Trembling Essence Devlog 10:๐Ÿ’™Going into the Morning route + Fail-safe balance!!๐Ÿ’™


Hi helloo and welcome new followers, here's how game progression is going! :]

Quick recap:

I plan on doing a future update hopefully before the end of the year that serves as a quality of life to fix issues from the [Extended Demo] I didn't catch during the initial release. This includes updating most of the script, CG's, and bringing the overall story up to date with how I want things to be. :]


I usually get very busy closer to the end of the year so I tried to get as much as I could done. So far I've been editing the "Morning route" and updating most of the story building which includes outdated CG's. I did end up getting a good amount finished before spooky month starts! :,,]

I want to be super careful with the pacing but this shouldn't take as long compared to the "Afternoon route" which took more time than expected when the [Talk to Noah], [Look around.], [Go to sleep.] and [Continue to wait.] choices were outdated and not complete.

Morning route adjustments + Fail-safe balance:

I only played/fixed a little bit of the "Morning route" back in the spring of this year when I wanted to do 4* routes. Now that it's only 3 I now have to go back and pretty much adjust everything I did during that time and make sure all of the pacing is done correctly.

The 'Morning route' might be abouttt 65%-80%(??) different depending on your choices but I still need to do a bit more work towards this. Some choices were edited/combined and a good amount of dialog/certain scenes were updated to make the flow of the story a bit better. While I was going through the demo I found more continuation issues that I didn't catch. If Noah's closeness towards the player(Y/N) doesn't lead to a Bad Ending but isn't high enough you'd get alternative dialog but when the game continues the rest of Day 3, an error would happen. There was also a section of dialog in this that I decided to cut since it's very outdated and I think It may have added as a form of 'filler dialog' initially but I'm not sure anymore. I also added 2 more fail-safe's in the game to balance things out a bit more. These have also been adjusted with updated dialog and CG's.

I'm reallllyyy hoping these fail-safe's aren't too intrusive during game-play. I'll probably do a poll about this in the future after the update to the [Extended Demo] has been out for a while. :,,,]

Choice progress:

Here's the progress on the choices being updated. At first I had a good idea on what to do and I got pretty far with my ideas but unfortunately I hit a writers block during the middle of this month because there was a continuation issue that I just couldn't write around. There were also some interactions that happened way too early in Day 3 between the player(Y/N) and Noah that ended up creating 3 branching arcs that were too spoiler-y and too much for me to try handle. Eventually I got help from my play tester and we bounced off ideas and there was a happy solution in the end that I liked. Speaking of my play testers, in good news both of them were able to test out the new content and I got a lot of great feedback! :,D

New CG's + sneak peeks:



I was really looking forward to re-doing a lot of the CG's for the "Morning route". Back when I uploaded the [Extended Demo] this route was actually missing(?) CG's but at the time, I really wasn't good at perspective so a lot of them were scrapped. Something funny happened while I was testing things out though, I discovered I had two different living room CG's that were slightly different in morning hues. I have no idea how I didn't catch this when uploading the [Extended Demo] back then but one good thing that came out of this was finding a hidden Noah sprite behind the CG's which got a laugh out of me. Speaking of this I ended up finding a few more in different sections too. :P

*Speaking of CG's, certain ones might be re-used in specific parts of the game for Day 4+ etc, just in case/to save on file space. :,,,]

Here's an example of what I mean! This CG can be seen in the "Afternoon route" but things like lighting etc, will be adjusted for different times of the day in the routes. :]

Other than other stuff being taken care of behind the scenes, I don't think I have much else to say for right now. :[]


If you like what I create, please consider supporting what I do on kofi [Here]! All donations and tips help tremendously while I continue to work on the game!

Q&A / Ask box is open:

To know and understand Noah through Asks and random posts about lore, they'll be under #Get to know: Noah ! :]

**Some asks won't be answered if it contains spoilers but I do appreciate what I receive. :]

If you have any questions about Trembling Essence/Noah feel free to ask here or on itch.io please. This makes it easier for me to see and answer accordingly! I enjoy hearing from you guys!

Thank you guys for all the continuous support, I really appreciate it!! Happy early spooky month! >:]

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