Here are some character sketches for Princess Elika drawn by LoneWolf. Elika is dedicated to her family, ed Laragi and to her planet, Tau Ceti 5. She takes her responsibilities very seriously, but occasionally wishes she could escape the burdens of royalty and be a typical girl. She loves music from the Vegan rock band, Silver Stars.

(For the curious, yes, that is Konata’s ahoge. I couldn’t help myself.)

We’re taking the Crunchy Pixel core engine and writing up the script. We did 2 of Elika’s scenes. It was really cool to see her change her expression to the dialogue. Felt like the characters were alive. I’m pretty psyched. Finally got around to doing the continuity check for the Liora scenes.

Also figured out a new scriptwriting protocol that matches the LUA for the scripting. The scripting system is complicated, but pretty cool. We were able to make effects changes and everything without recompiling. I think I can now figure out how to write the scripts to this format to make things easier.

Now that I see Elika alive, I’m dying to see Liora. Boy, I want this to be successful, I’d love to see these characters animated…lol.

Finally got around to updating the “About Us,” “Contact Us,” and “Support” pages of the site.  Definitely these will require more updates soon and I *really* have to spend the time on the back end to get comfy with how to post the images.  The ‘H’ images may require some sort of trickery so people can opt-in after they lie and/or assure us that they are over 18 and can take responsibility for what their innocent eyes may see.

I keep starting to write nice short blogs and wind up with freakin’ term papers.  Maybe I’ll post them here later, but I have diarrhea of the keyboard that makes everyone else seem like mimes!  I blame the job description.  Marketing guys are supposed to babble like idiots…

It took me a while to get Elika’s sotry arc finished, but with that as a template, I was able to roughly pace out Liora’s story arc.  With Elika’s story as a rough pacing guide, I rolled up my sleeves this weekend and managed to finish Liora’s major story arc.  There are a few touchups and continuity checks needed, but that means that the only sequences left that need to be completed are the Kindee sequence (which I started), as well as the minor arcs for Seta and Briel.  Seta should be a lot easier now, since doing the Liora story arc really helped me flush out Galactic Civilization.  Hmm, this story and universe is getting way more complicated than I expected, and I don’t think I can fit all of the material into the context of the current game.  Come on people, buy this thing so I can make a sequel…lol.

I usually write prose not dialogue, so this has been a unique challenge for me.  Still, its nice to see the personalities of the characters starting to show through.  I have been letting LoneWolf read some parts so she has a feel for the character personalities.  Honestly I’ve been writing off of her sketches, and she has been drawing off of my notes and references, so I think the character personalities and looks match pretty well.

I should receive some settei for some of the major characters soon, so that will be cool.  I will post a version online when I get a chance.  With the settei, I’ll be able to generate more marketing materials…and with the settei, LoneWolf can finish up the production art for the characters.  Backgrounds are still a bit of a challenge, but we’re working on a solution to that.

I like the images, it helps me visualize the differences between the three girls and the cultures they come from. Still, the planets are rendered in a photoreal style and that doesn’t always blend with art in the anime style. I might use them in a background for the OP or if the girls talk about their planet. On the other hand, maybe we can use these as reference and redraw by hand? Use some filters to lower the photoreal aspect? I’ll have to play with it. These are the times when I wish we had more artists on staff. Just another topic to add to the art meeting today.

Here are a few pieces of concept art that we decided to post. These are the home planets for the three main princesses of Princess Code! Since most of the game will take place at Vinatu Royal Academy, these images are really just for reference. We might use them in the OP.

[Click on any image to see a larger version.]

Princess Elika Panyuu Soo ed Laragi of Tau Ceti 5
Princess Elika represents Tau Ceti 5. Tau Ceti 5 is one of the older, more powerful planets in the Galactic Civilization. The people of Tau Ceti 5 are considered shrewd merchants, and the planet is one of the top financial centers in the Galaxy.

Princess Kindee Vinta Mar ed Vitori of Cygni 2
Princess Kindee represents Cygni 2. Cygni 2 was one of the first worlds colonized by humanity after being given interstellar travel by the ancients nearly 10,000 years ago, and is considered to have the closest ties to Earth. It is a small world, with very little land and a very small population.

Princess Liora Mednia Foma ed Relada of Tau Ceti 4
Princess Liora represents Tau Ceti 4. Once a mining colony of Tau Ceti 5, this once barren world has been painstakingly terraformed by the Relada family. After a very long and bitter struggle for independence from Tau Ceti 5, the people of Tau Ceti 4 have a very fierce sense of loyalty to the planet and to ed Relada.

On the code side of things, it feels like things are going pretty well. We’re playtesting the puzzle as we speak. We’re also testing our game script, and we used it to slide characters on and offstage, as well as render text in Japanese and English. On the art and story side of things we’re probably a bit behind. While the script for Elika is mostly done, Liora is only about halfway finished. Kindee may end up being the most challenging, since she is the quietest of the three characters, but of course, if there is no dialogue the story will be horribly boring. As for the art, I’m going to have a meeting with our artist tomorrow. Hey, I know, life gets in the way. That kind of thing is particularly true for a small indie studio like us. No sweat. We’ll figure things out. That’s why they pay me the big bucks to produce this thing…hey…waitaminute…

Last night I got to see how the text rendering engine works. It takes the text and turns it into a texture that gets mapped onto a 3D object. Nice. Next task will be to use that with a UTF-16 text application so we can display Japanese. It will be fun to see text and images onscreen.

Pricing is so arbitrary, yet so critical. Sure we can probably sell more units at $10 than at $40, but can we sell enough to cover our costs? Way back in high school we learned that if you lower the price, you sell more games, but after 10 years of selling anime stuff, I have painfully learned about elasticity. One company lowered their price and saw no change in sales! In other words, sometimes, you sell the same number of units at $15 as you would at $25. It does not seem right, but it happens.

For each $10,000 of revenue we need, there’s a huge difference in the number of units we need to sell depending upon the price AND depending upon where we sell the product. If we sell from our own site (always an option), we get to keep all of the revenue. So if we might be able to sell 500 games at $20 each to make $10k, so long as we can convince 500 people to learn about our product, come to our site and pay the money.

At an online or brick and mortar retailer, we certainly increase the number of people we attract, but the retailer will want roughly half of the sales as their cut. So now, to get the same $10,000 we’ll have to either sell 1,000 games or make the price $40!

So now we are in a tough position. This is our first game, so we don’t know how many sales we can expect. The price of import games is somewhere between $20 and $40 (here, in Japan, they pay crazy amounts!), yet we don’t really know how many units of those are sold either. I think the game will be priced at $30 or we might price it at $40 and then sell it at 25% off for the psychological effect. If we start too low, it’s not like we can raise prices later, so we’ll probably have to err on the high side and whip the game development folk to make a really good value for our consumers.

It is no wonder the programmers and artists love us marketing creeps. . .

Today the production team had a useful meeting (team being programmer and designer…lol). We talked about how the game scripts will be constructed, how the text, graphics and effects will be implemented, as well as some user interface and art questions. We also reviewed the art and the script, including multilingual support. (Ooop, has that been announced yet? <cough>nihongo and espanol<cough>) Well, as it turns out there was more work than expected, but I guess that is the only constant in game development. I asked for a rebuild of the puzzle code, since I think we need some playtesting…I want to make sure the difficulty level doesn’t scale too fast, since I’ve been playing some other games to make sure I got a feel for the pacing. We agreed that we almost have enough components to assemble a functional game loop, start to finish. I continue to provide our artist with reference materials, plus a few design tweaks that have come up. Progress is good, schedule is a tad behind but nothing unrecoverable. I think…this means I can take a nap. Bliss.