(This is Part 2 of Ribbit's Anniversary Post. Part 1 can be found here)

HOW’S THAT UPDATE COMING ALONG ANYWAYS

Since I finished the script back on September 3rd, that means full-time development began only after then. Over these last 4 months, we’ve been effectively shaping up Ribbit into its alpha phase: Developing art assets, and coding in rough versions of every scene in the game. Due to the overwhelming amount of pages for the new update’s script, I realized my team would have a really difficult time reading and memorizing it all… that’s why, I’m prioritizing the creation of cutscenes above anything else, so that I may slowly show my team, video by video, where the story is heading. It’s kinda like weekly episodes, and I think it’s a fun way to warm your team up to your vision!

Anyway, so far, I’ve developed seven scenes for the update… wait, only seven?! Wait, wait, no, it’s okay! I have excuses! I have excuses!!

Well, a “scene” can actually mean a lot of things in this context. For example, one of the scenes is actually a full exploration sequence across a series of multiple rooms, which takes considerable time to set up. It’s not all just 2-minute cutscenes and such. Given the nature of this being the finale to Ribbit, many of these scenes require a significant amount of effort to put together, for the sake of them living up to being a climatic sequence to the game. We also do have to keep in mind that as much as I have a team, that’s primarily in terms of art. I’m still fully in charge of programming, on top of audio editing, direction, having to brief the art team on every new scene that arrives, and writing this godforsaken anniversary post.

Aside from that though, the new update is also taking some strides to increase its production value. Redd, god bless his soul, has been working on redesigning every single MOTHERSPAWN enemy from scratch, and has unfortunately had to put up with me overseeing all of it. I want to ensure these designs stick as closely to the original mood as possible, while bringing out other intents that were previously lost to the conceptual phase, or just a result of our past limitations. No matter how you slice it though, these will be pretty different from the original designs, which is why there will be a setting that lets you re-enable the old designs back on.

Another way I would like to improve the presentation of Ribbit is via voice acting! Now, important to stress upfront that we’ve had a discussion about retroactively adding voice clips to existing parts of the game, which I rejected as that would drastically alter the tone. Instead, all new instances of voice acting will be present for the newly-added scenes, all of which will only be accessible in that 2nd run of the game. It’s not gonna be too fancy, mostly grunts and laughs and maybe one-two spoken lines to give certain scenes impact. My philosophy towards voice lines is that they should feel like a reward, not something you expect around every corner. Of course, this has added “voice director” onto my list of roles, and that too takes a lot of time. But, for scenes that were specifically built around this new feature, I can't wait to show you the voice talent's efforts!

To be honest, even saying this much is more than I’ve ever planned to say about the new update… I was hoping to originally keep literally everything about it a secret until the day of its release, even down to me saying a new update was coming out at all. As is clearly turning out to be the case, though, the update is bigger than originally planned, and so I need to at least let people know to wait patiently. 

What a good time to do it too! Ribbit continues being talked about through the grapevine here and there, and so the thought of giving you one more thing to cap things off excites me more than ever. Feels like I’ve already done all my heartfelt messages before [IN PART 1], so it’s a little hard to come up with one now… but, hey, thanks anyway man. Just, for reading this, for playing this, for laughing at it, resonating with it. Could be you’ve done either just one of those things, could be you’ve done all of them. Whether you liked something about Ribbit or disliked something else,.. 

To put it mildly, I think this post demonstrates that my perception of what it meant to write has been fucked up for a while, as far back as 2019, with me wanting to cater Ribbit to every audience at the same time everywhere. It took a while to climb out of this, but I think putting something out to the internet has allowed me to go through the process of figuring out what I really wanted to do in my life. It’s given me the validation I wanted, alongside the criticism I desperately needed. It also clouded my vision. Other people’s voices became my voice. But, I got to live that experience. I recognized its deeper problems. I incorporated them into my story. 

Eventually, when I put out this update for everyone to share their opinions on Ribbit once more, I’ll have to live that experience one more time. This time, with hindsight. I am in all likelihood going to disappoint somebody. I’m likely going to spot some flaws in it after a few months or years of it being out. And that’s okay. Perfection is impossible anyway, though improvement is always within hand's reach.

That’s all for this year. May I see you in the next one.

When you’re making a story, you should probably write the script first. - Maxine 2024