Chill [Beta Updated]

[Baka Chikara]

This is a game based on my first short story I wrote, around 7 months ago. Ever since I finished the story, I had been interested in making it into a visual novel, for a fun project, and because it was a special story to me. It was my first finished piece of work. However, due to my work ethic and various other things (like being a senior), it got pushed aside. However, with my recent freedom, I decided to work on this and finish it.

Presenting... Chill!

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Story:
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2 months ago, I had an experience that changed my perspective of my life. Up until that point, I was a person who preferred to be alone all the time. That one night.... that one moment in time changed me. But, time goes on, and memories become stale, over glamored, or are simply forgotten. That's why, for this memory, I will write everything down. The complete truth, and a message for me to never forget.

To my Future Self:
If you are reading this, that means you probably decided to look back in time to relive old days. Remember this not as a fancy of your youth, but as the truth; the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Because you were the only one who knew. Because you will be the only one to remember her. Because you are the one she loved. Because she deserves it.

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System:
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Standard control. Read the story, and pick a choice when the time comes. You somewhat control what happens in the end. Make the right choices, or make the wrong ones. It's all up to you.


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Endings:
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I'll say now that, with only 6 menus, it's kinda hard to actually make too many endings. But I managed to put in a (not really) bad ending, good ending, and a best ending that has a short epilogue. There aren't any girls to choose from. The choices simply pick how you act with the one in front of you in the very end.


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Stats so far:
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Lint stats:

The game contains 345 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 5498 words.
For an average of 15.9 words per screen.
The game contains 6 menus.

Percentages complete:

Story - 100% (completely finished)
Coding - 100% (completely finished)
Art - 99% (need to edit a picture)
Music - 100% (completely finished - thank you chronoluminaire for the links!)

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Problem (11-28-07)
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Unfortunately, the entirely possible happened to me: my old computer's motherboard just decided to up and quit at the start of school. I didn't lose anything, since it didn't affect the hard-drive, but I just now got the means to start working again. So, that meant there was a LONG time when I wasn't doing anything, since it was sitting on an unused hard-drive while I waited for the money to get the new computer, and stabilize it. It's all good now, so I've begun a little bit of work. I made a few changes to the game, but the most important is the commenting-out of all the "Karin" pics. I'm going to try what monele suggested and let the player imagine Karin. Don't know how that will work out.

Almost there. Need one small edit (that I can't do right now) and I'll be finished every way except possible with the character art.

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Screenshots
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In-game Screenshots



Karin drawings and work (possibly not using, testing that in the new build)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/ ... sizing.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/ ... pcolor.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v204/ ... ceall3.png

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Demo, Script/Options, and general attachments
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[DaFool]

Hi Baka Chikara and welcome to the forums.

This is great that you got a story completed in skeletal VN form.

edit : Ah got to the stories...

[Baka Chikara]

Thanks.

It's not so great. If anything, this should have been done back when Ren'Py was still on version 5.6.6 or somewhere around there. But I kept putting it off, then I almost completely forgot about it. I just thought it was about time I finished something that I started. Since I have been writing recently, I decided I might like to do this.

I have enjoyed it. But pretty soon, I'm going to get to a bottleneck in my abilities. The art and music part are going to be harder to come up with. That's why I decided to start posting now.

And I assume you looked at my website?

[Baka Chikara]

Just to put it here, these are the lint statistics. So far.

Statistics:

The game contains 219 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 3285 words.
For an average of 15.0 words per screen.
The game contains 2 menus.


Percentages done?

Script = 95%
Coding = 50%
Art = 5%
Music = 0%

[EDIT] Four hours, 2 games of Counter Strike Source, and one bout of dial-up hatred later, I have updated the statistics. I think I have done a heck of a lot of work in the little time I actually fully worked on it. Anyway, here are the new stats.

Statistics:

The game contains 297 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 4562 words.
For an average of 15.4 words per screen.
The game contains 6 menus.

Script = 99.9% (only grammar and spelling errors left)
Coding = 95% (only need the pictures and music to finish this)
Art = 5%
Music = 0%

I can upload a version of the game if anyone wants. It won't have any pictures or music, but anyone who would care to help might like to see it so they can see that I'm serious about finishing it up.

Uhhhh, wait, where do I upload a demo version of the game? Argg, and it's dial-up I'm dealing with. I think I'll have to wait on that. I need sleep. It's 5 AM here.

[One more Edit] Before I go to sleep, I'll say right now that I'm going to need a few more backgrounds and fullscreens shots. Maybe 3-4ish more? Also I will need one more character I'm going to show in the special ending. My game has 3 endings. One bad, one good, and one good with a special epilogue. The game picks an ending based on a simple point system I set up. Certain choices give you certain amounts of points. It's fairly easy to get the best ending, since there are only 6 choices in the whole thing.

Anyway.........

Goodnight peoples.

[DaFool]

Well...

I really have a thing for epic females that live for thousands or millions of years

Really tempting.

[lordcloudx]

Good luck and welcome to the forums.

if you ever try to make your own characters, try using pencils with digital coloring, it lets you make relatively decent-looking cgs fast.

[Baka Chikara]

Well, I was kinda feeling epic at the time. Yet not really, since I toned it down to only an epic-like character. Actually the game could continue past the point I have made it stop at. I didn't want to, at the time, go way past the bounds that my short-story has. However, I was really tired, but I was thinking up some pretty cool stuff. A tiny bit of that shows in the special ending.

Thanks lordcloudx. I've tried drawing a little. I've only made one good drawing ever, though. I guess with me really wanting to finish this I could possibly make something decent. I really want some landscape/ground stuff. I can't draw the ground if my life depended on it .

Ok, I can post the beta without the art and music now. The stuff at the very end could change a bit, since I was making quite a bit of the extra stuff up as I went along.

Mac and Linux will come later. It's hell to upload...

[edit=old version deleted. newest version in first post]

[monele]

Haven't checked the zip so maybe that's what you did already but given that you're on dialup, and since it's just for testing purpose, among other creators, maybe just zipping the scripts would be enough? Should be quite small.

[Baka Chikara]

I only have the one script file that I have actually done stuff in. Should I just zip up that? Or are there specific things that have to be there?

[monele]

Mm... technically, anything that is in your game directory. If you used the default RenPy project template, there should be a script.rpy and a options.rpy I think.

[Baka Chikara]

Ok.... is that all I need to zip up?

[edit=old script file removed. newest ones on first post]

[Baka Chikara]

[edit=screenshots I kept are now moved to the first post]

Various screenshots of the game. I decided to go out and take some pictures. Felt kind of odd to drive around and try to find the right kind of area and then take photos of it. Anyway, the first half of my game has bg... though I would like it if somebody would help me with some versions of the bg I have where it is drawn, instead of photos. It would look much better.

Still haven't done the character though, so I don't have screenshots of that. I would rather that was done by somebody else too, so I would like to ask for help there too. Anyway, just more proof that if somebody helped, it wouldn't be for a dead project.

[Edit] Should those be smaller physically? They actually load fine on my dial-up, due to the fact that I tweaked a lot of the settings in Infranview when I saved it. But their actual pixel size.......

[PyTom]

Isn't the size of the picture controlled by the size of the game? As is, the last picture seems a little over-compressed to me, with lots of artifacts in the glowing pebble things.

[Baka Chikara]

Isn't the size of the picture controlled by the size of the game? As is, the last picture seems a little over-compressed to me, with lots of artifacts in the glowing pebble things.

Oh, sorry, I was just worried about post stretching with large images, but I guess I didn't have to worry with that. Being dumb here.

Yeah, I know about the artifacts... if you can tell, I have a really BAD digital camera. It's called an... HP Photosmart 215 or something? It has a 1.2 megapixel max image, only 2x digital zoom, and hates taking pictures at dark. The artifacts were from when the camera freaked out from it's inability to get enough light from the surroundings, I guess. They were there in the original photo too. One of the many reasons I still wish for some help.

[Edit] Oh, wait, you were talking about the places where the lights were brighter in the center? That was supposed to make the lights look more intense in the center and gradually fade out to the edges, but I was in a hurry, because I was having fun putting together the pictures with the script, and I guess it made them look like the center of the orbs were artifacts. I tried to cover up a few of the REAL artifacts with orbs, also, so you were actually partway right......... And my newness to working with computer graphics shows.

The compression... it's something that I found in the Infranview program. The program is basically just a viewer, but it also has the ability to save jpegs that don't have artifacts, unlike paint. However, if you want, you can change the "save quality" when you save. It doesn't visibly change the image much, but it drastically reduces the data size.

Anyways, I was just worried about page stretching. So sorry.

Nice to talk to the creator! It's amazing how nice and helpful this forum is. I've seen some bad forums before...

[monele]

The compression... it's something that I found in the Infranview program. The program is basically just a viewer, but it also has the ability to save jpegs that don't have artifacts, unlike paint. However, if you want, you can change the "save quality" when you save. It doesn't visibly change the image much, but it drastically reduces the data size.

It's not really different from Paint... except maybe for the quality slider. Now, know that JPG is *always* lossy, even if it's unnoticeable at high quality (a setting of 80 up to 95 in IrfanView). But if you lower it too much, you'll start seeing "compression artifacts" which make thing blurry and/or squareish.