Life, Interludes, Artefacts, and the State of the Project

 So, as some of you may know, I got a new job recently, and consequently needed to delay the release of Roots interlude 1.

As of today, it's up ([read it here]), and as you'll see, it's quite different from anything I've published before.

** Interludes

The frequency of these may decrease--we'll see--but for now, for every 3-5 chapters, I'd like to spend an update to publish some supplementary material. The one just published is diaries and correspondances from the story's characters. Others might be excerpts from in world texts, or even just explicit world-building lore dumps. The story will be fully understandable without them, and I imagine some readers may choose to skip them. For me, they serve a dual purpose of letting me share details of the characters and world that couldn't make it into the main text, and providing (ideally--though not last time) a bit of a rest from the frantic work of pumping out the real chapters.

** Artefacts

One thing I'd like to experiment with in interludes from time to time is showing photographs of in world objects that I've constructed and staged for viewing. In this first interlude, I've shown some letters and notebooks. In the future, I might show textile works; wood carvings; etc, or even do entire interludes in the form of in-world music.

This is because, when I say, "I am a multi-media artist," I mean (in case you haven't gathered it from my choice of project) that I am interested in an utterly ridiculous number of media, and that the more of them I can pull into a given project, the more engaged with it I can be.

So, every couple chapters, I get to carve, or sing, or embroider, or make weird science fantasy props, and it's my book, and you can't stop me.

** The State of the Project

New job. Too many migraines. Life is chaos. Roots is on.

The next few updates, we're going to be aiming for once a month, rather than twice. If I'm honest, I'm not even 100% percent confident that I'm going to be able to consistently meet that for the next few chapters. Based on the data that I've gathered from doing the last three-and-a-bit chapters, there's absolutely enough time (in fact, I specifically chose my work hours to be sure there would be time), but between life and health, I am not functioning at full capacity at the moment. I'll do my best, and it'll have to be enough.

What I am 100% confident of is that by the time these next three chapters are done, I'll be able to reduce the work-per-chapter notably by re-using assets. The first big time skip of the series is gonna be done, and all the characters and locations are gonna look the same for a while. I doubt it'll be enough to immediately hike the update rate, but in time, between accumulation of experience, accumulation of assets, and accumulation of engine improvements, it will be.

We're still early days, team. Still figuring things out. Hang in there, and thanks for tuning in.

Reflections on the Process: Chapter 3

Whew! This is going up late.
This was a difficult chapter. It was pulling teeth every stage of the way, from getting the illustrations done, to alignment, but somehow, I managed to get it all done on schedule.

** Why was chapter 3 hard?

I can't account for why /illustrating/ it was so difficult--except maybe that of the early drawings, some were so /nice/ that my standards for myself shot up, and I struggled to meet them. (I did meet them, ultimately.) I think by far the bigger reason the chapter felt like such an uphill battle was the crowd scenes, which took a couple hours to illustrate, nearly as much to clean, and were a massive alignment time sink.

** What worked

• Following the same basic process/order of operations as chapter 2 worked fine
• Making quick thumbnails with no repeating images rather than a real storyboard allowed me to a) do visual brainstorming & think visually first, while b) minimizing the amount of time spent on storyboards that won't be followed closely
• Improvising JavaScript animation effects when I needed them gave the story an added level of visual expression (I do need to come up with a place/process for abstracting and saving these for reuse--but in its own time).
• Having a firm deadline helped me pace and push myself
  

** What didn't work

• Trying to draw all the illustrations on back to back days, with no breaks, just made me burn out. I need to figure out how to pace myself so that I can have illustrations ready in a timely manner, /and/ feel OK while I draw them. I like drawing. If this is gonna work long term, I have to figure out how to stop turning /Roots/ illustrations into a stress factory.
• This chapter was waaayyy more visually ambitious than I accounted for in my planning. I got it done it two weeks, yeah, but it nearly killed me. I'm glad I had the deadline, and I'm even glad I stuck to it, but for future estimation purposes, I did not give myself nearly enough time. *There needs to be a step, early in chapter planning, where I go, "what's unusual about this chapter? Is there anything I haven't really done before? And then if there's any part that's likely to take a lot of learning, custom code, engine updates, etc, I multiply my time estimate by like 150%, and decide how I want to schedule the chapter release/my life based on that.*
  

** What I learned

• At least at this point in my learning/engine development, substantially animating /anything/, even if the illustration burden is low, is going to massively inflate the time spent on a chapter. That doesn't mean I want to avoid it--I want to look for chances to increase it, actually, but it does mean that any time I decide to include animations, I have to plan for extra time.
• The engine I've written is pretty easy to hack extra JS animations onto! I don't know if that's because it's /well/ designed, or because it's a really shallow stack on top of Vanilla JS, or because I have an insane idea of what "easy" and "nice" look like--but whatever the case, it's great news for me!
• You /have/ to get all the white edges off the outlines of background characters. Even crowds. Especially crowds. Getting it right may be tedious as hell, but it is needed.
  

** Developments in the Engine

• Frame based animations can now auto-generate however many cross-fade tweens you want

I think that's the only big one.

I also have the first interlude up, as of yesterday, so I'll be posting another update today. Stay tuned.