Hi, everyone!

First of all, seeing as Letter to the Golden Witch is a personal project and fan work, I've been reluctant about appearing to take things too seriously by doing anything like a devlog. However, I have some things I want to share and at the end of the day, a devlog is be the best way to do that.

That being the case, I thought it might be nice to summarize the state of development that Letter is in, and to give an idea of the  progress that's been made on the project thus far. 

So, without further ado: here's a quick dev log for anyone interested in Letter!

General Progress

Script

By far the largest part of Letter in terms of workload is the script itself- the dialogue and narration. At present, the first drafts for Act 1 and 2 (of 3 in total) are close to being finished, which, at an estimate, means about 60% of the total script is at a first draft stage now. 

As this is a passion project, my writing is sporadic, and any Umineko fan story of this scale requires very close and careful planning, so it's difficult to make steady progress. In any case, at my current rate, finishing the first draft of the script in 2021 looks likely! 

Editing and porting to Ponscripter

My current workflow conveniently bundles the editing and VN script conversion processes together- by the time the first draft of a scene has been fully ported in-engine with all the necessary backgrounds, music, sprites & effects, it's also been carefully edited at the same time to make sure it reads well in the VN format, not just as a raw screenplay. 

Though these combined processes might sound like a lot, it's not too hard to take a scene from "first draft" to "finished VN scene" quickly- so, after finishing the first draft of the script, porting everything to Ponscripter should be pretty easy and fast.

Everything else

Besides the script itself, almost everything else is finished. A full set of sprites for the character "Etna Alighieri" with over 40 expressions is complete and working in-game, as well as plenty of other assets like backgrounds, credits scrolls, custom menu UI elements and more. Additionally, all in-game code functionality is done and ready for release, with one exception:

The Tips Screen

I have essentially no programming experience and almost all the work with Ponscripter I've done thus far has been part of a trial-and-error learning process. That approach has generally been very successful, but has unfortunately reached its limit with the tips screen. In short, the tips screen code is very temperamental and difficult to work with, and at present it seems unlikely that I'll be able to get it working for the final release of Letter. 

However, in lieu of a properly functioning in-game tips screen, I've compiled all the character bios & assorted tips from Act 1 into images like the ones below, a full collection of which will be uploaded to the main itch page later!