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Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

Looks great! Can't wait to play! ^_^

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My Last.fm profile:http://www.last.fm/user/Nightbane112
Feel free to add me as a friend!

*sigh* And despite the new forum rules, some users just don't understand how to follow them. teacup, you're going to want to make a Player's Chat topic for this soon if you want this thread to be useful at all.

My main gripe with (P)lanets 1 was that I didn't feel like Marin was an actual student there. I about know her special circumstances, but that's still no excuse for lack of immersion into the world of psychics. What I'm saying is that her powers of telepathy weren't heavily stressed enough. And aside from that, the boy's routes were lacking in depth. The execution was meh. The art, I think, was fine, except for a few CGs.

So to be blunt, what I'm hoping for in (P)lanets 2 is a deeper storyline. Doesn't have to be dark, but just more than what it was in (P)lanets 1.

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Visit the OELVN wiki at the top of the forum! We have free assets, programs, tutorials, tips and more over there. I'm the administrator, PM me if you want to help organize the place. I could use a hand.

I hate to be off-topic but... I'm not sure exactly how to make a post in the player's chat? Is there something specific I need to put in the first post? I guess i can just redirect players and fans to the old wip for now. ^^ Please comment there if you aren't posting feedback, thanks~


Hopefully the player will feel more like they're in a psychic school now with the new features. You can attend psychic lessons, keep notes in your 'aura journal' and use your psychic power. You'll also be tested on how much information you've acquired about auras later in the game. Plus, for each of the guys, their psychic power is now closely related to their personality and back-story. It's because of their powers that they are the way that they are - so there is a much greater emphasis on powers than there was in the first game, instead of just generic high school drama. Hopefully this should help players feel that they really are in a psychic school and not just a regular school.
I'll be the first to admit that I didn't use the the psychic school to it's potential. Which is exactly why I'm making a sequel. ^^

This is a character game so there won't be an over-arching plot or a very 'deep' storyline. The purpose is to be a lighthearted game with a focus on developing friendships/relationships. But to make up for that, there will be multiple endings now and less 'common scenes', more scenes that are special to each path. There are also mysteries in the heroine's own background to be uncovered, hopefully making her seem like less of a generic otome heroine and one with depth.

Do you have any advice on how to execute the routes better? What exactly about them did you think was poorly executed?

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Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

To answer your question about the Player's Chat thread with a quote:

PyTom in the sticky message wrote:

Note that posts in this forum should remain developer centric. If you want comments from players, or to begin building a fanbase, you should make a second post in the Player Chat forum, and link to it from here.

So you basically just make a post and let things run on their own, I guess ._.

I'll attribute the story's weaknesses to fast pacing and infodumping of the boys' histories. Only some days were played, and several weeks were fully skipped. This omitted lots of potential shenanigans that the boys could have done which, done correctly, would let the players know the boys' personalities and behavior even more. As for the infodumping problem, a solution would be to consider if they were really willing to spill everything about themselves to someone else that easily.
And remember that you're writing a story set in a school setting. Feel free to write about the little things that go on during high school! They're the most fun, so don't skip out on the butler cafe during the school festival them :3

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Visit the OELVN wiki at the top of the forum! We have free assets, programs, tutorials, tips and more over there. I'm the administrator, PM me if you want to help organize the place. I could use a hand.

I see :3
I will make sure that this time, instead of dumping the entire history of each guy's past in one scene, I let it slowly unravel over the course of their path. Definitely don't want it to seem like an info dump ^^;
This is actually the first time I heard the story was fast-paced... but since this game will be longer than the first, it shouldn't have that problem.
And yes, I'm going to include many more of the 'little things' that make high school special! And this includes festivals

The first post has been updated with Ren's sprite - Rinko's older brother.

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Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

Oh my God!
Even if it wouldnt be an Otome Game I would so play it!
A year with seasonal Event etc., using your ability...
This is so much fun when I think of it!
*at the moment playing (P)lanets*

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Thank you. My biggest priority is to create a game that's a fun experience.
I know that may sound silly, but I honestly just want to make a game that can make other people happy. ^^

Anyway, I would like to get some more helpful feedback so I figured I should ask some questions.
As mentioned in the first post, this game will cover an entire year so naturally it'll go through the seasons. The problem with this is that I'm using free backgrounds, many of which only have the basic variations [day/afternoon/night]. Would you find it incredibly distracting if the season was winter, but the background still was the same as it is in all the other seasons? :/ [take the courtyard for example... the grass is still gonna be green, even in winter].
I'm not really sure how to go about fixing this since I don't know how to edit the backgrounds to give them a more wintery or autumn-like appearance. Any suggestions? Would you be able to overlook this considering the limited resources I'm working with?

And as a side note, the character sprites blink now. I'm thinking about making their mouths move as well, but I'm not sure about this considering they're not voiced. How would you feel about un-voiced characters whose mouths still move when they're 'talking'? Would that be creepy or cool? XD

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Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

Fufufu, such lovely progress~

What I didn't like about the first game was that the entire 'psychics' premise seemed to be included just as an attention grabbing device to pull in more players (I actually had no qualms about the art since there has been far, far worse. Also I like your art ovo). That being said, I am extremely happy to see that massive effort is being put in to expanding the world of the psychics, and I am extremely curious about how their powers will be explained and explored. And of course, I love that you're making an effort to improve on your drawing skills as well, it's quite a leap from the first [P]lanets game.
The cell-phone application is certainly a very interesting idea. I can see myself having trouble with it though, since my phone is completely neglected in real life ^^;

As for the backgrounds, I don't know what kind of restrictions you're under for the backgrounds, but if they allow free editing, perhaps add some elements of the seasons in? For example, adding a few stray leaves for autumn or some more flowers for spring? Or another idea could be that you change the hue of the background or add an overlay to it? For example, adding an orange hue for autumn and a blue hue for winter. These are entirely just speculations though, I have no idea if they'd even work @_@;; I'd be willing to overlook them, although that means that the seasons will likely mean less to me (as in, I'd be more likely to not notice or forget the change or significance in seasons).

For the sprites, I quite like the blinking, but honestly, the moving mouths would bother me quite a bit, and not just because of the lack of voices. It's not really creepy as it is...annoying, I think is the word. It'd be a pain to make the character mouth each word perfectly, but moving mouths annoy me if the lip movements don't match the words (and especially so if it's just an open close animation). Then there's the reading speed problem. I read very fast, so it's likely that I'll have finished reading before the character has mouthed half the sentence. This makes it feel like I've cut them off, but I don't like having to wait for a character to finish before moving on. (It is for this reason that I usually turn voices off when I play a game.)

Just my thoughts on the matter, hope I've helped even slightly xD'' Also my bias is completely and utterly Nemu

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Thank you! This is really helpful! And yay, I'm glad to see Nemu fans. He needs more love.


Aha yeah, that seems to be the most common complaint, which is understandable. So I'm glad you can see the effort being made to make the psychic school seem more.. well, like a psychic school XD
Also always happy to hear that my art's improving!


Ahaha, same here XD I've made the in-game phone a lot more simple than a real phone, of course!
In fact, all it really entails is that once you get close enough to someone, you will receive their number. From that point on, they may send you messages inviting you to do something with them. A notification will pop up telling you when you have a message. You can reply to it [in which you'll be given a short list of replies to choose from] or ignore it [and yes, ignoring it will negatively impact relationships]. And that's it, really. As you get closer to someone, they may send you more personalized messages which are really there just for fun [no replying necessary].
I added it mostly because cellphones have become such a huge part of society, especially with high-school aged people, that I thought it would add a bit of realism. I'm not gonna abuse it though, since I personally feel like getting text messages all the time in real life is rather annoying.


Yeah, you're right ^^; Not only would it be a pain to make the mouth movements look realistic, but it would probably just bother players who read more quickly [I'm one of those people who plays rather slowly on auto mode, so the text doesn't advance until the character has finished speaking]. I don't really wanna waste my time giving them mouth movements if it's just gonna be a nuisance, haha. I really just want to think of ways to make the game seem more animated and less static, and I think the blinking alone does a good job of that


Okay, I took some time to edit a background for the seasons using Tag-'s suggestions. ^^
Disclaimer: By 'some time' I mean about 15 minutes, so... I know it doesn't look that great, ahaha. I'll take more time to edit them later but for now I was just messing around. If these look all right, I'll fix them up [I know the snow one looks especially bad] and may add some more details like leaves or flowers.

_________________
Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

If you're going to change the backgrounds per season, you'd have to do more than simple hue changing, for winter you'd have actual snow lying around like this:



It doesn't take that long really, just paint over it and you're done. For autumn you could have fallen leaves around the path instead.

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My dating sim similar to Harvest Moon & Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side.

Can I just make a suggestion here, the snow on the bushes and trees don't look right to me, don't tree's normally die during winter and have no leaves, and snow won't automatically spread through and cover an entire bush like that it will clump in area's exposed.

I know you just edited it but maybe you need to improve it with these suggestions a bit to look more natural.

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Sounds like fun to me
I had such games before, where mouths were moving without any noise coming from it
Besides, it would give the game something more lively, like an anime

Good idea in my view!

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W-wow... that looks amazing, Celianna! ( ´ﾟдﾟ｀)
I wish I could do that! I mean, I get that you just painted over it but I've tried to do that as well and it hasn't turned out looking that good.
I guess I need to experiment more to make it look as good as yours... I'll be back with edits later!

@Mickychi
Yeah, I know trees normally don't have leaves in winter. As I said I took less than 15 minutes to edit all four of those pictures, so I'm aware that it doesn't look realistic. Editing the trees to look 'dead' is too difficult for me, because I'd basically have to redraw the tree branches, which... frankly, I don't know if I could do that with my low drawing abilities :/
I get what you're saying about snow spreading through the bushes though. I'll edit it so just the top part of the bush has snow on it.
I think the way Celianna has edited it is probably as good as it's gonna get - and that looks pretty good to me!

@ShadowBerry
Yeah, that's what I really want to do is make the game more lively. ^^ I've added some simple animations throughout the game to help with that too. As for the mouth movements, I'm still not sure about it yet. I'll have to experiment with it a bit first and if it doesn't look good, I probably just won't include it. But if I don't, I've still added a few other things to make it seem more animated.

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Complete: (P)lanets - The Life of Normalcy has Ended!
My blogs were hacked. I'm currently trying to get them restored. Don't worry, I'm still alive -barely-

Hmm for winter maybe you can show the snow falling? I'm not sure if this is what you were looking for, but I came across this in the cookbook: http://renpy.org/wiki/renpy/doc/cookboo ... now_effect Also if you have Photoshop you can try and make animated snow. I found this tutorial to be quite useful. However, if you cant make it more winter-y I don't think I would mind much if they were all the same. To be honest I live in California, USA. It doesn't snow here, and the weather is pretty constant all year around. So for me, I'm quite use to everything pretty much looking the same. (only thing is during spring we get a bit of rainfall so scenery turns a little greener, and in winter the air becomes more crisp and cooler)

I wouldn't mind seeing the characters lips move and eyes blink if they weren't voiced.

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