Hi, Wavi here, bringing you weekly progress updates for Her Choice!

It’s only been 4 days since our February summary log, so I don’t have much to show you this time. But we’ve started work on a bunch of cool stuff, and there’s never a lack of things for me to talk about hahaha.

First up, in January we transitioned from a “working on whatever, whenever, as long as you get it done” system (it was more a state of mind, though) to an actual method that helps us track our working hours. The rush to the demo release was a month-long uphill sprint, and I knew Moon and I needed to curb our workaholic tendencies before we burned ourselves out. At that time I chanced on a reddit article by fellow indie dev jakefriend. While the article itself is about maxing productivity (jakefriend works a 45-hour week, and bathroom breaks don’t count *gulp*), the method looked so simple and efficient, I was inspired to try it out myself.

(You can read the original article here)

We’ve been experimenting with it for about two months, and I can say it now: we are never turning back! Actually, from March we are taking it one step further.

Since we’ve already gotten into the habit of tracking hours, we will be tracking tasks along with them. As the person charged with planning our work, week by week, month by month, in order to lead us to the finish line, I feel almost ridiculous for not having thought of this sooner. I feel that moving on, life will be much simpler (and realistic) now that I have actual average times for each task, instead of winging them off the top of my head (or basing them on my hopes and wishful thinking hahaha).

The second big pro of tracking tasks is that I can schedule for us to be constantly making a little progress on every aspect of the game, not just the most obvious script and sprites, script and sprites, script and sprites. Even if nothing gets finished by the end of the week, there is no need for us to feel disheartened or disappointed, because we know the game has still moved forward towards completion!

That’s also the biggest con, hahaha orz. Since we are now spreading ourselves out, there will be weeks like this, where I have nothing to show you, because everything is still “in progress”. We’ll catch up (sooner or later), so bear with us, ok?

I promise there is good stuff ahead, so smash that like button and don’t forget to subscribe and click the notification bell ……… oh, wrong platform. Jokes aside, we’re hanging out on twitter every day, and would love to interact with you more, so do drop by our profile!

Lastly, on the topic of tracking things, I was inspired and then convinced by Margot over at Tenebrae (which by the way is a gorgeous looking game in the making that you should definitely check out) to start using a spreadsheet to track my script progress. (Yeah, I used to … hm … add up wordcounts manually …)

So, tada, here it is for all to see!

Wordcount is broken down scene by scene, and at the top you can see the total wordcount for each chapter. With the authority of the spreadsheet behind me, I can now officially announce that Her Choice: Act 1 sits at 106’970 words.

…………

I wrote a freaking novel and I still have 44% of it to go hahaha what in the world have I gotten myself into.

__φ(◎◎ヘ)

Well, I have no special image to go with this devlog, so here is some random Hano instead.

See you next week!

- Wavi -