This is the seventh entry of my weekly dev diary for The Weight of a Soul.

Progress

The pace of work is moving back up to a sort of acceptable clip. I finished two scenes, one of which is a math puzzle and the other of which is a monstrously complicated room with lots of things to examine. At first I was worried about not doing enough for the week, but stepping back and considering the amount of work that actually went into this exploratory room, it’s more like two or three scenes.

There are only two weeks left in my schedule for “the end of Day Three” but it’s looking very possible that I can finish the section by the deadline I set myself. It’s heartening that despite the setbacks I will still be able to get things done.

What’s in a Scene?

This week has shown the shortcomings of measuring work by “scenes” (as described in the first dev diary post). Scenes are a decent way to subdivide the work of The Weight of a Soul, but they can vary in length by a shocking amount. For example, I described a room as a “scene,” but some rooms, like Arturus’s Clinic, actually have the narrative length of 8-9 scenes, simply because there’s so much stuff to do in it and so many things to examine.

The room I finished today isn’t quite as insane with Arturus’s Clinic, with the four dead bodies and the multiple dialogues, but it’s still quite an exploration-heavy room with lots of things to examine and read through. This shows that a better unit of work than “scenes” could be helpful in visualizing the amount of work that it actually is to write one of these rooms.

I can’t come up with a good replacement for my “4-5 scenes a week” schema but I will be a lot more aware of the shortcomings of this system of measurement from now on.

• The Weight of a Soul Dev Diary