Greetings everyone! With Episode 1 in the rearview mirror, we want to take this opportunity to look ahead at the future of Hazelnut Latte. 

This is the second of a six-part series in which we will discuss the future of Hazelnut Latte. What is changing, and how we will release the game.

In this post, we will discuss Scope Creep.

Scope Creep

Now that we have explained Word Count, I want to talk about Scope. Scope is the amount of stuff we want to get done for the game. It's the amount of features, story, modes, etc. It is the parameters we set that define what the game will be. "The game will be X long with Y features and Z characters."

Scope Creep is when you continuously say, "Hey, what if we add in this? How about that?" Because you're making a video game, which is the most creatively freeing and seemingly unlimited art form ever to exist. It can be a book, a movie, an audio drama, a concert, a puzzle game, a rhythm game, an RPG, a dating sim, a life sim, etc., all wrapped into one product.

There are no limits to what a game could be. But there needs to be limits to what a game will be.

When making a game like Hazelnut Latte, you want to do it all. You want to add in every cool character you think of. You want them all to be dateable with their own long story arc. You want to add all these features for the player to do. You want to tell the most detailed, epic, and amazing story.

This also means that the game will never, ever come out. We want this game to come out. We want to make games after this game. (Anyone notice the posters at Hildebrandt's?) For that to happen, we needed to reduce the scope of our game. We cannot think of an idea and immediately add it to the game. That is what we were doing, and it led to bloat.

Biggest Contributor

Now, the biggest contributing factor to scope creep in our game is not the systems and the features. Adding in a minigame does take time, and assets need to be done, but it isn't the biggest factor. Because it will reach a point where the visual novel framework is perfected. We have already reached the point where we are tweaking how the dialogue flows. So all we need to do for programming is add the script and the appropriate sprites. We'll have time to figure out how to make a cool coffee minigame.

The biggest thing is new characters. Every time I add one, that character will need tens of thousands of words to tell their story. Words I need to brainstorm, plan, outline, write, rewrite, rewrite again. And then account for every choice, every difference of personality.

If you look online at other visual novels and their word counts, the number you stumble upon a lot is: 1 Million Words. The Lord of the Rings? 455k words. So when you think about how long it takes an author to write all that, now imagine how long it takes to account for all the different choices. I also have a team to run.

To amend this, I have hired another writer to help me refine my drafts and potentially write new content. But it's still a lot to handle. It's something authors far more experienced and talented than I struggle with. And I don't have the funds to hire them full-time yet. The game just doesn't make enough.

"Perfect is the enemy of good."

Which basically means, if you try to make something perfect, you will never achieve it. You can never make something perfect. Every artist, if you ask them about their work, will have a story about something they've already released that they wish they could keep working on and improve.

You can find yourself in a spiral of constantly tweaking and perfecting, and then you turn around, and you've never released anything. Which is why this big restart is the only one we will do. Which is why, after we leave Episode 1, we are not looking back*.

*Unless there is something really bad that needs a quick band-aid.

I could probably rewrite, tweak, and edit Hazelnut Latte for the rest of my life. And I'd be on my deathbed, wanting to do one more thing. But you can't do that.

Accepting that we can't do it all

Recently, I have been playing other acclaimed visual novels, and I have realized something. We are really aiming high, like, really damn high. The animated sprites, animated lewds, animated moments. The open world, the map, the phone, the date/time, the minigames, etc.

I was playing Steins;Gate, which is pretty well-received, from what I can tell, and it has a whole series, even an anime. And they barely use any art. There was an early scene where multiple characters talked for a while, with a single image on screen. No sprites, no switching, just one CG.

While I do like punching above my weight class and want to make a game with insane polish, it can't all happen right away. So we are not going to prioritize animated Special Moments, and we are going to be more thoughtful about how many Backgrounds we make.

Animated Special Moments

I am happy we got to include this in our first build for Episode 1, but over time, it has proven challenging to keep up with. Again, we only have one animator doing everything, and while Koth is the GOAT, he is still one guy. So if I had to put anything on the animation back burner, it would have to be Special Moments.

Going forward, most Special Moments won't be animated unless we think they really deserve it. Like meeting a new love interest or seeing them in a new outfit. We'll try to prioritize those moments if we can help it.

While Special Moments will be static, I have another animator working on a per-commission basis who will be behind us, catching up on all the Special Moments. The goal is to raise more funds so we can hire more animators and eventually eliminate the backlog. But for now, to get the game out, most will be static.

Backgrounds

By now, we have seen the incredible backgrounds that Pamika is drawing for the game. These backgrounds take time as they are the backbone of the story. That said, we are planning to reduce the number of backgrounds we use and let the Novel part of the Visual Novel do some of the work.

If we are at a pizza place and we have a background of the whole shop with the counter and chairs, and the script says the characters sit down, we don't really need a new image to show them sitting down. You know where they are, and you can envision them sitting down. We don't need to divert time and money to drawing that. 

Would it be cool? Yeah, but if we wanted to do every cool thing, the game would never ship. We need to pick our battles.

Sprites

For the moment, animated sprites are still going to happen for every character. However, if push comes to shove and we realize that we need to shave time somewhere, I am going to prioritize lewd animations.

But if we are working on a build and I find out I need to choose between an animated sprite and a lewd animation, I will pick the lewd animation, and we'll just get back to the sprite later.

For now, we should be good. But in the worst-case scenario, we still have all the 2D sprites.

Wrap up

Scope is something that threatens every video game ever made. If you don't get a handle on it, you end up taking a decade to release a game, if not longer.

This was originally part of an even longer post, but I decided to move the rest of that to its own post, so stay tuned, as tomorrow we will be going over what plan to cut from the game!

Don't forget to join us for our YouTube Live Stream on Wednesday, August 12th, at 9 AM Pacific Time, where we will hold a large Q&A about all this information!

https://youtube.com/live/orTdqwcfGeo 

If you are not available to attend, but still want to submit a question (or want to be nice and give us time to prepare), you can fill out this Google Form with your questions so we can read them during the livestream. 

https://forms.gle/PGRQcjLrw1KzrCvg9

Thank you all so much for your continued support! You're the reason we're even making this game. With that said, Stay Rad!