Our Pre-Alpha for Primrose Path’s common route outline is nearly over! You can imagine it’s taken up most of our time! The playtest's purpose for us is two-fold. We wanted to experiment with how well Inkle Studio's scripting language, Ink, tied into our workflow, and if those in our target audience were interested in playing Primrose Path further.
The Pre-Alpha consists of Primrose Path’s common route presented as a long-form summary. It is overwhelmingly narrative—you are not reading dialogue script. And while it is interactive with a number of choices and variables coded in thanks to Ink, we only chose to create choices in the game which make the concepts we plan to have in our visual novel feasible.
That said, we’re proud to say that there’s actually a lot of opportunities to explore the setting, meet and build connections with the main cast, and have your interactions affect the way your character perceives and is perceived. At about 16,000 words or so for this entire summarized version alone, you can tell there’ll be a lot in store when it comes time for the actual script!
So far, almost all of our responses are from our target audience of heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ persons ages 20-30. And we’re delighted to hear that every single tester—target or not—was interested in playing Primrose Path further!
Playtesting majorly occurs in our Discord server. If you would like to participate in testing and give feedback, you can click this link and ask for the AlphaReader role when you join. Testing and survey submissions will close on June 17th, 11:59 PM EDT.
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
• Revised Outline: 90%
The Artist:
• Draft Outline: 100% ✔
We are almost done with the clean outline of the common route! We’re missing the final scene that resolves the common route, but it wasn't critical to the playtest—and it doesn't hurt to have some surprises!
The next things we’ll focus on will be revising the common route based on the feedback we received from those who played the playtest, and then tackling the common route script.
(Behind the Scenes)
Real Life
Elm just got a new job working as a Junior VR/Real-time artist! While that may slow down some things on the Quiet Days team, the new position builds Elm’s skills in 3D architectural visualisation, which can only benefit our workflow for background art!
Lore Snippets
We told you it was coming! Primrose Path is full of fun facts about characters, locations, events and culture.
The above is a snapshot from our pre-alpha. Lynn comes home from work and video chats with her friend Priya, but is notified of an incoming call from a number she had blocked. She refuses to pick up, but it’s clear that there’s a reason why that number’s blocked.
Our protagonist, as customizable and renameable as she is, exists with her own history. There are people in her life who are present and gone, precious and tenuous. We think it’s exciting that you, player, will have the experience to simultaneously shape and discover who all she is while untangling the lives of the main cast.
PlantPal is a young and popular plant care and delivery service in Primrose Path. Lynn is a frequent customer, shopping through their online catalog of proprietary and partnered nurseries and garden centers. From shrubs to succulents, flowers to grasses, PlantPal couriers arrive with your order and spend up to 20 minutes of free consultation to help you get started caring for your plants today!
Love these snippets? We’ll be posting more on our Twitter under the hashtag #PrimrosePathVN.
Fan Art After playing the Pre-Alpha, a fan by the name of Hazel drew herself taking a selfie with Priya, wearing dresses from the game’s New Year’s Eve party. This photo says #NoFiter, but with how much drinking went down, of course spelling goes out the window.
If you adore Hazel’s fanart like we do and are interested in more of her work, you can follow her on Twitter @HLR_ART.
Accessibility
A carry over from our last update: Quiet Days still wants your take on what we can do to make visual novels more accessible! Your opinions, preferences, and first-hand experiences are important to us, as we all have different abilities and sensibilities—and we all deserve a chance to enjoy this game.[/b] Please get in touch with us either on tumblr or via our Discord.
We’re focusing on monthly devlogs for our Tumblr, but we have to ask:
Are there other kinds of content and updates you folks would like to see here? We want to know! Shoot us a message in our Ask the Devs inbox on Tumblr, or hit us up on Twitter, Discord, and here!
- Do you have concerns about games built in Unity and not Ren'py?
- Are you interested by lore snippets?
- Would you be interested in minigames?
- Do you consider yourself to be a completionist? (Primrose has a lot of hidden scenes and replayability, but we feel a lot of it might just stay unseen).