MorningStar

[ficedula]

I haven't finished uploading the new version, so if you're partway through downloading it, finish downloading the file you're already getting (that'll work fine), and then download the second patch I linked above.

The new version, I'll give a different filename, to make sure people downloading the old file don't get a screwed up version.

The new version should be up in ~10 minutes.

(Edit: OK, new version is up)

[DaFool]

*Cries

I so want to play this game...

This is the error I get, even after patching

Specs:

WinXP SP1, P4 1.3Ghz, Locale reverted to English.

Guess I'll have to wait until Monday and play the latest version during office hours...

[Hime]

Jake: It is playing at the same time as other music. @_@ With me, at least.
And I guess I'm just bad at the fights then... There are some that I just can't win. Like one where the choices are Natsuki, Sachiko and Miyako. I've tried it like, six times? And never won... Ugh, I guess I'll have to accept the fact that I can't beat it...

Oh and, a question. What is the character in the logo? I am curious and I can't recgonize it... ^^;

[Jake]

Jake: It is playing at the same time as other music. @_@ With me, at least.

Damn. I know it used to be doing this, but I thought it had stopped. :/

And I guess I'm just bad at the fights then... There are some that I just can't win. Like one where the choices are Natsuki, Sachiko and Miyako. I've tried it like, six times? And never won... Ugh, I guess I'll have to accept the fact that I can't beat it...

Well, you still gain experience and level up whether you win or not, you just level up faster if you're winning. We've played right through a few times with all battles and it's certainly completable despite losing the first six or seven straight.

Oh and, a question. What is the character in the logo? I am curious and I can't recgonize it... ^^;

Myself, the only Japanese I know I learned from Anime, which means I recognise approximately three characters, so I had to cross-reference three independent sources to make sure it actually meant what I was being told it meant...

According to my notes, '暁星' or 'gyousei' means 'Venus' or 'dawn star' or something similar; '星' alone means 'star' (or planet, or something) and so we figured we'd mimick the Mai-HiME/Otome logo by writing that part in English; '暁' alone is 'akatsuki', meaning 'dawn'. Out of the three pairs of kanji we were told would work it was the one that looked the most like the one in the Mai-HiME logo.

[Hime]

Oh no, now nobody wants to be my pair when I should graduate tomorrow and there is no progress in the game... Ugh. I guess I'll have to play it again... It took me several hours to get this far though, uguu~... I guess I wasn't enough for Akemi-san. ;<

[Jake]

Oh no, now nobody wants to be my pair

Not even Sachiko? What did you do to the poor girl?!

Hmm... I spent the first couple of weeks worrying that we were making the whole thing too easy, and then the last week worrying that it was far too hard... I'm wondering how tricky it would be to add an 'easy/hard' switch to the game...

[ficedula]

DaFool: That error probably means you need to install the .NET 1.1 framework - it should be easy enough to find either on Microsoft.com or on about a zillion other websites (means another download, though, I'm afraid!)

EDIT: OK, Jake's put together a patch which adds the option of easy or normal difficulty when starting a game; download it from the project website.

Also, we fixed some of the display issues, like the new talking-head appearing too early, music not stopping etc.

Existing savegames *should* work fine with the new version - but we recommend starting a new game from scratch; you'll get the option of which difficulty level to choose, so everything is more likely to work...

[Jake]

EDIT: OK, Jake's put together a patch which adds the option of easy or normal difficulty when starting a game; download it from the project website.

Also, we fixed some of the display issues, like the new talking-head appearing too early, music not stopping etc.

More specifically, the patch is here - I know when I went to check I had to force-refresh to see the new HTML... :/

[kara24601]

So far this game seems like it could be made with Ren'py or Flash and you can still have all those fancy effects you're wanting but without the graphical errors / bugs ( unless of course you're not great at programming in Flash or something )

I really don't see why this game needs its own engine.
But , I've never tried making an engine myself so ,
apoligies for not being able to help.

Things go way too fast in some parts and
I really hate the battle system / "practice" battles
but at the same time it reminds me of Adventure Quest RPG
and I love AQRPG.

The graphics are great except of course where there can sometimes be glitches ( like whenever you're sent to "hospital" or whatever section of school after getting your butt kicked in battle practice )

Story is fairly interesting.
I like that they have to kiss in order to share power ( *giggle* )
The PC's head being faceless during conversations is creepy.
Especially since you get to see a face on her during cutscenes.
( gee I dunno why that would but I hope that doesn't count as a "spoiler" )

It doesn't make sense and isn't fair that if you attend classes and choose to study rather than read for pleasure at the library , that when you take exams you fail regardless of what you do. I know you're supposed to be this newcomer to the school but really it should let you at least have an average or better passing grade if you attend classes and study.

Oh , and that brings me to another thing , parts of the plot don't make sense , such as the fact that you're a newcomer yet somehow you already know about the picture in the library or whatever and you're supposed to be shocked by everything but somehow it's like you've been there before.

It's stupid that even after you "learn" who Naoko-chan is , there's still scenes with whats-her-name calling you Naoko-chan and the PC still goes "Who's Naoko-chan?" in response. The girl shouldn't ever call the PC Naoko-chan in the first place because she's not Naoko-chan.

[Jake]

So far this game seems like it could be made with Ren'py or Flash and you can still have all those fancy effects you're wanting but without the graphical errors / bugs ( unless of course you're not great at programming in Flash or something )

The pragmatic answer is that Ficedula doesn't know/like Python, and I'm OK at it but I'd never have got all the programming and the art done in a month (Fice is easily the fastest programmer I know), so if he didn't write a new engine in Delphi/.NET the project wouldn't have happened.

(To my knowledge neither of us have ever touched Flash, but I hear nothing but bad things about it from other programmers... and frankly, we'd have to have started from scratch in that as well.)

There are two things I can think of that the engine does which Ren'Py doesn't, off the top of my head: firstly, there are some 3D effects in the battle engine, particularly on the higher-level gravity and force attacks; secondly, the engine renders masked bloom around the edges of character sprites to give that warm-glow you get at dusk for the evening scenes, although that unfortunately didn't get finished in time to get used in the release. (We're expecting to release a 'Plus' version at some point in the future that's more or less the same but with better graphics. )

The other advantage of having our own engine was that things which might have taken ages, lots of questions and cursing in Ren'Py took Fice very little time to implement; not because Ren'Py is bad, just because neither of us are actually PyTom so we don't understand the way it works totally. And, well, working in Ren'Py doesn't guarantee a bug-free release either - look at the recent Magical Boutique release.

The part I'm most annoyed about as far as not-using-Ren'Py goes is that I did large parts of my share of the work on my Mac, but of course I couldn't actually run the game on it.

Things go way too fast in some parts

Any particular parts, just out of interest? Pacing was kind of hard, so I'd be interested to know where we did and didn't screw up so as to do better next time...

(The battle system - well, I guess it's never going to appeal to everybody, particularly in a community like this where the typical format is so different. :/ I'm still tempted to do a textual-overview-of-battle option for the plus version.)

The graphics are great except of course where there can sometimes be glitches ( like whenever you're sent to "hospital" or whatever section of school after getting your butt kicked in battle practice )

What kind of glitches are you seeing there? I know that scene worked fine for me the last time I saw it...

The PC's head being faceless during conversations is creepy.
Especially since you get to see a face on her during cutscenes.
( gee I dunno why that would but I hope that doesn't count as a "spoiler" )

Well, you get to see her face during the intro (in the mirror), so...

Basically, it was a hard choice, that one - the floating-heads were planned early on but the graphics weren't rendered out 'til all the sprites were finished, so we tested most of the game without them. When we re-added them, we realised that there was no support in the engine for varying the emotion of the protagonist, so it was a choice between having her faceless or having her in that neutral half-smile even through the scenes where she was supposed to be happy, embarrassed or angry...

Hopefully, by the plus version we'll have had time to set emotions for Hikari all through all the scenes, so it will no longer be an issue...

It doesn't make sense and isn't fair that if you attend classes and choose to study rather than read for pleasure at the library , that when you take exams you fail regardless of what you do.

The easy mode in the difficulty patch makes the learning rate faster as well - but you should be able to pass the exams at the end of the game normally, even if you don't pass the first mocks. If you do think it's too hard, could you send us one of your save games to illustrate the scenario so we can see what went wrong?

Essentially, you only need to pass the exams at the end of the [month-long] game, so if we made it possible to easily pass the first mocks then the academic part of the game would be more or less pointless; on the other hand, if we don't have the first mocks really early on then we have to find some other way to reasonably tell the player that they only actually have to study two subjects.

Oh , and that brings me to another thing , parts of the plot don't make sense , such as the fact that you're a newcomer yet somehow you already know about the picture in the library

The picture in the library over the mausoleum door is the same one as in the chapel over the medical facility door; Hikari recognises it from when she got beaten in combat training. It shouldn't give you that line unless you've seen the medical facility in the chapel at least once - did it?

It's stupid that even after you "learn" who Naoko-chan is , there's still scenes with whats-her-name calling you Naoko-chan and the PC still goes "Who's Naoko-chan?" in response.

Hmm. That certainly shouldn't happen. I'll look into it.

The girl shouldn't ever call the PC Naoko-chan in the first place because she's not Naoko-chan.

Yeah, but Sachiko lived with Naoko for years, so she's used to her and to waking her up in the morning, and she's only lived with Hikari for a few days at that point. It's not uncommon for people to get other people's names confused, particularly when they've moved into a role previously occupied by someone else. Think of all those kids who call their teacher 'mum' by accident every year.

[DaFool]

edit: Hehehe...very fun and amusing, as well as frustrating as hell No way I'm going to master this battle system...the A.I. just seems to put up just the right kinds of shields to ward off my attacks, and it always never fails to put up shields. I'm already playing Easy, yet I can barely make a dent in the enemy HP. As soon as I weaken the shield, well it just puts up another one!

But dammit it is so awesome, this game is so unique. The character art is gorgeous. The backgrounds could use more detail, but do the job sufficiently. The choice of music is appropriate...etc etc etc...see attachment for what exactly I'm talking about

YEAH I am so going to use that as a screenshot for Ren'Py games...

...wait a minute, this isn't a Ren'Py game

[Jake]

edit: Hehehe...very fun and amusing, as well as frustrating as hell No way I'm going to master this battle system...the A.I. just seems to put up just the right kinds of shields to ward off my attacks, and it always never fails to put up shields. I'm already playing Easy, yet I can barely make a dent in the enemy HP. As soon as I weaken the shield, well it just puts up another one!

Seriously, even on Easy you should expect to lose the first couple of battles - it's just that on easy you should stop losing quicker... and it makes less difference in the long run. If you went right in at the beginning winning every fight, then having the battle training in the first place would be kind of pointless.

awesome

Aw, thanks.

[ficedula]

I've uploaded an additional update to the website which contains some fixes to Miyako's scenes Jake found, and also makes the text scrolling a bit smoother, so it's less annoying...

[Hime]

Yay, I managed to get Miyako's ending! The ending felt a bit... "flat", though, because it's so short and does not have any special Miyako-stuff after hours of playing. And I think that the reason why it takes so long to play the game through is the lenght of the battles. They take veeeery long. ^^; If there was some kind of a battle-less edition of the game, I would definetly play it again, trying to get either Natsuki or Sakura.

And here are my opnions on the characters (that you can get):
Sachiko - She's good looking, she's nice, but she's all like "pick me pick me, I'll give myself to you without you having to do anything", which makes me not want to pick her. Reminds me a lot of Strawberry Panic's Tamao, and a bit of Shizuma too with that roommate-thing... Even the Regale uniforms remind me a bit of Miator's, haha.
Akemi - She's very good looking too (and I like the blue uniform (I don't remember the school name, sorry ^^; ) more than the Regale one), but her personality seems a bit dull to me. Might be that I never talked with her much, even though I was aiming for her in my first time when I played Morning Star through.
Natsuki - Yay, the sensei/senpai-type! Her character sprite is the best-looking in my opnion, and it's a pity that she's the only one like that. Her personality is nice too. As I said before, I'd aim for her if I'd play this game for the third time.
Miyako - She reminds me of Chikane from Kannazuki no Miko. Chikane used bow as well and had beautiful hair too, plus she was good at studying. And they're both so elegant as well~! I liked her a lot, and got her ending as I said before. ^^
Sakura - I think she's the least good looking out of the girls, but her personality is really, really cute. I'd like to see her scenes as well.

There definetly should be more games like this, even though I didn't totally love the fighting part to be honest. But shoujo ai, especially with such cute girls... Mmmmm.

[Jake]

Yay, I managed to get Miyako's ending! The ending felt a bit... "flat", though, because it's so short and does not have any special Miyako-stuff after hours of playing.

To be honest, this is my number-one regret with the game; there simply wasn't enough time to do separate CGs and fleshing-out for each of the endings, and I'd have liked to. But there are many permutations, and there wasn't even time to properly shade the CGs we did get in... :/

In a sense, though, everything after the confrontation with Shichiro is 'ending scene', it's just that a lot of it is shared and there's still some activity... but by that point you've made all the important ending-determining decisions, all that's left is to make sure you don't mess up the tournament.

Anyway, on the plus side, I'm pretty sure the game remembers which endings you have or haven't seen, so when we get a 'plus' version out at some point in the indeterminable future with nice CG endings, it should hopefully be possible to go back and review the ones you missed out on before.

And yes, pretty much all the familiarities you mentioned were intentional... At least when we started, all of the characters were based loosely on characters from either Mai- series or other shoujo-ai/yuri series; the Regale uniform is quite obviously referencing the Strawberry Panic Miator uniform, the Auratum one is more-loosely based on the Mai-Otome one. Just with the girls looking a little less like maids. One of the unlockable extras is a series of scans of all the uniform-design sheets, which probably makes that one more obvious.