let it leave me like a long breath

oof

so then i didn't write for a few days and got to be 7k words behind before i started at the least keeping pace, and today i managed 2.7k words so now i'm only 6k behind.

i've started more actively playtesting the game, and focusing on fixing up small things in the early game, or little missing scenes or busted sequences that were previously too small-scale for me to worry about when there were huge reams of content missing. there are still huge reams of content missing, but, less now than there were before.

part of what i've been working on today has been the astau introduction sequence, which is sliced up such that it doesn't really make any good excerpts. astau is kind of an interesting case, because as opposed to brulvundojn -- who has some established history with the pc regardless of character creation choices -- astau is always a total stranger when first introduced, which means having to have some fairly exposition-heavy passages to get both the player and the pc up to date in terms of how yr astau interactions are gonna go.

one of the major things i've been noticing as i work on this more is just how important dialog is. i mean, okay yes that seems obvious, but yeah turns out character dialog is actually really important in terms of establishing character voice and making characters seem interesting. so there's this big astau dialog interaction sequence that kind of establishes him as a fairly important character that you might be visiting repeatedly, which makes sense since he's, uh, the only way to get nearly all of the pregnancy tfs. i had been planning on adding more monsters to the overworld in early development, but after i sketched out the main two and the bonus one/two i started to realize how much actual writing was involved with all that. so.

anyway the overall story has now hit over 150k words, which is an awful lot but still nowhere near being done. i remember starting this back in... february? and thinking like, "yeah i could finish this in a month". i really gotta learn to outline things better and cut down on development sprawl.

oof

okay so i'm around 7.5k/9k words behind, which isn't great but is definitely still surmountable, especially since we're still in the first half. turns out a few days of doing basically no writing adds up.

anyway today (the 13th) i'm gonna be trying to do some writing all through the day to actually get a decent chunk set aside. there's this temptation like "i mean technically i can write 7k in one day, so i don't really need to focus on keeping a steady pace since i can just do it all in one day", but of course that's not a practical way to approach things.

anyway here's some stuff i wrote yesterday. this excerpt contains spoilers. or like, design spoilers?

( excerpt )

oof today i was tired and got distracted and ended up only writing 1044 words, which puts me at 6786 words total, just barely enough to still be on pace.

no excerpt for today tho b/c the first thing i'm gonna do tomorrow is edit the stuff i wrote today for coherency.

so the last time i did nanowrimo was... a considerable time ago, and i went looking for the tools i used last time. one of them was 'write or die', a little web thing that gives you a text field and dings and turns red if you don't keep typing more-or-less continuously. a very simple, basic thing that looked like this when i used it last. meanwhile, the 'modern' version of it is this over-designed mess.

thankfully the archive.org version still mostly works.

wrote another 2k words today (well, 1995 words). this puts me at 4031 words total, or +697 ahead of pace. finished that djen fisting scene and wrote most of the opening paths the jinn survey caves sequence. i also put in some very basic code for handling conversation with the various gheist characters, since it was bothering me that all the human characters got talk options but nobody else did. that's gonna be weird to try to work into the nanowrimo process -- each individual talk option is maybe a paragraph, and they're nearly all backstory/worldbuilding exposition, so they're not really things i could write in a single timed block the way i've been writing the sex scenes. we'll see how that goes.

( excerpt: )