The Rise and Fall of Gemini (released January 2009)

[N0UGHTS]

:smile: Blatant and unwarranted indeed.

http://incompetech.com/

I have no idea what kind of music you want, but chances are, that guy has it composed. ...Like I said, I have no idea what you want, but I suggest listening to Reminiscing, Stages of Grief, Water Droplets on the River, There is Romance, and Impromptu in Quarter Comma Meantone. Oh, and maybe Water Prelude? See if any of those songs fit.

As for art... I guess not a lot of people here are very experienced with drawing anything for/with sci-fi. You know, aside from the people who are busy with their projects. (I'm looking at you, AlphaProspector!) Perhaps you should try a community that specialises in sci-fi art?

[Guest]

Thanks for the music link, N0UGHTS!

I think I'm looking for realistic art more than I am sci-fi art. I'd like the spacecraft to look like real-life, 1960s-era stuff, and the space scenes should resemble NASA photographs - but I'd like art that has a glow of emotion and a hand-drawn look. Maybe I should put that in my first post.

[lunasspecto]

Drat. I could have sworn that I had logged in.

I've been to incompetech before, but I had trouble finding what I was looking for, so thanks for the suggestions!

[AlphaProspector]

You know, aside from the people who are busy with their projects. (I'm looking at you, AlphaProspector!)

I see what you did there

Well, so the looks should be realistic? That sounds neat and like a good challenge. For the space shots... let me think, I could come up with one or two artworks for the space scenes and then doing all the post processing of the render in Photoshop till it acquires a hand-drawn look. 3dsMAX (the 3d tool I use) comes with some nice filters to blur the excessively CGIish lines and bloom (only a tiny thing here, in the order of 3% of less, not the over excessive bloom plus brown you see in games nowadays) helps a bit when bringing the raw render to Photoshop for the final 'treatment'.

Maybe I will delay the release of the next version and do the artwork... I think I'm in the mood to try a high-orbit shot of the Earth from a first-generation NASA spacecraft without a gigantic lens-flare taking over 80% of the image

I think I saw some 3d freebies of Nasa models but I can't remember at the moment... If the models are nice enough I could tweak them a bit and use those, else, some wise collage and the power of 'shop (not shoop-da-woop) could make it for an external shot of the spacecraft with, maybe, sketchy/pencil-like approach?

There we are.

[lunasspecto]

That sounds excellent, AlphaProspector! If you'd like to give this project a shot I'd be very greatful.

[AlphaProspector]

Well, middle of the week. I'm painfully stuck with a translation job and I have a work interview tomorrow but had some spare time and made a 3d Earth with MAX and rendered a huge 4000x4000 square to post-process in Photoshop. I went to the NASA old archive and found an a nice shot of the Apollo 11 module leaving the moon behind. It was a through-the-window shot and, well, I used this angle as the shot I had in mind.

Simply by replacing the moon with the rendered Earth we come up with this. Mission: out of the Earth (that's Brazil's tip by the way) Home, I dream of home...

Lo-res render attached. Full one is 800x600. I began testing how to make it sketchy but it might need some extra playing to avoid the 'generic' sketchy look that makes people scream: "Photoshop Filter!"

mmm, hope it's fine. My next attempt would be a sketchy starfield.

[lunasspecto]

That's really wonderful. The contrast is great, and the utter darkness of the area in shadow is very evocative.

[AlphaProspector]

Thank you!

I'll PM ya the 800x600 image then. I tried to follow the indication as much as possible with a quite realistic-yet-sketchy Earth. The idea was to keep the Photoshop filters at a minimum or making them quite subtle so it doesn't get that obvious.

Also, did you dump the text on a script file to examine how long it'll take and how it'll look? If you didn't, well, I created the project files and I'll soon upload ya a rar with the script/options rpys already set and a Narrator Character assigned to all the text so you can edit or fiddle with it.

edit: here it is. Put this in the Ren'Py folder and it should recognise it as the project. From there you can mess with the script/options files.

The total word count is 605 so I think that maybe NVL mode could be used to provide entire paragraphs in a single screen, properly separated (some extra space between text lines).

Else, single sentences would also help to separate and give coherence to the story. A total of 3-4 bg images (a fifth for the main menu and probably another two for game menu and the credits?) seem ok. Of course these are all estimates, nothing is carved in stone.

[AlphaProspector]

Time to bump this again. Sorry for the delay, got stuck at work... Here is the preview of the starfield. If you like both the orbital shot+fantasy/sketchy starfield I'll PM ya both the full 800x600 images.

This time I worked entirely in Photoshop as opposed to mixing it with 3dsMAX.

Hope you like this one. Took me a bit to get the hang of the brushes and do everything manually.

edit: and here is the rocket about to be launched with a little manipulation from a NASA archives shot. The original image is huge so I took a small portion and began working on it, giving it a sketchy and paint-like approach. I'm not too sure I succeeded but the layer of clouds wasn't there in the original shot (it's a set of almost transparent clouds I put on top xP)

There we are. That makes 3 BGs if I'm not wrong.

[lunasspecto]

AlphaProspector
These are all great. They're quite atmospheric. I have an interesting idea I've played around with using star photographs and Ren'Py scripting:

I'd like to do something like the end of "Starry Sky" - fading out all the stars except two - then go one step further by dimming one of the remaining stars, so one lone star is left. I have the basic GIMP and Ren'Py skills to do this.

Please send the 800x600 images at your leisure. I'm not in a hurry.

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

[AlphaProspector]

Spoilers ahead:

Well, that's actually quite neat for the end and would match the atmospheric feeling. Don't worry, I built the starfield from its very foundations. The stars you see there are each one in separate layers (ok, the dimmer stars are a noise layer heavily customised) I only need to export a specific layer (just point me two of the stars you wanna keep shining) and then I'll get ya the pngs with transparencies and ready to apply in Ren'Py. After that, it's a matter of using a longer "with dissolve" transition. Using the starfield as the main bg we put something like:

hide bg stars
show bg starlight
with dissolve

And we would be set to go. The whole starfield would softly and slowly fade away, leaving only two stars. Then we repeat the same but with the two stars, leaving only one and, ultimately a "scene bg black with dissolve" to make the last star disappear.

mmm, I was also thinking you could use the same two stars as regular images (not just bgs) and create a looped animation so we get them to twinkle periodically while the player reads. What do you think? In The Circular Gate I have a background that suddenly shines extremely bright and then goes back to normal cyclically throughout the whole chapter, something soft like that or maybe accelerated to give a faster twinkling?

Guess once we clear this thingie I'll send the whole pack. Jeez, I hate blocks and stress, I was feeling so depressed due to lack of inspiration... This quite helped!

[lunasspecto]

AlphaProspector:

I could use transparencies as you suggested or simply (but perhaps less efficiently) use three complete background images. The twinkling is a cool idea, but I prefer stillness because it emphasizes the sterility of the scene.

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

[AlphaProspector]

kk. Maybe it'll be better as my twinkling effect could actually slow thingies down a bit... Now, don't worry. The transparency image it's just a couple of kb. (I think it's less than 40kb so loaded in memory it won't be that much even when the mb multiplication is applied, especially if we clear it with a hide bg and load a new bg with the "scene bg" command instead of show)

Oh, and the latest Ren'Py offers improved speed and image handling (but I would recommend working safely on 6.7.0, then porting the game to 6.7.1 for the final release, I'm not fond of JEdit)

Once I get the two transparencies I'm packing everything in a rar and PM 'em to you. Let's make this short but sweet. Oh, if you don't mind, after reading the 'banner exchange' thread, I could my, for now, quite empty game log/dev diary and put an entry (entry = personal definition of a mini site) for the game plus links to your Fictionpress account (or any other site I could direct users to). A banner for both you as a dev/writer/artist and one for the game would be neat.

Since you have some GIMP knowledge, would you like to try making those? I will gladly include them in my site so we can start the shameless promotion. Standard size for said banners seems to be exactly 200x40.

mmm, here comes the offtopic: there should really be a thread for offsite linking/banner exchanging and basic design styles guidelines...

Well, for now, time to focus on the game.

[lunasspecto]

I'd just like to announce that thanks primarily to AlphaProspector this project is very close to completion. We just need to slip in one or two more backgrounds and make one or two cosmetic additions; either beta-testing or public distribution will follow.

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

[PyTom]

Um... I can't believe I didn't notice this before... but all the rockets and capsules in this thread are Apollos, not Geminis.