#primrosepath

PRIYA: Morning, hotshot. PRIYA: Wow, you look like you woke up on the wrong side of life... PRIYA: ... then fell out of bed and onto two fists. One for each eye.

The tall blonde woman folds her cards and rises from her seat in a huff. SAMSON: (Chuckles) Clearly, you don't share your wife's sense of humour. She rolls her eyes, throwing her bag over her shoulder. AMANDA: Pipi, we're leaving. As she leaves, a small Pomeranian jumps off from Sam's lap and scurries behind her.

PRIYA: Are our readers interested in intimidating, towering thug dad vibes? MC: Are you? PRIYA: I watch hour-long videos of a buttery-voiced Russian narrating a tournament between elephant beetles in captivity. PRIYA: I am not the majority of our readers.

With her grasp firmly on me, I pull her out of the crowd. Her prim and proper appearance, a little more disheveled. MC: That wasn't so bad, right? LEIGH-ANNA: You're insane. MC: Y'know, people do say that.

If this is the kind of content you like to see, we’d love for you to jump into our Discord server! We occasionally share much longer unrevised excerpts and discuss the game in much more depth with our community.

Behind The Scenes

Concepts

This is a potential face concept for auto and tech CEO, Samson Opeyemi. We’re trying to work around a few face refs, so as well-rendered as this sketch may be, we’re eyeing a few other facial structures. 

Are you a fan of any of these? Let us know! We love to hear from you guys, and your support can have a direct influence on our design decisions. We want this to be something everyone enjoys.

Real Life

Coda’s been contracted for a sequential artist position with an animation and video game studio! Getting some industry-level experience on creating and managing production materials is nothing but a boon for the team going forward. She believes this will strengthen her composition and scene directing skills, which will help make Primrose Path and other projects going forward much more engaging.

A Short Break

The holidays are here, so we’ve decided we're gonna take it a little easier this month! Our next update will be at the end of January, as we settle down for the festive period and college finals. Self care is important to us, so we make a conscious decision to try and achieve a more balanced lifestyle. We're far from perfect, but we encourage everyone else to do the same.    We hope to see you in 2020 with some big changes! ♥

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask: Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Socials

My eyes dart to the Prince so I can apologize for the misunderstanding, but his gaze pierces through me as he laughs.

PRINCE: Oh, don’t be such a tease. PRINCE: Are you getting coy over what you shared about Priya? PRINCE: (smiling) Because that would be silly… and unadvised.

EZRA: Old royal buildings. It used to belong to a runaway Prussian heiress—a distant cousin of the Romanovs.

He freezes as the panel clicks open and slowly reveals a small stairwell.

EZRA: Allegedly.

Pique your interest? You don’t have to wait for one every month: we share more unrevised draft snippets in our Discord server. Join if you’d like to peep longer excerpts and chat with us over them!

Behind The Scenes

CGs in VNs Survey

We had questions about CGs and wanted to know what fans of the visual novel community thought about them, the role they play, examples they enjoyed, and more. We received over 200 responses from folks across different platforms—all this is in addition to our previous survey which received over 100! There's only two of us, so it'll be a while to get through all the data, but we’re excited to interpret and release them in separate posts coming soon!

Writing GitScrum Board

We’ve had this feature in our Discord server for much longer, but now that we’re writing our script draft for the common route, we’ve decided to open up our writing GitScrum board publicly. Now you lot passing by can peek into our progress on scenes at any point. Please, feel free to hold us accountable for how much we get done weekly. Your watchful eyes spur us on.

Code Blog

We're keeping up a mini-blog on side projects and developments! Elm will be talking about developing with Unity, starting with basic knowledge and things to consider during the early stages of production. If you're interested in hearing about 2D narrative development in Unity via our projects from start to finish, you can stop by Elm's coding blog!

Real Life

Coda’s back in college this semester, and she’s decided to pick up a 3D Game Graphics class to learn some asset creation basics. The class will teach her how to make a low-poly asset pack for creating environments, interiors, and props in Maya 2019 to explore in the Unity game engine. Quiet Days’ method for creating backgrounds in Primrose Path uses 3D modeling as a base for our environments, which is later rendered and post-processed in 2D. This is the main reason Primrose can exist at it's current scale! Elm is the one with the BA (Hons) for 3D, but Coda wanted to take some of the weight off of Elm for efficiency. Wish her the best; so far she’s had a great first day!

Lore Snippets

BŌGLŌ

BŌGLŌ is a trendy meal replacement drink in the universe of Primrose Path. Although many consumers are skeptical about its appearance, the bioluminescent algae smoothie has become a popular drink among its eccentric audience. Creator and CEO of BŌGLŌ, Chouette Lars is a contentious figure in the natural holism movement. Many prominent holists denounce her for appropriating the ideology in her pseudoscientific and capitalist ventures. Lars’ health claims for the drink have been found inconclusive by food scientists and nutritionists. BŌGLŌ glows brighter when agitated, is allergen-free, may stain teeth, and comes in such flavors as “Pasta La Vista” and “Cake or Death”.

Love this snippet? We’ll be posting more on our Twitter under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, but come back here to get detailed insight beyond Twitter’s character limit. 

We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft!

Thanks for reading! Remember to take it easy on your Quiet Days. ♥

Socials

Lore Snippets

Primrose Path has deep lore that sprinkles itself across the narrative. Although we still have to go through beta before release, you can look forward to having some special previews long before the game is out. Our Twitter will now include occasional snippets of lore and fictional media which may be referenced in-game. They’ll all be tucked under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN, so stay tuned!

Greyson

Everyone's favourite virtual assistant, Greyson, has joined the World Wide Web! Greyson's database now regularly Tweets voice assistance snippets as if he was your very own! Isn’t he a sweetheart? Currently, his schedule is once every Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday. You can interact with him here!

Discord

Our discord server is for all current and future Quiet Days' games! Recently we have been mentioning and voting on early concepts long before releasing them to the public, as well as logging our project tasks to hold our productivity accountable. If being in the know is something that interests you, you can slip on in here.

Accessibility

A major thing we’ve been dealing with this past month is redirecting our design to be more inclusive, via accessibility. Great game design starts when these things are considered ahead of time, rather than as an afterthought.

Currently we are very much open to hearing about what we can do to make visual novels more accessible. We have some ideas and designs of our own for the future, which include mindful options over font choices, audio-related functions, and content warnings.

Share with us your accessibility concerns in video games! Opinions, preferences, and first-hand experiences will be of great help, as we want to make sure people with different abilities and sensibilities can have a chance to enjoy our game!

Main Game Progress

Coding

Coding is underway on the Primrose Path team! Our current focus is introducing the Ink scripting language into our current workflow, which we think will tie into our natural way of writing script while allowing for easier, lighter coding of varied branching narrative. If we succeed in the integrations we have planned, we think this will deepen the level of interactivity for the game overall. Which reminds us:

Outlining

Primrose Path is very much still in the scripting department. We have a very thorough process, where we create a heavily detailed draft outline that covers the overall entire game. (It's currently a whopping 30,000 words, but this amount goes up and down as we fill in and delete what's transferred to the clean outline.) We then take this, revise, and transfer it to a 'clean' outline, which breaks down each scene on a beat by beat basis. Only then do we move onto script.

On that note, we're rather happy to say that the common route of our draft guideline document is fully complete! Work on that route's clean outline is nearly finished at a pretty 5,500 words or so. That’s an easy read, as we’ve had to boil it down from tens of thousands of words, weeks of discussion, and countless passing ideas!

Common Route:

   •   Draft Outline: 100% ✔

   •   Clean Outline: 66%

The Artist:

   •   Draft Outline: 100%  ✔

With The Artist's route draft outline 100% completed, we've come a long way since the plotline's inception. The Artist is a bisexual love interest named Matthias Barousse, a soft-spoken social butterfly best known for his interactive media exhibits—and a bit of a playboy reputation in the community. His route is a tightrope walk between perceptions of good intentions and questionable engagements as rumors about his sex life come to the fore. Is he a good Samaritan or a master manipulator? He'll say it's not his place to judge—is it yours?

And we can’t forget to put a face to the name:

Artwork

The beguiling and provocative multimedia artist, Matthias Barousse

It’s another rough sketch, but here’s an initial concept for The Artist. We’ll be playing around with his look in the future, but Matt for certain likes parkas and has long locks to glide your fingers through.

In other news, we ran a poll on Twitter to see which hairstyles people preferred for another love interest, Ezra Safir, the Executive Assistant. Based on both the poll and written responses in spaces where the poll was shared, the methodical organizer and jazz enthusiast will be sporting this:

That low bun and undercut looks good on him! You guys have pretty great taste!

Coda also took the time to whip up fan art (yes, our own fan art; hear us out) of your best friend, Priya, gearing up for your makeover like any other grown woman in her late twenties:

(original source) 

Was asking Priya, of all people, a mistake? You’ll have plenty of time to think on that as she blocks the only exit out of the bedroom.

We're focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask: 

Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox here on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and Lemma Soft! 

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

    ♦ Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!

- Continue the discussion on Discord!

“Grey, Inc. just released a new AI update. Here’s a snippet from their website:

Meet Greyson, your virtual personal assistant. He connects to your existing smart home ecosystem and helps you have total control over your lifestyle!

A Great Listener: His unique evolving encryption encoding allows you to securely dictate information to him as he accesses and updates all your synced business, social, and productivity accounts to the cloud.

A Big Brain: With a zettabyte worth of memory at your fingers, Greyson can always recall local and cached data in a fraction of a second, so you’re always connected even when you’re offline. His new No-Brainer mode gives him short-term memory, so all new information is immediately forgotten in a configurable time frame!

Knows You Best: With improved prediction in Ghost mode, Greyson can autorun all your learned routines with minimal reminders after only a month of monitoring your data.

Stylish Too: You can also customize his or any of his family members’ appearance and voice with our ever-growing, open source library of cosmetic assets. You can even mod your own skins and audio files and upload it to our paid developer store!

Greyson always has you best interest at heart. He’s here for you.

Greyson is so savvy that you can actually follow him on social media.” -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Sprawling Metropolis to Explore

We’ve no shortage of lore and locations in Primrose Path. There will be over 100 beautiful location backgrounds to experience—not including our atmospheric day, evening, and night variations. We will be introducing more in-universe teasers like Greyson in future updates!

Customizable Female Protagonist

Lynn is a woman with history, family, career, and taste. You can’t change that. But you can change her look! With five different hair colors and skin tones each, you can create a more relatable character to view in relevant, gorgeous snapshots in your CG gallery. That's 25 possible CG variations!

NaNoRenO

This year’s NaNoRenO—the Ren’py version of NaNoWriMo (a.k.a. National Novel Writing Month)—is starting this March, and fellow developers using the visual novel engine are psyched! NaNoRenO’s premise is to challenge indie teams to create a playable, fully-developed visual novel by the end of the month!

A game the scale of Primrose Path can’t possibly be completed in that span of time, but the Quiet Days team is still sharing the game jam’s spirit! We won’t participate in NaNoRenO, but we’re inspired to push through development alongside it. We’ll be using the event to measure how far we can get with an in-house demo, and give more substantial visual updates in the future!  

While our blog is still the best way to receive regular, thorough updates on Primrose Path, you can now keep up with our Lemma Soft thread, which we update as a sort of master document!

Nanoprogress 

Continuing on the NaNoRenO thought, while we won’t be creating assets until March 1st, we do have a head start on concept and design work! Our progress so far: 

Concepts / Design work 

Characters: 21%

Locations: 11%

... We’re calling it “nanoprogress” for a reason, but rest assured, the steps we’re taking are anything but small. We’ll update as we go. Keep up!

Socials

- Micro-updates on Twitter!

      ♦  Factoids with Greyson!

- Live art development on Twitch!

- Art logging on Instagram!

- Ask us anything here!