Three Days in a Van: glacier's intermortem dev-slog

So I suppose the demo is finished.
Let me say before I begin that Imma just stream of consciousness this one and that it may or may not be worth reading.
I don't want to say "You have been warned," but you have been.
Hic svnt dracones, and all that.

It ought to be noted before I start that I have what I call Worldbuilders' Disease, and I suffer from it severely. The short version of an explanation here is that when I think of things, my imagination tends to simulate them exhaustively, whether the thought pertains to a person, place, thing, action, or scenario. That doesn't necessarily sound too bad until you start getting into sad stories and realistic horror and other situations you don't want to find yourself in, because my brain-- the idiot-- immediately begins to explore what I should feel like if I was in that situation.
Thanks, Dingus. >:[

With that out of the way, let's begin:

It was a peculiar road getting here with cola. I enjoyed it for the most part, although we certainly didn't see eye-to-eye on too, too much.
She invited me to do the jam with her six weeks ago and although I had a lot of reservations, I agreed to it because I thought it would be a good opportunity to get a bit out of my usual comfort zone and also to do something fun with my girlfriend. In hindsight, I probably should have reaaaally hammered home this idea that I was out of my element, as I learned pretty quick that I'm too much of a goddamn marshmallow for this stuff.
I said so at the time but I didn't dwell on it, and I ought to have.

You see, I don't really enjoy it much when bad things happen to characters for no reason, and I like it even less when bad things happen to characters I've come up with for no reason. That doesn't mean that they can never suffer at all! Bad things-- even tragedies-- can take place, and ought to take place, as long as they serve to develop either the character or the plot in some way, even if the point of them is to illustrate that sometimes bad things happen and you need to account for and recover from them. Shit does indeed happen. But when shit is gratuitous and suffering and grief and misfortune is used as decoration, rather than plot (or even setting,) it brings me down and in a way that's difficult to work with, around, or in spite of.
That's not some high-minded editorial on prose or literature or philosophy or anything so judgey. I just have a weird, personal dyscompatibility with it and it makes me feel worse and like a worse person. It's the opposite of my fetish. Lesson: learned.

"But glacier!"
I hear you cry.
"Did you at any point consider that maybe 'toxic yuri' is the wrong genre for you??" 
Yes, actually.  Twice, and seriously.
Once at the very beginning, because it's obvious, and then a second time after realizing that while cola's original plot was certainly correct for the theme and genre, my ability to adapt to it was not at all up to the task. 

To that extent, cola's first story turned out to make me feel really lousy, not because of the writing itself, or even the concept, but because the story made me empathize with the characters involved, who were for the most part dying like nobody's business. My solution was to put some emotional distance between myself and the work I could do for her without agonizing over it, but she would have none of it, because she wanted to do something together, rather than merely with my help.
I was about ready to quit, in fact, when we reread the jam description, which (among other things) described how "toxic" could be any of a variety of themes, whether the more conventional antagonistic or abusive threads, or (I may be paraphrasing here) "two people who make each other worse." And that was a relationship dynamic I could fuck with: Hell-Besties. Beavis and Butthead, but who are, apart, perfectly functional (if somewhat unhappy) people, and also in this case are unemployed lesbian robots.
And so, we settled on a different, toxic-but-less-so concept about these two people whose flaws resonated into absurd decisions and stupid pranks; something toxic but less-depressing. 
Also worth noting: I'm a sci-fi wonk and a geography grad and I wanted to draw some robots and I can never go long without drawing boobs somewhere or another, so I guess I grabbed all those threads and tied them together and doodled some weird-legs titty 'bots and (per Worldbuilders' Disease) gave them jobs and histories and names and circumstances. B was a traveler helper at a spaceport. W is a teamster, but she used to be a surgeon.  Ч is a goofy DANGER, WILL ROBINSON hose-armed automaton with a phone for a head, because it amuses me. A is Conventionally-Attractive-chan. K, who doesn't have a role but was in the concept art, is a fifth robot I drew but got bogged down trying to find a different type of legs for and had a pal suggest on stream that I do Mega-Man boots (which I did). I drew the map as well, partially from my own imagination and partially from cola's concept notes. It was a lot of fun! And it was productive too, I think! Good times~

Anyway we went through a lot of setting building and came up with details and where they went and what they did there and why, and I would say that this part was turbulent but relatively easy. There were a lot of mechanics and gameplay things we smoothed out (although the smoothing process itself had many wrinkles). Aside from my own slowness at making art and cola's and my chronic inability to communicate effectively, it went fairly well; it was fun and I felt like we came up with good stuff!
cola wrote the first  and third days and I wrote the second, and we went over each other's work. I enjoyed what she wrote but, again, as a marshmallow too soft for this type of story, I asked her to tamp down the injuries from "deer girl gets his [pronouns partially explained in the game! :y] mouth, throat, and lungs frozen half to death" to "maybe gets frostbite on his lips." She didn't like that much but did it for my sake, and I appreciate it still.
The second day remains a work in progress and I think it's going all right; may it continue to do so until the deed is done.

I wrote the prologue as well, and in this attempt, it turned out that cola didn't like my prose a whole lot.
This would be fine if we were working on separate things and could casually like or like-less or dislike what we've read and talk about it academically, but in a situation where we have to try and reconcile our stuff into a single document, it became a bit on the agonizing side.
While I have a preference for leaving things unsaid until later and setting up plot hooks for objects and places to become relevant and more-fully explained later, she often prefers for those things to be described in complete detail immediately as they appear, which would be fine except for when it means I have to completely rewrite a scene because things I have introduced now need to be described, and the pacing is all over the map. Adding two sentences to explain a thing I want to explain later destroys the cadence of the writing for me, I suppose. Replacing it with something else feels bland and dissatisfying. Sometimes the easiest solution is to delete the offending element entirely, but I don't always get away with that, either. Feels Bad, Mang. Trying to make those edits with one of us editorializing over the other's shoulder makes it harder still. Harder, and at times, profoundly frustrating.

Still.

Having said all that, I'm glad I worked on it, and I'm happy to continue and see it through. It's been good and I've learned a lot about myself and I got to do a fun with with a loved one. I drew some cool robots and learned more about Ren'Py and Clip Studio. I have a lot complimentary and (uh) unflattering things I can say about Clip Studio, in fact, which I think I'll leave unsaid. (Inshallah it will not come up in a later chapter.)

But yeah. Troubled planet. Robot lesbians. Roadtrip. They're awful, but at least they're awful together.

Going to work on this and ArtFight for the rest of July, then return to Three Days wholeheartedly in August.

Adios! See you then! <3

 -- g