripting code, I’m still trying to tweak things to make the script easier to write and edit down the road. Incorporating some of the newer Ren’Py features helps with this as well. So I’m doing some of that in between working on pass 2. When I’m caught up with pass 2, I’d like to look into making some extras like a CG gallery menu.
For my part, in terms of making the numbers go up, I’m aiming to do a few hours of Ren’Py scripting each week in the long term. What typically happened in the past is that I’d grab several scenes at once, and try to script them all in a short time. Then I felt burned out for a little while, and needed more effort to come back. Even if the work is ‘supposed to be fun’, I feel like I have to mix up my week with different types of work to stay productive. So, I’m going to start applying this principle to ESR and hopefully it helps out.
Finally, we always have some material for screenshots, so let’s have a couple of those:
Nice!
Now we actually have a grasp on relative progress.
One thing I’d like to know that I think wasn’t ever really confirmed.
Koishi will get her own proper route, right?
I checked around, and if I’m not mistaken, we haven’t outright revealed the mystery 5th romance yet. However, I can confirm that this 5th route is a full route!
yaaaaaaas
Nice!
But considering that Koishi references her own route multiple times in the demo and that she is on the “full heroine lineup” image a few posts down, It wouldn’t really make sense for the 5th route to be anyone else’s.
Honestly, Koishi’s route is the thing I am looking forward to the most in this project, which is the reason why I am so stubborn about this. I don’t want to be hyped about this for years and be excited to hell and back, only to play it and find out that she doesn’t have a route after all.
If nothing else, I’m relieved the script is mostly complete.
If, god forbid, anything happens that means you won’t be able to finish the game, will that be released?
@SomeHobo: Fair enough, I’ll at least drop a couple more hints. Up to the end of the last demo, Koishi does indeed hint at the 5th route on at least a couple of occasions. Also, keep an eye out for multiple-choice situations that don’t boost any visible stats (love, danmaku, knowledge, klepto) and aren’t related to any of the 4 main romance prospects.
@Raineh Daze: Yes; at least I’ll make sure that happens as long as I’m around. The most important thing is that all the work we’ve done since the last demo (writing, art, music, coding) doesn’t just go to waste. Obviously, the best scenario is that ESR becomes complete as we intended, and we release that. If that is infeasible for some reason, an incomplete release is still better than none at all, which would be the biggest waste.
Thanks for the update.
Good to hear you’re still there, because as sure as hell we’re still here. Keep up the good work.
Okay, this is epic!
I’m glad this is still a thing.
Hopefully done by the end of this year.
@Back: Cool to see you’re still checking in. The goal right now is steady, sustainable progress, a little a week – and so far I’ve held up that goal (currently 51% scripting and did a few major code cleanups). Though, I can safely say this work pace won’t finish ESR until deep into 2020 at least. Writer availability is also a question mark still, so we’ll see. Hoping I can motivate the other devs with my progress.
Finishing in 2020 is fine too.
Honestly I’m just glad to know this project hasn’t been abandoned
Update soon? It’s been about 3 months.
Also opinions on new Kasen and new 2hus?
I for one, love the new armpit Oni and the stage 2 cow mom is 10/10.
Yeah, gonna make a new post either this weekend or early next week.
I haven’t checked out the TH17 demo yet, but from the art I think Kutaka looks kinda neat. I still gotta play the more recent games in order at some point (last one I played was Double Spoiler).