Weekly Summary 2023/31

Hello everyone! Welcome to the thirty-first weekly summary of the year.

Since I'm shifting my development back to Illa Café, I changed the colour scheme of the weekly summary doodle back to the sunny yellow. ☀️

Kick-starting the Illa Café development is a little bit slow since this week I'm needed a lot in many places; I haven't been sitting much to do scripts and notes re-reading. There are lots of things happening at the same time (very good things and I'm loving them!) but Illa Café progress starts really slowly as a result. I'm still very excited, though!

Illa Café, in vibe, is more calm in comparison to emotional Blooming Chimes, but I learnt a whole lot from writing Blooming Chimes that I'd like to carry to Illa Café; the pacing and how to split things so that I can finally make chapters. I love chapter bookmarks!

Development progress

There's no development made this week; I guess I'll consider this week as relaxing doodle week (it gave me time to take care of tons of things afk too) after the impulsive Tuna Rice development last week. I think I'll delay the afterwords for Tuna Rice until things are more calm on my side, perhaps I'll format it with texts + lots of doodles instead of comic format.

So: I did many Illa Café doodles this week! At the moment, it's been really warm days where I am at (around 35ºC ~ 38ºC at peak) and since Illa Café (Volume 1) is in winter setting, I draw lots of jackets and layers for them. It's strangely interesting, it feels like a really fun dissonance. ^^;

Since there isn't much progress this week, I'll make some points about what I envision for the development in the next few weeks/months:

• I'm still contemplating whether Illa Café will be part of a jam entry. I mentioned before that it would be a nice timing for Winter Jam (with the theme and everything else); but at the same time I'm wondering if Illa Café fits the jam's nature, since I plan it to be semi-commercial. The entire first volume will also be the demo, and future volumes and other extras (e.g. gallery, etc.) will be behind the paid version. I plan to contact itch.io to ask them about some features regarding PWYW game turned into paid in the future and what will happen to previous downloads.
• I want to finalise Illa Café's colour theme soon. I have always given it warm, brown/yellow colour theme with colourful characters but I want to undergo one more check so I'm able to feature many locations and time of the day. There are many colour theme choices to consider, whether I'll go monochrome or colourful, whether I'll keep the brown theme or be more flexible, or whether I'll do colour theme based on the chapter/volume changes. It's a lot to think and to experiment, and I wonder if it's a good playing/reading experience...
• When I wrote Illa Café late last year, I made it a light read – it's soft slice of life, brushing some young adult problems of navigating life. Today – a few months later – I have more writing experiences that enriched me to be able to brush more young adult/adult problems that may/may not be dark for people. I need to rethink this. While in general Illa Café is SFW, I think I'll flag it as, at least, 16+ – even without romances. There are lots of alcohol consumptions and probably some cursing. I may need to find a sensitivity reader to determine this for me (TBD).

Other things

• #nowplaying I've Got Friends - Hitomi Kuroishi. I'll start watching Last Exile in near future hopefully. I have a weird approach to this show: I'm a fan of the character design Murata Range, and I'm a fan of this OST's singer Hitomi Kuroishi. They met together in a project: Last Exile, so I'll check this show out! ^^
• VSCode's Ren'Py extension broke in my PC. The colour syntaxes aren't consistent and the colour picker widget disappeared. I've filed a bug in their github page but there's no reply. I'm sad. 😩

• There are so many side things I want to do: I'm still contemplating to do 2024 Calendar (I still have no idea yet!!) but I think I'll spare around 2-3 weeks this month/next month to work on it. There are many friends who're looking forward to it, and I happen to use it IRL as well so I'll dedicate some time for that!
• After releasing Tuna Rice last week, I got to know many indie devs and experience their cool creations! It makes me so warm and happy; everyone is so great and inspiring! VN dev community is so fun! I'm sadly not an active person whether it's on Twitter/Discord but hopefully when I'm more free, I'll be able to chat more with others!

As usual, thank you for everyone who's joining me here this week! I hope your weekend will be lovely. Take care!
- Konayachi