devlog, part 3: post-launch massive bugs

I'm released! Everything's good, right?

... No. I get a few friends to play through it once each. They see a giant bug: there's a warning in the backyard. You actually can't see what happens. The if clusters I used to figure out which thing to show people have broken.
Also, one of them says they want to play the Lena path. I attempt to play the Lena path. There is no Lena path; there is no Library. I've forgotten to add links to it. I hurriedly add a way to visit the library from the foyer, check it off.

Someone says "Why am I seeing Nadia here and Steven is actually inside?" Oh, god. Because I rewrote all the actual 'where people are' three times, sometimes the before-you-choose parts of each hour are mismatched with the actual things that happen. This means the player has no idea what they're going to get. I clear that up in ... several places, and scowl.

It's 3AM. I'm two hours late.

...

The next day I wake up and play through a few more times, and see more bugs. Over the next few days I catch and fix a few more bugs, which is the version you can play now.

... Honestly, I'm really proud of it. The writing isn't fantastic. There were a lot of bugs. Even ... how it works isn't fantastic. But it works, and has a lot of writing (almost 5x more than my previous game), and it makes sense. So that ... I'm chalking this up as a win.

So, things I'm going to do, and takeaways.

Things I'm going to do post-launch for this game:
-Probably nothing for now. There's music and art I can add, but I think that music and art in a game generally works best as a guideline towards just moving it to Ren'Py. I'm not sure how well Twine would work for this. And I haven't learned Ren'Py yet, and also can't really draw, so that's going to be a whole thing.

-Maybe I'll expand this setting and story at some point in the future, though! The characters may be very ... basically stereotypes (what do you want, I wrote a fifth of a "winning nanowrimo" novel in six hours), but I love them anyways. :p I'm glad that I was able to flesh them all out a little bit, sort of.

Takeaways:
-All the time I spent not writing, and plotting, actually was extremely useful. Thank god.

-That said, don't wait until the day of the deadline to write 10k words. That's such a terrible idea.

-The way the plot unfolds made it easy to write a lot, but also it means that what people play through is only ever a fourth of the game or so. This might not be a great idea for a game like this where the plot and interactions between characters is very front-and-center. ... If I enter another one of these, I'll see what I can do about that.

-My hands hurt for days. x.x

I learned how to do a slightly larger plot, game-wise, than what I had ever previously made, so I consider this time well spent, for sure. :)

Whoever you are, hope you're having a good day, and enjoyed the game (if you've played it!). If you have any questions, let me know, I'll do my best to answer.