This is the twelfth entry of my dev diary for The Weight of a Soul.
Progress
So I’ve laid out the structure of Day Four. It’s going to start by following through on the big end-of-Day-Three reveal, giving Marid a dialogue with the antagonist where she can ask questions and have a sort of verbal battle now that we finally know who the antagonist is. After that, Marid has to escape from captivity in a short puzzle sequence, make one final journey through the Channelworks District overworld, and confront the antagonist in the highest point of the Channelworks. Predictable, I know, but I felt it was the best way to hit all the plot points and emotional beats leading up to the climactic showdown.
Right now I’m working my way through the “cinematic” at the beginning and the dialogue with the antagonist. As I mentioned earlier, I find dialogue the hardest part of The Weight of a Soul to write, so it’s not going very quickly. It’s also a pretty heavy conversation that hits some emotional dark points for me, at a particularly depressing time to be alive. I’m taking my time to write this dialogue because it’s emotionally draining, it’s difficult to write, and this scene in particular is an incredibly important unskippable plot point so it has to be good.
Adapting the Timeline
Since this dialogue is such a pain, and I’m already behind on my schedule for Day Four, I no longer believe that I can finish the story by December 31st. At least, not if I keep following the same workflow and polishing everything to the same degree of quality.
I believe I’ll end up somewhere around the final confrontation, without enough time to write the epilogue sequences. That means I will need an additional couple of weeks, give or take, to finish the story proper, which would put my “pen down, stop writing” day on January 15.
I am okay with this pushing back of the schedule because my original schedule included a little bit of flex for this exact sort of situation. If push comes to shove, there is still time for me to cut nonessential features like the original music score. (I can produce whatever I’m able to produce and make up for the remainder by licensing appropriate ambient music tracks, such as the ones at tabletopaudio.com.)
Chin Kee Yong 