Damn, time flies. Especially when you are having computer troubles! After a month of struggling to figure out how to get my computer to synch with our server, I finally gave up and reinstalled the program. That’s all it took. Now that I have all of the most recent artwork, I finally can update the website! Woot!

So, as of today, we have new artwork for Ben (new Portal Pic!), Briel, Seta, Calen and Liora. I also have the Japanese web text in hand, but still need it proofed and my translator is having family issues. Maybe next month for that update…

I truly realize how large a task it is to put together a really good OP (opening sequence) for your game.  The OP team finds itself scrutinizing every edit and every frame.  I think we still have more to go, but at least we are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Anyway, every pass we make gets us closer.

Most of my time has been spent debugging the script as well as taking care of purely administrative/business things, but I have managed to crank out the Briel and End sequence scripting.  Also we’ve done some more of the OP/”demo movie,” but that is still only partially complete.  Hopefully we can power forward on those tasks.  At this point, we’re debugging script errors, adding in some of the conditional brnaching and dropping in backgrounds.  One last art dump should finish things, and then we have final testing/tweaking, package design…shopping around for retail partners…then we might actually start shipping these guys!

This was done as a composite image just so that I could get the visual height differences (master file had pixel height lines that I removed from the web version of the image), so some of the art doesn’t match perfectly.  And yeah, there are some cast missing…but…at least you can start to see the cast fall into place.

While I’m posting images, here is a production Settei of Ed’s friend at New Pacifica University (Earth), Tina.

I’m posting a tentative background.  We’re still working out some details, but I think this is the direction we will go.  This is the Vinatu Royal Academy’s fountain in the area known as the Garden.  Liora likes to read news here.

Whew, Liora and Seta scripts now complete.  Still waiting on Briel, along with the end sequences.  Then we integrate backgrounds, the H scenes and we should be pretty close.

Kindee scripting done!  Note that there are still bits of the script that need to be changed, but the bulk of the scripting for the Kindee story arc is now in place.  On to Liora!

Well, took a bit longer than expected, but Elika’s story arc scripting is complete.  I’ve still got a few bugs, and the three size (no pun intended) scaling that I picked isn’t working out, so I’m going to have to make the difference in size even more dramatic to get the effect I want.  Still, progress is progress, now with Elika as a template, Kindee and Liora will go faster.  Hmm, yes, I’m also working on an arc for Seta and Briel too, so that means we have a little bit for everyone!

Anyway, back to work!

OK, I admit, things got a bit crazy.  I HAVE been working on the game, but the day job kinda got in the way.  A quick production update:

1.  Story is all done!  Wow!  Finally!  Don’t mess up…the difference between winning and losing is…err…dramatic.

2.  Got a big chunk of the production artwork.  I’m still missing some parts, but enough to finish 80% of the game now.  Got all of the settei.  Not sure if I will post that right away.

3.  SVN ate my scripting revisions.  I lost a few days work because the HDD on the SVN server crashed.  Actually, it was something stupid I did on the client side that overwrote my changed files.  Just as well, there were some revisions that needed to go in.  I worked on it over Christmas (took a few days off, but it ended up being spent visiting people instead of actually doing script work…sorry!)  I started to play games on my 360 and PS3…that was a horrible mistake.

4.  Adding the music and sound effects changes things a LOT.

5.  Gonna play around with 3 sizes for each character.  I saw that in another game by another rather famous Japanese Visual Novel maker and liked it.  Way better than the traditional single size.

OK, less blogging, more working…just wanted to make sure people didn’t think the production team vanished.  Oh yeah, on the programming side been doing a lot of bug fixes.  The multilingual system creates some challenges that we need to work out on the scripting and menu side.  I THINK we have if fixed.  Also doing some Vista testing.  In general I hate Vista, but what can you do…most machines have it installed nowadays.

Oh yeah, a side note…for now we’re sticking to a 4:3 aspect ratio.  We’ll see how that works.  We may eventually have to look into a 16:9 or 16:10 solution…but then the file sizes are going to get huge if we support images at 1080p.  Well, thats not a problem for people buying the physical disk, but since we might have to do downloads, that could be a problem.  I guess thats the one disadvantage of having a full powered 3D/2D engine.  Still, when the next generation of our games come out using the same platform, that will be worth it…I hope.