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Hello, everyone. :) I'm going to have The Silent Column just be linear, now. Not really to lessen the workload on myself: I'm going to essentially be merging the individual routes into one, so the core things that happen in all the routes will still happen. In the cases where I have to chose between two options, I just choose the one I feel is the best and lose whatever's less important, or try to keep the best elements of both: If a route had a light go green on Wednesday and another route had a light go red on Tuesday, if I really liked the green light but really liked Tuesday, I would just merge things so that the green light would go off on Tuesday, instead, losing some less important things in the process. The reason I'm merging things like this is so that if I ever want to release The Silent Column as a novel(s) before or after the visual novel(s) release(s), I can just take all the text and make it a book without much trouble. Also, merging things helps me put everything together into one stronger and/or longer story rather than several weaker and/or shorter ones. I know that putting a bunch of elements into one pot doesn't automatically make things stronger and can make things less focused- and doing this may result in the story being less focused- but I think the good will outweigh the bad, and I think that merging things together will lead to interesting situations that I wouldn't get to write, otherwise. In addition to all this, something I am going to do to lessen the workload on myself because I like the style, it's less work, and I would like to realistically be able to show you a finished product eventually, is change from the traditional visual novel look of sprites that change emotions against a background that changes before the player gets to see an occasional CG, to a simple look of text being on the left of the screen, character portraits that don't change emotion being displayed one at a time on the right of the screen, and very occasional CGs that fill all of the screen when they come up. I've made a mockup for you all which includes a nicely sized writing snippet: I don't want the character portraits to feature extremely close-up pictures of the characters they're meant to depict- that picture of Amy is just the newest character piece I have, so that's what I used in the mockup. The length of the character portraits reminds me of Clow Cards from Cardcaptor Sakura: And of Art Nouveau pieces: I'm wanting each character portrait to look something akin to those while also having a style of their own, and I want the VN to have a "looking through an old book" sort of feel to it.
I'm only going to be doing 10 CGs for this act and I might not make character portraits for all of the characters, just the more important ones. As for the music part of the project, I'm thinking of just having between 3 and 5 songs for this- and perhaps the next- act. I know that switching things like this might not be for everyone but I feel that it lets the reader focus more on the text, lets the reader use their imagination more, lets me put my time into making a few beautiful pieces of art instead of worrying about how many pieces I have to do, creates a nice style that I and some others may like, and lets me focus on nothing but the writing and few songs after finishing the few art assets. I do empathize with people not playing The Silent Column because of this switch, though. :) I don't yet know how to code this change but people at Lemmasoft Forums are very kind, helpful, and have helped me with my coding troubles before, and I'll likely be able to find something in Ren'Py's documentation to help me out, as well. I'll see you later. :)
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