Lycoris: Their Journeys [Horror|Romance|Satire] [BxB]

Ideas and games that are not yet publicly in production. This forum also contains the pre-2012 archives of the Works in Progress forum.
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Holland
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Re: Lycoris [S/LGBT/A] [Otome] [Supernatural/Romance]

#16 Post by Holland »

dott.Piergiorgio wrote:Perhaps I'm culturally biased (I'm, well, Italian), but why Virgil, Beatrice and not Dante ??
It's because Dante was the main character, which has him now replaced by Manju and Saka ;o He's also a character I don't really want to taint with the story lol
dott.Piergiorgio wrote:p.s. there will be reference to the old scholastic question, the sex of angels ? ;)
There will be references to it, but it's not treated as a big factor :3

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Re: Lycoris [S/LGBT/A] [Otome] [Supernatural/Romance]

#17 Post by dott.Piergiorgio »

On Dante, you ought not to worry... yes, here (Italy) was an outrage on the depiction of Dante as a tormented dark warrior in a certain console videogame (I'm not referring to "Devil may cry", but to another action-adventure) but that interpretation of the Inferno was so bad that deserves the mess, but from what I glance from your blurbs and sketches I guess you can safely rename Manju into Dante ;)

Of course at least reference to the sex of angels is obligatory when one depict angels of both sexes, IMHO: ;)

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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Holland
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Re: Lycoris [S/LGBT/A] [Otome] [Supernatural/Romance]

#18 Post by Holland »

Hey guys, just wanted to say we're still around.
Just working on other things and getting life together.
I hope everyone is doing well!
Last edited by Holland on Fri Mar 25, 2016 4:57 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Mad Harlequin
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Re: Lycoris [S/LGBT/A] [Otome] [Supernatural/Romance]

#19 Post by Mad Harlequin »

Welcome back! :)

Don't worry about putting things on hold while you get settled. We'll still be here.
I'm an aspiring writer and voice talent with a passion for literature and an unhealthy attachment to video games. I am also a seasoned typo-sniper. Inquiries are encouraged. Friendly chats are welcome.
"Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."
— Mark Twain

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Holland
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Re: Lycoris: Their Journeys [Horror|Romance|Satire] [BxB]

#20 Post by Holland »

pssst.... hi
chill devlog here

3/18/19
After reviewing some old notes, I realized we'd changed the characters' names to "Manja" and "Saku" (swapping the last letters) at some point, probably to avoid the awkward images their fable names bring up when spoken with an English/American accent ("man jew" and "that dude from avatar"). I'm considering bringing this back. I don't mind a little lingual inaccuracy if it helps the immersion. Just worried it might have the opposite effect on anyone familiar with the inspiration. Edit: After getting more interested in Chinese content and comfortable with how their names work, I realized this change is very very silly. We'll leave 'em as they were in the fable.

I've also switched the romance in this to bxb. The stories' themes aren't sex-relevant, and the split between sexes was causing them to come off that way. This should also make each protagonist appealing to the same (smaller, niche-r) audience and encourage players to try both routes. I hadn't thought that deeply about it until just recently & wish I had reconsidered that choice earlier.

Currently reading some game design books and condensing my own knowledge that's been picked up throughout this development process. Will resume art and writing shortly. Not in any rush (obviously lol).

On the research side of things, I recently picked up a translation of The Arabian Nights / 1001 Nights. It has a similar structure to Lycoris in that one story branches out to tell many shorter tales. In the case of Lycoris, the main plot is the journey of Manju/Saka, during which we learn the stories of the characters met and places visited, each with a theme that relates back to modern life. 1001 Nights handles it a bit differently, using modern characters and events within the same universe to glue together older middle-eastern mythological and historical fables. It's actually really good and is giving me a lot of great ideas. But it's very long, definitely not something I can or should binge over a few sittings :c

edit: By the way, there's a lot more mockups and updated concept art lying around than what's linked in the first post. I just haven't had any reason to scan the newer stuff in (been working solo for a while). Maybe a new character/location list would be a good enough excuse for the effort.

3/20/19
Made a quick sketch of the protagonists as kids. Getting used to Manju as a male character.
Image

3/21/19 - 4/10/19
Taking a break to focus on a NaNoRenO game.

11/15/19
I've spent the last few months working on other projects, working on my mental health (trying to be more consistently productive), and building up my skills. I'm very close to being able to draw in the art style I've wanted Lycoris to have for a long time. Well, character art, anyway; my environments and composition need some work. I would like to do more audio practice soon as well.

The game has a new name (a few other VNs with the title "Lycoris" or similar variations have come out since I first started working on this...) which will be announced alongside the updated concept art. I've also solidified the vibe and game mechanics.

I'm not sure if I've ever mentioned this here, but over the past year or two, I've been envisioning Lycoris as having a bit of a meta-game. Because it's so massive and will take so long to produce, I wanted it to be designed in a way that left plenty of room for me to play around with other game mechanics and art styles, while still having a consistent aesthetic throughout the bulk of the story and some aesthetic detail tying these additional mechanics together. I've finally figured out how to do this and exactly what kind of tone the game will have.

The bulk of the story will play out in this "manuscript" style VN where the player is flipping through pages in a series of books. Instead of these being disembodied books on some random desk, there's a layer of meta game above them -- you're playing the character who is flipping through them as much as you are playing Lycoris. While most of the story is in the books, the books will sometimes prompt you to play cassette tapes or VHS tapes or video games (the console will probably be a knock-off GameCube with the same resolution limits; we're using that retro/glitchy aesthetic to tie these mechanics together). There will also be some additional horror elements "outside" the game alongside a meta plot. This all allows us to have background audio, cutscenes, jump scares, and minigames without taking away from the books. Imagine trying to binge read a good book while working night shift at FNAF - that's close to the vibe I'm going for.

I'm very happy with the direction the game is going in and look forward to working on it. In the meantime, I'll continue building my skills and progressing on smaller projects ♥


2/9/21
Whilst working on my productivity, I did a lot of speed drawings that made me see the gaps in my understanding of art. So I've spent the time since my last post really focusing on fundamentals of drawing. I learned gesture, form, perspective (finally! it terrified & confused me for so long), lighting, rendering, as well as a significant amount of anatomy. I would say my grasp on form, perspective, and lighting is 98% (fully grasp the theories but am learning those last little shortcuts and getting mileage) while my anatomy is closer to 60% (above average but hasn't quite "clicked" yet; once it does, I'll be able to shuffle over to comparative anatomy). I've dipped my toes into composition and environments, which I intend to focus on this year. I want to render with paint more frequently, now that I have a good grasp on line art.

Practicing with tiny unfinished projects and some studying means my character designs have become much more intentional.

I want to clarify that I don't think a game needs technical art to be good. But when I was working on the initial assets for this game, I found that I couldn't communicate the variety of features the characters had or pose them as desired, simply because I didn't understand art itself very well. And environments were a complete mystery, I had no idea how to communicate one setting vs another. I hopped around from style to style not realizing that it was my abilities themselves that were the issue. I think, if I knew this back then, I would have simplified the visual designs. Reduced the amount of variety just slightly. By now, I am attached to the design logic I started with and am just improving it. I also see Lycoris as a very personal and specific sort of "art game" now, where the pieces really need to fit together for it to work at all.

Learning art is also teaching me "how to learn" in general. It's been deeply beneficial in that way. I'm not concerned about my limited progress on music and coding at this point because I have a much stronger grasp on how I study. I understand what I need to look out for when self-teaching a new skill. It's the kind of understanding I'd never have gotten if I kept spreading myself thin. However, I will continue poking at these subjects and collecting resources, until I'm ready to add them to my routine.

I've also got my own life a little more organized. After getting all my paperwork in one place, I'm working to declutter it and collect my story plotting onto an online archive, something I can build on and refer back to anywhere and anytime. I've found myself redesigning and replotting aspects of this game simply because I can't find my notes. That's obviously not acceptable. I have tried to make universe bibles in the past... It took me some time to find a version of the concept that suited my needs.

The complexity of Lycoris is one thing that inspired me to put all my work into one organized universe in the first place. And now, as I dig through notes, I'm realizing that a universe is all the original design of Lycoris was to me once we got into the worldbuilding phase. I was building a world -- the afterlife in Inferno & beyond -- that I wanted to show off using the journey of these characters. Which isn't a bad thing on its own! However, I was seeing the project and world as a single thing, to the detriment of both.

A world can have massive amounts of surface-level content that could never fit into a single game. And on its own, an environment doesn't offer you much direction in terms of storytelling or gameplay. I was overwhelmed by how many tiny things I was trying to juggle and weave into the game as the world continued to develop.

I'm glad to have realized this. The concept described in the very first OP hasn't changed -- it's still these two characters with these angels, gods, and demons as love interests travelling through these worlds, trying to reconnect with each other. But the structure and approach being used to tell that story will be completely different. When I return to make a new outline of this game, I hope to be more focused and intentional about what I choose to include and leave out.

2/8/23
Heyo, figured it's been a while & I should pop in.

Last year, I found the program Obsidian MD & it's been a huge, huge help when it comes to organizing paperwork and ideas. It took me a while to get a system in place that I liked & I'll probably eternally fiddle with it, but it's good enough that I can archive everything from this project (along with the overarching universe and many other projects I've started haha). Thankfully, I compiled as much as I could in previous attempts at organizing it, so I have some fairly dense documents to go through before digging around for stray information. It's interesting to see how much of the story and game has changed over the years.

As everything is getting sorted, I'm also updating the visual designs to better match the current vision of the game.

For fun, here is a sneak peek at where we started vs where we're going:
Image

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