[Newsletter Archive] HUGE Three Lilies Progress!

Originally published July 25, 2022.

Today’s issue goes over writing and previews of some backgrounds, as well as future expectations for the newsletter, the main development blog, and the individual devlogs on itch.io.

Writing: FIRST DRAFT 100% COMPLETED

After a long time coming, the first draft of Three Lilies has been completed.

What happens next is that I’m going to leave it alone for a week to give myself time away from it. Then, I get to return to it and start working on the second draft with fresh eyes. If need be I’ll do a third draft (and I will let that second draft sit as well before implementation just in case), but ideally I’m going to have that second draft be the final.

Now, I wanted to post a snippet from Countryside as a nice little picture, but Revue doesn’t give you the option to set the alt text for images (WHY?) and the caption with the description would come out long and awkward, so I’ll just…paste it in here.

nar "Huifang looks up at Anna through her eyelashes."
anna "N-Nevermind...!"
anna_t "Oh, shit, she's so close!"
anna_t "What am I supposed to do when you look at me like that, huh?!"
anna_t "Now that I've got such a good look at her, she seriously beats all those girls I hooked up with at the bar by a long shot!"

Art: Sprites Complete, Backgrounds Time

With the sprites now complete (I’ll show them eventually in character introduction tweets, it’ll be a surprise!), I am moving on to background art. Some assets are being remade so they can be bigger…and more accurate.

A work-in-progress painting of a subtropical, bumpy forest, with lots of mist.
Now THIS is starting to look a little more like a forest on a subtropical island.

Much better. (Compare: the old one, where I quickly textured thick lines and made bushes and called it a day because this was originally a jam game.)

Here’s a couple finished ones for the road:

A misty blue-grey sky with plenty of clouds.
A cloudy night sky with sparse stars and the faint light of civilization from below.

Newsletter VS Itch Devlogs VS Main Blog

So, here’s the deal: all three of these things offer notifications by e-mail. If you were to, say, both follow milk+ visual on itch AND subscribe to this newsletter, posting the same information on them twice would just be redundant.

Here is how I plan to utilize these three channels of information, plus our social media.

Small updates will go on Twitter, and even smaller play-by-play updates typically go in the dedicated dev channel on the Discord.

When enough of these little updates have accumulated, I will compile them all into a Revue newsletter issue, thus making the milk+ visual tribune the place to subscribe to for update round-ups. I will also start reposting these newsletters onto our Tumblr for those that primarily follow us there.

After a couple of update round-ups, I will make the game devlogs the place to post game-specific update round-up compilations. That way, those who are only sticking to the devlog updates for information get a steady stream of information, but aren’t getting information so frequently it becomes irritating.

The main development blog will be used for major announcements, such as going gold, release date announcements, and so on. To emphasize their importance, the updates posted on that blog will also be pushed through the newsletter AND the relevant devlogs.

I know everyone has different preferences for how they’d like their updates delivered to them. So, if you’d like to keep up with milk+ visual stuff, here’s the breakdown again (with links!):

Thanks everyone for being so patient with me, especially after a couple years of trying and experimenting with this whole PR thing and just generally getting the hang of everything after Soundless’s surprising reception and real-life bumps. I think I’ve finally achieved a flow that works for me, knock on wood.

Let’s move forward into the future!

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