some modest tweaks.

To be honest, making Devlogs feels weird. I'm usually working on the game every few days, but stopping to post my progress? I don't really know how much progress I need to make before it feels right to post about it. But, I'll feel things out.

I've pushed a slightly newer build of the game-- it's actually kind of anachronistic. If you're wondering about the number, it's actually a representative of how many days I've worked on the game (or at least, it used to be). Meaning, this build was made with about 6 days worth of daily work. It's actually not accurate anymore, though? I've worked on the game for about ~20 days now, but the most recent private build is "0.13.2" (I use 0.#.# to indicate when I've not made enough changes to justify making a backup of the game just yet). Patch notes at the bottom-- though it's not much, in the interest of transparency. I've put in a lot of work in the past 30 days, as I'll cover in the next section, but the actual writing still isn't finished enough for me to be confident in uploading just yet. Hence, a hotfix. 

a month in purgatory.

Well, then! It feels weird to have a game out, and for it to have been out for a month-- even if what's publicly available is nothing more than a "proof-of-concept&prototype" as we put it. To be honest, it's terrifying. Even if very little people have actually seen it (which is fine, we've not been doing much in the way of promoting), the fact that people outside of our friend circle have seen it is, frankly, both exciting and mortifying.

Have we avoided the dreaded burnout? ...Kinda? We're not pulling 10-hour workdays anymore, which is good. But truth be told we've hit some mental brick walls with development. The game's not in danger of cancellation, don't worry about that. It's just more that we're hitting a point where we need to actually start taking things seriously with regards to development and planning, and we've just hit some snags when it comes to actually working on this as we would any of our other major projects in the works. Lots of horizontal progress emotionally dragging us down (implementing some of the features detailed in the next section, among other things), rather than the rush of constant vertical progress with writing more and more plot. So, we take breaks working on other projects (we have some webcomics we'd love to share with y'all soon!!!)

But, as we said on our Patreon (which we do have-- though you're under no obligation to donate!), we like giving ourselves a few projects to bounce around with. Honestly, if we worked solely on one project rather than 2-3, we would probably just get bored and burnout pretty dang quickly. I think we've found a good balance here, though. It's been an absolute blast. We literally spend our days working our dream game and webcomics, and when we're not we're daydreaming and brainstorming how we want plot beats and character developments to go. It's our best life, truth be told.

what next?

Here's the part we're dreading to write-- specifically, where we have to sit down and think about how much we SHOULD show and how much we need to keep to ourselves as a little surprise. We've a confession to make: We're absolutely terrible with secrets. We love holding them as a writer, but we're so bad with keeping them. We're just naturally the type of person who loves to talk on-and-on about what we're working on, how it's going and what we're planning next-- honestly, the only reason we've not done so many more Devlogs is the aforementioned "how much progress warrants a post?", on top of, of course, "how much should we keep to ourselves?". But, this is a learning experience. We'll figure it out as we go along.

So, without further ado...

i see you crystal clear.

We've been working on prettying the game as much we can.  Fonts are more consistent across the board, and we even learned how vector graphics work so we can make the game's logo look way prettier across all of the promo material. 

...Yes, I realize this is one of the most mundane ways we could've opened, but we're easily amused by our own work, please bear with us for just a moment.

The game's logo was one of the first things we did for the project, just improvising something that seemed aesthetically pleasing in GIMP. We had the name in mind for months, but when it came to actually working on the project, it was very spur of the moment-- just type the name in a serif font (Sylfaen to be specific), type in a screed that basically posits the intended thesis statement (an idea that we took from the SciADV series as well as fricking 90's Japanese Sonic the Hedgehog box arts), and then throw in the names of a bunch of our D&D characters that might or might not make it into the final release of the game. Still, it's a fairly pretty logo, we think. Even prettier now that we lowered the opacity on the character names so the main text is more legible.

We've even made an alternative version of the logo for square-sized images, as well. Look for that whenever,  wherever (e.g. wait until our website is finally live).

live your best (worst) life.

In the next build of the game, tentatively marked as the mystical "1.0", you'll be able to select what your character looks like from a couple of presets, based on a good few fantasy archetypes we thought would fit. It only makes sense, in a novel based on D&D, to pull from various fantasy tropes when deciding what the various options should be (There may also be a few of our friends' D&D characters as "guest" options, as well... watch out for that). We're physically restraining ourselves from showing them all off right now, but we truly hope you enjoy being able to express yourself in whatever way you deem most fitting when spending your days in Whiteslate.

(Each character will have slightly different narration, as well as differences in how the various residents will react-- don't worry, we won't be getting into any fantasy-racism-territory, but with how unique each protagonist is, I think you'll understand why the various villagers may react differently from character-to-character)

Furthermore...

You can now actually select your pronouns!!! Wooooo!!! You have npckc to thank for that-- what a lovely tool they've made. Those who have played the current prototype will notice that there's a very clear point in the game where the player should be able to choose their pronouns-- but, unfortunately, time crunch prevented us from implementing it at the time. But, now that we have infinite time, we can do whatever! It's great!

Once you get to the point in the game where you're prompted for your pronouns, you can choose to change your choice at any point. However, as it stands, if you rollback to whatever dialogue was before the line you had up when you chose a different set of pronouns, the game will revert to your previous option. It's a side effect of how Ren'py handles rollback, unfortunately-- we'll look into seeing if we could fix that.

Furthermore,  you can also see your pronouns as well as the pronouns of whatever character you're speaking to on the top right of the message box. This can be hidden at any point, but honestly it's a nice compositional element that I really recommend keeping it. NPC pronouns do not show up until the character introduces themselves to you, with the implication that you're exchanging pronouns when introductions are held (with the exception of Scourge, who explicitly gives her pronouns within the script of the game itself).

the songbird sings her tune.

I think the last thing we'll touch upon for now, since this post is already fairly lengthy as is, is the music of the game. In 0.6.1, there is no music. We were going to look for royalty-free music to serve as placeholder, but we were literally picking out sound effects to use minutes before pushing the build to this site and streaming it on Twitch. So, nothing but ambience. That's not a bad thing-- lots of visual novels are reserved with employing music. The When They Cry series comes to mind. But, we'd like to have just a bit more. Ace Attorney was one of our big inspirations, so it only makes sense we'd want to put up some good character themes for our game, as well.

And, well, just take a listen:

We're not the most knowledgeable on music theory or anything (at most one college course and a decade of choir training), but we've been having a blast creating our own songs-- and our friends don't think they're ear-piercing, so we must be doing something right, right?

This is the part that's easily making development take way longer though, as we're still very new to making music (this is our first finished song, actually!!), but development was always going to be slow no matter how much of the work we decided to take on for ourselves. It's just nice that we're finally making our own songs-- something we've wanted to do for a while. All it took was a multi-day internet outage and a metric ton of boredom.

the boring part where we have to discuss monetization.

We've had two friends now support the game by paying via the "Pay What You Want" option on itch, and that's absolutely insane! Thank you both so much! But, it does lead into a topic that we want to cover as soon as we can: what will the final game cost?

Truth be told, we never actually considered the idea of even selling this game for money. It started life as a vague webcomic idea we thought would be neat, and really the only reason it's an actual game now is because we needed something to do to pass the time (and we're trying to actually make a project rather than constantly plan it out and never actually start working). In any case, we have a general idea in mind:

The prologue, when complete, will always be free. Think of it as a long, extended demo; a primer into the kind of writing you'll expect to see if you decide to try out the full game. The rest of the game is likely to be somewhere between $10-$15 USD, depending on how we feel once we're getting closer to wrapping things up. Maybe cheaper than that, we don't know yet. Honestly, the idea of us actually selling a product is absolutely terrifying, but we're getting used to that prospect as time goes on. If you're not sure if you'll like the game even past the prologue, we'll be streaming the game live on Twitch whenever a chapter is finished and released (chat will get to choose what options we go with, as well).

Our main reason for charging for the rest of the game is just the sheer amount of time its taken to work on as a project-- we're making a full-fledged game, not just some chintzy experiment with game engines or self-indulgent fanfic (of a licensed work, that is-- this project is absolutely self-indulgent fanfiction of our own characters). We only hope the end result, when complete, is worth whatever price we ultimately give it.

(Also, to those who've paid for the game: we don't know if you're going to have instant access to the full game once we start charging for it, but I'll hand out download keys if it's not the case-- regardless of what price the full game takes-- as a thanks for early support. <3)

wrapping up...

We're going to try and post more here, when we can. Maybe some smaller posts here and there on bits of development we find interesting-- maybe some bits on the various characters featured, as well! Each character's taken from a D&D campaign after all, so many of them have interesting stories to tell. We'll see, honestly. This is our first time really committing to a project, more than just leaving it in the development hell of constant planning and pre-planning, so we're definitely in unfamiliar territory.

But, in any case, thank you for following the development of Peaceful&Purgatory. We hope you enjoy your time in Whiteslate~

(Oh, and also, the game's now on GameJolt, if you needed an alternative place to check the game out. No Steam page yet, though-- we don't have the money to set up a SteamWorks account haha)

a recommendation.

One thing we're thinking of sprinkling in here and there in these Devlogs is a recommendation for contemporary works-- or even just whatever thing we feel like plugging at the time. Nothing sponsored, just things that fascinate us.

Today, we're going to recommend Date Knight, a very funny, cute dating sim also currently in  active development. You're a Knight in an academy of Knights, and you can date various other Knights and go on Knightly adventures.

...No, the decision to make one of the playable characters in P&P a Knight was not directly inspired by Date Knight, we're just really fond of Knights in general-- especially themed ones. Blame Shovel Knight, honestly.

We backed the game on IndieGoGo, but this isn't a sponsored ad or anything. We just think it's a very cool game we're glad managed to get funding. There's, coincidentally, also a Ren'py-based demo that gives a proof-of-concept taste of what the full game might be like (though they're moving the game to Unity if I recall), so go check it out. Whadd'ya waiting for? Go on, get.

patch notes

• A default for the volume sliders is now defined, meaning your eardrums won't be blown out by the sound effects and (in 1.0) music anymore (For the most part, see Known Issues). You may need to delete your Persistent file for this to be reflected; Click here if you don't know how to do that.
• The game is now being properly uploaded through Itch.io's butler service-- so it might update better in the future? I don't know. The platforms are now being automated through that now, so that's a thing. Let us know if something breaks, though-- there's so many moving parts in game development, especially with releasing builds, surprisingly enough.
• The "End of Progress" section has had some script alterations, to reflect the game now being available on GameJolt.
• Typos mentioned in the previous post have now been corrected.

known issues

The following issues still stand within this hotfix, as it uses the release version as a baseline rather than the current development build: 

• Naming your character is impossible on gamepad. You can still advance the game, but you're stuck with the default character name if you don't have a keyboard. 
• Pronoun selection isn't implemented yet. Script is currently written around the option to cover for this. Fixed in the upcoming 1.0 update.
• Sound effects are low quality, aren't always fitting, and some are louder/quieter than they should be. There's also no music.  Sound effects have not been replaced yet, but the default sound volume is lower to compensate for the default Ren'py volume being way too loud. Additionally, music is currently in development.