Char Sketch Update - Journal and rambling

Journal and random rambling 1

Hey everyone again, there's some things I always wanted to get out, mostly ranting about my writing skills and other stuff I think about on daily basis.

It's pretty much random rambling but you could also call it something like a journal or daily life blog or whatever.


Most of this won't be interesting and it will probably end up in quite the wall of text.
Since it's somewhat feelings and thoughts related it might be quite cringy and boring, so if you don't like boring stuff you should probably stay away.

Note: This also won't be thought at all, expect complete chaos.


New website and its purpose

Let's start with something that isn't a rant, I've put up the new website.

You can reach it over the new adress https://indarkwaters.com/ but the old one 
http://indarkwaters.lima-city.de works just fine aswell.

So why did I make it in the first place?
The goal of the new site is pretty much to have one place to acces every game/info/link at once so it's easier to find out about new updates and progress on whatever I'm working on.

At the moment everything is kind of all over the place and I often get questions about
where to download/play certain versions, which was the last one released etc.

The design is really simple/ugly for now, but it should be enough to at least show what's going
on with Dream Molder which is the main game I'm working on right now anyway.


Whenever I have the time I will start adding some random stuff to the site.
I want to put up a newsfeed, a place for feedback, a new progress bar with more clarity etc.
Hopefully when everything's done it's going to replace everything on this blog at some point.

Still going to take some time however. For now I'll have a lot of other things to do and the idea of how the site might look/work in the future can always change.

Side-Projects

Something I always wanted to talk about (but what probably wouldn't get much attention) are some of my sideprojects that I started designing a while back but never had the time to actually start doing.

One of which, "The curse of Nuhibi", is actually something I wanted to work on since release of the first Dream Molder Demo.
I started writing Nuhibi's story somewhere around the time I was finishing of the Demo, thinking that it wouldn't get any attention and I should start gathering ideas for the next game.

Plan was to make a short Hentai Game to get some Patrons, nothing big or special.
I'm a fan of desert settings and Monster Girls / Kenkou Cross, so I quickly decided to do some Anubis animations and write a short story to get along with it.

However, I quickly realized that writing fantasy/action kind of themes were way easier for me than the kind of slice of life genre Dream Molder was supposed to be.
Mostly because Dream Molder does take a lot of real life influence and I needed to do researche and have the experience in those things to write about them.

With the fantasy setting however I could simply make things up as I go and it felt like I could go on writing forever.


Realizing that the idea for Nuhibi got a lot bigger than I actually wanted I put it to the side for now, wanting to look for something else to make for Patreon.
But putting it to the side wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.
It was that thing that keeps you awake at night, telling you every detail about a character, the world and what happens next while you're trying to sleep.

Even when I started writing the full Dream Molder Version it kept following me around and to this day, I'm still way to excited when I think about anything of the game.
I did think about taking a break from DM to work on Nuhibi a couple of times, but I my excitement for the story would just keep me working on it forever and I don't want to leave DM unfinished either..

I have a couple of side projects like this that I wanted to work on or at least make a small/teaser/demo for.

But Dream Molder is taking so damn much of my time already...
I made the roadmap for now and aim to release Part 1 of Dream Molder by the end of the year.

If everything works out I might take a break to work on one of them after that.
We'll see when I'm there....


Story writing rant and how I started Dream Molder

I thought I should talk about some of the things that annoy myself about the game at the moment that kinda make it harder for me to work on it.

When I first started out I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted it to be in the end.
I had an idea for the story and progress, characters, etc...

Putting all of this into words (even more so in another than my native language) proved to be more difficult than expected though...


I wrote a lot of small stories, made simple games and drawings but always kept them to myself because in the end I learned from them and improved while making them, even if just so slightly.
These improvement however tend to show me the imperfection of my work and what kind of mistakes I'm did. Not all of them, but some.
And in the end that's always enough for me to not like the work anymore, making me rework and/or discard it.

However, only noticing my mistakes won't always make it better the next time and I'll end up doing the same things again with barely any improvements. This way the cycle continued and my ideas/work/projects never saw the light of day even though thinking back, some of them ware actually quite good..


That's why I began writing/making Dream Molder.
I wanted a simple/cute project that actually got out there and showed some of my ideas without giving me the chance to rework/discard them over and over.

This had the advantage that I'm actually getting helpful feedback and have people enjoy(or hate) them, but it also mend that I had to live with not liking some of my stuff myself when putting it out there.


This is not a big problem with smaller projects like simple animations or the Dream Molder Demo that were a one time thing that I didn't have to think about after.

However, working on the Full Version of Dream Molder shows me the things that I don't like over and over. Things that could have been made better, shouldn't have been there in the first place, etc.

It's hard for me to not just tear everything down and start over again because I know I could do it better by now...
But I also know that it would make everything take a lot longer or in the end get nowhere since I'm sure to find something that I don't like after that aswell.

But working with and lingering on something that I don't like is no fun which makes me work slower and decrease quality of everything after that even more...

So where do I draw the line?
I know that it will take ages if I keep reworking things until they have the quality I want, but at what point is it okay to say "I should upload this"?

I guess for now I can only keep trying and figure it out at some point..
Maybe giving more updates would help since I'll also get feedback that can help me decide/change things.

After all I'm probably not the only artist with this problem and I'm mostly a bit whiny and emotional when it comes to this.

Just had to get this of my chest and rant a bit to keep my head clear before I keep working on it...

How was Dream Molder affected by this?

I've been redoing stuff (especially story/writing related things) numerous times.
The best example for this would be the latest demo and it's path structure:

(Endings are named in order I wrote them in btw, even though 1 has been rewritten after 4 and 3 after 5)

While the games story is playing over a couple of months or so I ment to have it run over a longer period of time like a year or two.

However, my unability to write in this kind of style lead to me skipping a lot of things that I thought were very important to the story. Mostly beeing character- and bond developement through Fia's(Braixens) dreams, relaxing and nice filler days and last more details on the world and familiy surrounding the main characters.

So because of my inability to write these parts and make it feel real/good I ended up "rushing" a lot of szenes and the things that were supposed to happen in a year (red arrows) ended up beeing a month instead.

While this is probably acceptable I had to rething/write some story parts which made the game/pacing feel odd and uncomplete.

The endings came way to fast and I had to add scenes that gave a little insight on what happens a while after the story to make up for it. (blue arrows)

Ending 2 even had to be removed completely because of my inability to rewrite it fitting to the new timeline.. (Second reason beeing that a ending that was unfavorable for Braixen probably wouldn't be enjoyable for people that play a Braixen visual novel in the first place)

Sadly this also removed some of the possible decisions/choices which would have let over to the bad path from the other ones.

(Little fun fact: There actually was another "bad" ending planned revolving around path 3, and even though it had amazing potential and probably some hot h-scenes, I couldn't get myself to add it because of how bad it ends for Fia. T.T)


But yeah, long story short:
I've got a lot of things that annoy me with the story and I hope that giving out the Character Sketch Demo will give me the feedback/support/help I need to fix those issues and make it more enjoyable for everyone playing or working on it.


That's pretty much all I wanted to say...
For everyone who actually read through through the entire thing there's really no need to answer since it was more of a random collection of things/thoughts that annoy me at making the game atm and I had to get off my chest.

If you've got questions about any of the above, like deleted scenes, random nonsense be it what I had most fun with making or whatever offtopic you might think of post ahead, I'll answer whatever I see!

Alright, but that's more than enough for now and I should start uploading the demo..!
Have a nice weekend everyone, rant over! :3