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TRIPLETS TROUBLE!!!
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TRIPLETS TROUBLE!!!
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Hey everyone!
Me and a friend (Dook) decided to team up and start creating a visual novel a while ago, and now we decided to participate in NaNoRenO 2023 with a new idea: Triplets Trouble!!!!
The idea of the game is to follow the daily lives of triplets over the course of a week (7 days), in a period shortly after the pandemic and when things are slowly returning to normal, but when they are still stuck at home. In this context, they try to find fun things to do inside their own home, whether it's a new game or exploring a place in the house they've never been before.
The story will be very linear and with a single ending, classifying the game practically as a Kinetic Novel, but to make it more interactive and fun for the player, we want to put some minigames in each day (one of them being a point and click minigame).
On the artistic side, we have some ambitious ideas that we're not sure we'll be able to do yet, but we'll try! For example, one of our goals is for the kids to have a different outfit for each day, which obviously will give us extra work, but also a slightly greater sense of realism.
In that first week, our goal was to write at least 2 or 3 days/chapters of the story and have all the sprites ready. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do all of that, but we still made good progress during the week, which we'll show here. Dook will talk a little about the process of creating the design of the main characters:
Well, starting with the kids!
The triplets are 8 years old, and after a while, we decided not to specify the biological gender of any of them, they are children and only children.
To identify them, the only physical difference between them is their haircut, which is already an expression of each one's personality. But speaking of the technical part, this is quite convenient! Their faces are identical, so a single set of expressions would be used by all three. Their expressions are exaggerated, I had a certain influence on the manga "Yotsuba" and its protagonist of the same name, I don't remember exactly her age, but her actions and expressions are exactly what I see in the triplets. I left their hair with loose strands and open spaces on purpose to give the signal that yes, they never stand still and move a lot, even if they were combed every morning, in no time, it would be all messy and frizzy!
Also, kids move around so much, having just a single pose would be depressing. I did arm variations just to give movement, this idea that they are always doing something with their arms or hands.
If I had more time I would definitely try to do more hand and arm variations!
Now about the dad!
He is an artist who works from home, as well as a single father with three children, who are very cute and obedient, but who are still children and have a lot of energy to discharge all day and night. In the end, he is the one who almost always runs out of energy!
I want to make him look as tired as possible, but not worn out or sad, no no, just really tired and always on the verge of succumbing to the urge to just flop down on the floor and take a nap.
Oh, and the lines! They are blue, because I wanted to pass more softness. A black line seemed to be too heavy and rough in the design itself and in the game's narrative, with the blue line I looked for a greater lightness between the design and the colors.
As I said before, the "chapters" of the game will be equivalent to the days of the week, starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday. Being a story told from the point of view of three children, it took me a while to find the best way to present the whole world from their point of view. Initially, I thought about writing in the first person, but changing the point of view between them; writing this way would be a way to show more directly how each of the triplets sees the world, and how much things around them change during their games, however, it would be very difficult to make the transition between the point of view of a to each other in a natural way, especially writing in a visual novel format, which would end up being confusing for players.
Writing in third person is a better way to make that transition, but on the other hand, I was afraid that, with an observant narrator, I wouldn't be able to get the "childish gaze" across to the player. Children are expressive, not just with body language, but they are also sincere and tend to say everything they think sincerely and dramatically, so I thought I'd use that to my advantage and try to blend it all together.
The story will be narrated in third person, but most things will be spoken and shown by the children themselves; more than communicating with the player, they need to communicate with each other, and through this communication, they will show what they are seeing, feeling and even discovering about their family. Meanwhile, the third-person narration will serve as a way of translating that language for the player. In summary, expect little narration and a lot of dialogue between the characters, especially between the triplets.
And because of all these writing tests, all I've managed to write this week is a chapter and a half (a little over 5000 words), but from now on I'll be able to write a lot faster.
Finally, the last thing we did was a prototype (very prototype indeed) of a menu for the game, but it was just a test and it's far from being the final version.
What we did this week:
- Base sketch of all characters.
- Base body and hair of the three children and the dad.
- Some of the expressions of the dad and children.
- The writing of day 1 and half of day 2.
What we want to do next week:
- The sprite of one more character.
- 2 more expressions for the father and 3 for the children.
- The clothes of all the characters (and the variations for the kids).
- Start the backgrounds.
- Finish writing day 2 and write days 3 and 4.