Siren Song Chapter 3 - Progress Report 3/8/25

Hey Everyone!

It's been almost 3 weeks and I wanted to share what I've been up to. (Hint - I've been busy!)

I'm about half way done writing chapter 3. If everything works out the way I expect it to, it should be a fun one.

I've finished rendering the first scene, so that puts me at about 10% more or less.

I have also been busy on Suno writing songs for Charlie, Bobby, Willow, Vikki Vex, as well as other bands we will meet along the way. I plan to go back and add actual songs to the previous chapters so you can hear what I have heard in my head when rendering and coding those scenes.

The biggest news is really more about my progression with all of my projects including Siren Song: Adding galleries!

=========Development Storytime (Skip if you like)===============

It has always been a goal of mine to have a gallery in my games.

Well, I finally learned how to add one. I know, I suck at coding. It probably shouldn't have taken me this long, but here we are. Anyway, I used the stock tutorial "game" built into Ren'Py as my original guinea pig, and after I figured out the basics with that, I moved on to Christmas Eve. CE is a much smaller/shorter game, so I figured it would be easier to add a simple gallery to it first. So, while I was doing that, I had to confront the noisy image of an elephant in the room. Good gods those images are noisy. So....I FINALLY cleaned them up. I found a program that could denoise images in batches so, I used that. It only took about an hour or so to do 1300+ images. They came out looking pretty impressive. Check it out:

BEFORE...

AFTER...

It's not perfect, but it's definitely way better. So much so, that I've decided to release a "new and improved" version of Christmas Eve in the near future. I promise it won't interrupt my progress on SS too much! I also noticed a few typos and a couple of inconsistencies/continuity errors in the CE story, so I will fix those as well. What you will get is a more polished version of CE that fits the overall story between itself and NYD better with improved images, features and overall appearance.

===================== Storytime Over ========================

This paves the way for galleries in NYD as well as SS. NYD will get a standard gallery of special scenes and animations as well as a "Bios" gallery that will have unlockable backstories for characters as they are introduced and/or when spoiler-appropriate.

Siren Song will have these two things as well as (hopefully) a music gallery where you can listen to the songs from the game and perhaps any Siren Song inspired music that you guys decide to submit. They can be covers of my songs or anything you like. I'll also add a link to my Bandcamp profile where you can download the songs from the game.

Anyway, I hope you guys are happy about this. I know I'm super excited to add these features to my stories. I gotta get back to Charlie and Bobby and see if they are gonna do what I want them to do, or if they're gonna go off and do whatever they want. I know Charlotte tends to do that from time to time. Maybe it runs in the family.

Until then, hug the ones close to you while you can. My mom is in the hospital right now, and it's screwing with my emotions. So yeah. Be safe, be good, and keep rockin'.

Love y'all,

~ Jonesy