Controlled Chaos; or, Second Origins (demo up to Ch 8)

[Watercolorheart]

Yes, but I got NO sleep at all.

Um, my sketches I drew by hand, the lines I did directly into Flash. I mean ....... it's not like it was hard or anything, it was just drawing ...

I do feel "naked" without a sketch to go by, but I've been doing this so long that I can just visualize right onto the screen and go with it. I do get off to false starts, but the nice thing about a PC is, you'll never see where I erased it or exactly how many times I hit undo ...

[mikey]

Finally, I got to play the game, and I must say I'd really like to see it finished. It's obviously a story that's been on your mind for quite some time, so that makes it even more intensive - I've seen the Kara animation a long while back, but should everything come together at last in this work, it would undoubtedly be a great thing. Plus, one can see that the project really matters to you - I kind of felt it from the way it was put together and all the things around it.

I don't want to spoil the game for myself, so I'll just take a back seat and wait for the whole thing, as I'm sure this will be a good one, and that comes from someone who isn't so good with sci-fi. The story has a nice flow, and even though I can take only a couple of sci-fi stories a year, I'll gladly reserve a place for this one.

I understand that neither the presentation nor the graphics are ultra-final, but I don't think anyone doubts the quality which it will have once it's done.

About the VA, personally I would look for people after the script and possibly also the game as a whole is done, simply to save myself the stress - when the game is done and as good as it looks it's going to be, finding VAs shouldn't be a problem. Plus, it can give the VAs the comfort of knowing they have the final text, and by playing the game the way it was intended to be played (finished version) they can get into character more easily.

And you'd have the work really clearly defined for your VAs, they'd know precisely how many lines they'd have. The downside is the game would be a bit longer in development. This however is for you to decide, so good luck in finding the right people and finishing the project.

[PyTom]

There's also the issue that if you wait until the script is complete before adding voice acting, you can be sure that you won't have to ask the actors to change their lines. (Say, because you edited the script out from under them.)

[Watercolorheart]

I generally don't change my writing once I've written it ... except for typos ... I've held true to this for as long as I can remember, no matter if one person doesn't like it because there's always someone else who did.

More importantly, it's not for a fandom or anything or of a set series, so the ideas are all my own ... given that, I don't really feel pressured to change something because the whole story is being retold anyway, and I don't want it to be completely polished. I want it to be "me" ... however I felt at the time, you know?

Just like if someone told you, mikey, that they didn't care for an aspect of this or that game. You file it away for later information, but you probably aren't going to rewrite the whole script because of it ...

[Watercolorheart]

Hmm, the only thing I worry about in Chapter 3 is the timeline, LOL. I already know what's going to happen, my long discussions with my friends usually are trying to figure out what order it's going to happen in.

It's so weird telling a story I've already told before ...

[mikey]

I generally don't change my writing once I've written it ... except for typos ... I've held true to this for as long as I can remember, no matter if one person doesn't like it because there's always someone else who did.

Well, Tolstoy was said to change his scripts, Dostoyevsky was said never to do it. Both are world famous.

.. given that, I don't really feel pressured to change something because the whole story is being retold anyway, and I don't want it to be completely polished. I want it to be "me" ... however I felt at the time, you know?

Absolutely (I'll just say Gakuen Redux... it's been rewritten twice), and in fact I like the more personal, unpolished things more.

[Watercolorheart]

I like my original writing because, given the chance, I will go back and take out all the charming little things out that perhaps were very funny or cute even if they didn't "fit" and replace them with boring serious things or long descriptions.

I think I did that to one of my older stories, completely killed off all the fun. I reread it just a couple days ago, compared it against my early rough draft on my computer, and decided that the first one was better before I tried to "improve" it ...

Sometimes, a little cliche is good to break the monotony. Because even though I still feel dubious with how Chapter 2 turned out (I felt like it was very ... unbelievable), I was told that it was one of the better ones because it wasn't so deadly serious ... so I have my personal opinion, but then another one that tells me "if it's not broke, don't try to fix it."

[mikey]

I think I did that to one of my older stories, completely killed off all the fun. I reread it just a couple days ago, compared it against my early rough draft on my computer, and decided that the first one was better before I tried to "improve" it ...

As for me, I do rework a lot, but I often do it in really big blocks, rewriting chapters or even bigger portions from scratch and IMO by taking big blocks, this doesn't lead to what you described - that the script feels additionally edited and in the end a lot of the passion is replaced by "polish". So I really like to write particular segments in one breath, as it kind of feels like the best way for me. I've also tried a few times to "insert a scene", but it usually broke everything.

It also leads to me being able to look back at say Black Pencil and even though it's a really clumsy game with typos, not really wanting to change anything.

[Watercolorheart]

*nod*

I go back and fix typos. That is the exception: I will gladly remove bad sentence structure and replace it with something more grammatically correct.

[Watercolorheart]

.... small update.

[Watercolorheart]

I finished writing Chapter 3.

This thread really died in the meantime, didn't it?

[Alessio]

Hey hey, give us time to breathe! You're writing this thing faster than we can read it! ;)
On a side note, you wrote on deviantART that you want to compress the thing more by changing the file formats - I agree on the OGG one (very good compression), but I don't think going from PNG to JPG/GIF would help. If graphics are too heavy, you can try reducing the colour depth (if you don't need Alpha channels, then indexed pictures with 256 colors often still look very good, and the file size is much smaller). But when in doubt, leave as is. Not worth destroying good graphics to gain a few kB.

[monele]

Why not JPG ?... At lower compression levels, you gain quite a few KBs and still have a humanly perfect image (you'd have to zoom in to see compression artifacts). Or is it like music with some people seeing artifacts more easily than others ? :/

[Alessio]

You're right, I guess it's worth a try. I just remembered from my experiments that my background pictures were not much smaller in JPG as long as they were in an acceptable quality. On the other hand, JPG is a lossy algorithm, and so actually should make it possible to shrink sizes quite a bit.

No, I don't think people see JPGs differently - but you've got a point there. Maybe some notice it more, some less.

[mikey]

Well, JPG can have different compression rates, right? With 80% I think images should come out reasonably well. More than 90% is almost without artifacts, but then again, the file is bigger.

Hmm, the most recent example I saw that a JPG had visible artifacts was At Summer's End. If the artifacts are too visible, of course then it becomes a bother.