#dev update on the clock lmao

[thekenikaridevblog]

FREE TIMES ARE COMPLETELY AND FULLY DONE WHO CHEERED

Background edits (9/10) (JUST ONE MORE. ONE MORE AND I'LL BE FREE)

Backgrounds (0/3) (.......whoops)

New character sprites (2/2) (I realised I kinda accidentally did another one. also this one won't even be used until chapter 2.1. why am I like this)

Special character sprite bundle thing (5/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (9/17) (after some more calculations n planning n stuff i think it'll actually end up being around 17 CGs total? of course there will be some with more effort put into them since they'll have stuff like changed expressions and poses, but as general scenes I think that's how many there'll be)

Dialogue (50%)

Free time events (4/4) (100%) (WOOO)

Music (1/?)

Dialogue is only halfway through even though i've made progress up to late evening. and that's because there's gonna be kind of a big event happening with tons of dialogue

originally I wanted to get a lot more ambitious with it, with special separate individual scenes depending on the character you spent the most free times with, but I decided to scale it down for my sanity (and also bc i found no way to actually implement those scenes in like. a narratively cohesive way. like why would this character do that if you were nice to them 3 days ago)

tbh, now that i've made the event have far less narrative branches, I wonder how big of a percentage in day 3's dialogue it'll actually end up taking........ still a lot because there's gonna be so much bullshit happening in the span of like an hour. but there has also been so much bullshit happening before that. i don't know anymore

Finally I get to use this gif properly

Anyways! Like before, this progression chart post thing will be exclusively of day 3, the day before the trial, and that's where all my dev efforts will be directed towards. The full chapter 1 is more than half finished, now we just need the final home stretch and you'll finally be able to see this gay tragedy I've been cooking

Hope you guys will stick along for the ride :D

Background edits (there won't be any new backgrounds per se, but the old ones will get a lot of variations that will require more or less work, so imma keep track of that) (4/7)

Backgrounds (0/1) (edit: whoops I forgot there is a new background lol)

Tilesets (0/0)

New character sprites (0.5/1) (the number could easily go up, don't take the 1 for granted)

Special character sprite bundle thing (2/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (0/17 at least) (idk the count might be off. These things tend to go way out of proportion)

Dialogue (0.5%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

[seldaryne]

"Wyll's quest regarding the Wyrmway is now a subquest instead of part of his main quest."

"Wyll's quest regarding Ravengard will now more reliably and frequently receive updates in Act III."

so mechanically speaking then, was the demotion of quest status in the first point required for them to implement the functionality of the second or??? because i genuinely don't understand why it became a subquest, especially when the game's structure already allows you to just ignore quests & move on to the next area if you want. most of the patch notes that directly mention wyll are bug-related or scripting flow, which i don't have a problem with (bug fixes are great, we love those). i'd love to hear any thoughts about this, though, because i really can't think of a reason why it had to become a subquest?

i also initially read that second point as planning for future updates to wyll's content but at a second glance i think it may just be referring to journal updates? i don't know, i'd like to believe my initial reaction was the correct one but... yknow. anyway i maintain that this is yet Another example of some really goddamn weird choices on the developmental end of things. if the companion quests exist on a sliding scale of 'most related to current main storyline to least,' wyll is very much at the top end of things. optimistic thought is that a lot of his scrapped content existed in the parts of act 3 that were cut, but i would think that as a studio you'd see that & make an effort to level things out with how much screentime the other companions have. at the bare minimum, your player base shouldn't be able to clock so many weird holes in his story arc where it's clear that something else was supposed to be offered.

i'm also not saying that the other companion arcs weren't clunky in some areas & didn't need a bit of help, but the disparity here makes deprioritizing those edits seem like a more logical course of action. like there's a difference between some slightly unpolished scenes vs. something that feels fundamentally lacking in a lot of structural ways, especially when you get into the finer points of the comparisons. act 3 imo is the one that feels the most bare-bones to me. like yes, there's Stuff there visually and quests too but it doesn't feel as lived-in as acts 1 & 2. i would say that the underdark to ketheric section feels the most dense, content-wise, and i don't think it's a coincidence that it's the bracket of the game i enjoy the most. i maintain that giving wyll's storyline the attention it needs would not only help with the character arc itself, but also pad out the quieter stretches of act 3. at this point i don't really see how they'd be able to add in the upper city without either completely changing the trajectory of the third act (so like, almost definitely something we Will Not See Happen & understandably so from a production standpoint. weird post-release editing aside, it is still a finished game.) & i'm also not sure what a DLC would look like here because the main story feels pretty complete too. off the top of my head, maybe one where you follow wyll & karlach into avernus would work, but that's worldstate dependent & probably wouldn't get made for that reason.

all that to say, from where i'm standing it really seems like giving wyll the same respect other companions are offered would by extension fix some of the act 3 issues, without having to release an entirely new area of the game (i'd love it i just don't think it's realistic lmao). like i know why/what the factors are that led to wyll getting the short end of the stick, it's bullshit but it's not the first time we've seen black characters handled unfairly by devs (& fans), but beyond that it's literally just. so confusing to me on the basis of writing alone. why wouldn't you use the character with that many ties to the titular city of the game more? why isn't he more integral to the story when it really seems like he has every reason to take the spotlight in certain areas?? like that's a fantastic resource of a character to use to move the narrative along and Yet.

idk. this started off as just a reaction to patch notes but it's so unbelievably frustrating to watch it keep happening every patch.

[inflammatoryfandomblog]

hello i have been sick of corona here is the end of my first playthrough (it’s easy to play video games for many hours straight if locked in a room for a week)

siri (yes the apple assistant) is a witcher

not-germany won the war

cerys (best girl so she gets her name spelled properly) became ruler of the skellige isles.

gerald is a witcher. witching alone. no yen. no triss. both go in the trash.

keira and lambert are together and keira after keira did something altruistic for once in her life. she ended up finding a cure for a plague. good for her. more thoughts:

anyways witcher 3 is a decently fun game. it definitely shouldn’t have been an open-world game; completely clashes with the main narrative. yen is here acting completely callously and hastly in skellige and i’m here like “yen i have been spending the past month riding roach around velen and novigrad after i found out what happened to ciri i don’t understand your desperation.”

i sort of expect time to be important if there’s a big-ass clock in the HUD actively reminding me about the passage of time, instead of it being hidden/abstracted away.

exploration is meh because in many cases you’ll find out that the devs have peppered the map with meaningless shit to fill the open world. everything worthwhile is attached to a quest, and while exploring will sometimes make you able to do quests in cool ways, sometimes it completely breaks them. the levelling system basically punishes you for exploring and finding the side quests too, so... eh.

i think the only area that benefitted a lot from being open-world was kaer morhen. the first time you get there it’s really cozy in a way, it’s vesemir’s old project to keep it up, and those few npcs you find manage to keep it alive in a small way. but after vesemir dies, going through the completely desolate keep and seeing the witcher stuff completely changes the mood. there’s a real sense of loss in seeing all the ruins and wildlife, really makes you feel that vesemir’s place just died with him. 

the fun thing about kaer morgen is that i imagine you didn’t really even have to update it that much (besides removing the npcs) to get this emptiness from it. it just works and it owes a lot to the open world format and the fact that it’s primarily established that vesemir works on it.

story is fine for a video game. it works i guess. there are some annoying witcher things about it--female characters are always lacking ofc compared to the male ones, there’s a good amount of sexism in the franchise (even the books!) that’s kind of unquestionably a given, you have to ignore it or you’re just not going to like the games. it’s definitely better than the witcher 1 lmao.

uhhh... any original thoughts? yeah. a lot of people praise the hard decisions of the quests but i legitimately think this is mainly because geralt is a preestablished character rather than a blank slate. you can’t have the facile “do you do the obviously good thing or the obviously evil thing” because geralt at the end of the day has to be geralt, both choices have to vaguely be something he’d do.

this limitation means better quest design because you don’t have to account for extreme sorts of characters (which is a bad idea for a computer because it can’t just make stuff up organically). most of the time (not all the time) you could make a case for how geralt behaves either way, which naturally means more complicated scenarios.

but yeah it’s a decent game all in all.