#...do you think 50k words of main story plus probably an extra 50k of locations and side scenes is too much for an initial demo

[signalhill-if]

Public Trello Board & Progress Update

School is finally over, which means I can dedicate much more of my time to Signal Hill! Today, rather than focus on writing, I decided to look to the future. Establish what work has been done, and what still needs to be done, before the demo can be released.

In furtherance of that, I've created a Trello board that I think can help me focus my efforts, and I've decided to make it public so that y'all can check in on my progress (and hopefully keep me accountable to updating the board, haha)

Let me go over each category individually...

Coding

The majority of the items in the coding list are not huge priorities- that's why they haven't been done yet! I've been procrastinating on finishing the last little bits and pieces, so I created this board to keep track of which things still need to be finished.

Leads & Conversations

Tracking my leads and conversations is less about progress and more about ensuring I don't forget about any of them! Most of them are attached to major scenes, but the smaller leads and less important conversations could go missing easily, and I want to ensure that any uncompleted leads in the demo are uncompleted intentionally.

Locations

This is the nasty one. Lots of writing, very little reward. Basically grunt work. Counting up the checklist items and comparing the finished ones to unfinished ones is relatively pointless, as some locations are much larger than others. Suffice to say, Skid Row and The Stacks are almost finished, the Red Light District is about 1/3 done, The Heights hasn't been started yet (oops), and The Graveyard... I'm still not sure about its scope, so while I've completed some progress on it, I'm leaving it for last.

Writing

This is the DOOZY. The current leads clock in at about 23k words (this is not including locations or conversations that occur outside of the lead scenes), and I'll need to about double that to finish the demo. Some planned scenes, such as Test Run, may not actually end up getting included in the demo- however, the goal is to include a total of 6 main scenes, each ranging from 4k to 10k words. In the finished demo, any character will be able to experience every single one of these scenes if they choose!

This will probably continue to be slow going, but we're making some good progress here! My goal from the beginning has been to keep this project focused, even if it's not progressing entirely quickly, and I feel like I'm succeeding at that goal. The demo release is going to take a while because I'm a bit of a slow writer and have a job and school, not because of feature creep! Hopefully, though, I can dedicate myself to writing as much as possible over the next few weeks and knock out a couple of scenes quickly. Fingers crossed.