Lemma Soft Forums

Eastern Starlight Romance is a Touhou Project fangame focusing on Marisa's search for immortality and companionship.







We hit a few snags, but in the end, we've got a public release for you. You can get a direct download and a short list of the changes on our site here:
http://dsd.faceroll.net/?p=325

If you just want to grab it from off site (and if you're willing to put up with mediafire/megaupload), you can grab the demo from these links as well:

Eastern Starlight Romance download (Win32)
Eastern Starlight Romance download (All OS)

The README, for some quick info

We've had a lot of fun putting this together, and I hope you all enjoy it.

Our blog.
Our forums.

An update. New screenshots and a progress report, here.

Our progress on the demo:

Writing is done. Programming of the scripts has started.

Character cut-ins: ~ 100% complete.
Backgrounds: I (Graph) am working on this. ~ 66% complete.
Event CGs: Nobody working on this so far. ~ 0% complete.
GUI: ~ 100% complete (As far as saying, it's functional)

SFX: We more or less have what we need for the demo. ~90% complete.
Music: This one is getting done I think. ~80% complete.

Alice is sporting some pretty badass man arms. Maybe giving her more slender arms and smaller hands would make her more recognizable. (I wouldn't have thought that that's Alice had you not told me)

I'll revise things after the demo as needed... but keep in mind we're really short on artists here, we had about 5 or so drop out of the project so I'm pulling character art, GUI, backgrounds, and at this rate it looks like CGs as well. And the guy I picked up to crit my art registered and then never showed up again.

The thing is that it's an unusually large project and I guess that intimidates people. I would say that the demo is probably going to be as long as many of the full projects around here (If I correctly gathered that most don't take more than 3 hours to read through).

Sign-ups for beta testing are here!

If all goes well the beta demo should be ready in a few days.

There's still a bit of script to type up still, but so far Lint gives us this:

The game contains 3022 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 43927 words,
for an average of 14.5 words per screen.
The game contains 68 menus.

The demo is up! See our blog post here for the links. http://dsd.faceroll.net/?p=199

~58,000 words. Don't know how long that is time-wise.

Hi! I'm one of the programmers working on this game. Well, just a couple of things I have to add:

(1) As this forum is closely tied to the programming aspect of VNs, I'll say that as one of this game's programmers I'm definitely looking for pointers toward anything in the GUI that looks odd, off, or just not as good-looking as it could be. But of course, feedback on any aspect of the game will be helpful for all of us as we continue working. We'd like to deliver a genuinely good game here.

(2) Some more screenshots would be appropriate right about now:






Again, download links are on our blog. Well, hope you enjoy!

Very well written, and imaginitavely done. I am quite curious about the further scenarios that are to be developed, particularly the rest of Flandre's and Patchouli's. Her initial reaction to the events that occur just as the story begins are logical and a very human response to make in reaction to the unexpected loss of someone close, especially if you have access to magic. All together this looks like a wonderful game so far from what I have played, and hope to see the completed version soon.

^ (Very late reply, but...) thanks for the comments! The completed game is actually going to be quite a bit longer than the demo, so it could take a while... but we're going to have at least one more intermediate release before the whole thing's done.

Well, I thought we could bring an update here. We've been making lots of progress on the game this December.
First, screenshots!

We have new characters:

And re-drawn characters:



Second, we have a pretty large project on our hands, so could use some help! We mainly have two positions in mind now:

(1) We’re still looking for artists. Graph's doing very well with the character poses (the ones that go on top of background images), but we also need stand-alone CG images for special events in the story. The standard background images also need to get done, but it's mainly the CGs that we want to devote some quality time to. So an artist dedicated to CGs would be especially helpful! (But anyone who could try some CGs or BGs would be great.)


(2) Making magic-attack animations. These are new, and we're going to use these to improve our battle scenes (which currently just consist of showing the characters, naming spells, and playing sounds). To show the concept, here's a spell animation made with a single laser image and Ren'Py code. Unfortunately I don't have a video, but here are four screenshots (going left to right):

There's a wave of lasers going from the bottom to the top of the screen, at slightly varying angles. It's supposed to be kind of like Marisa's "Shoot the Moon" from Imperishable Night. As mentioned, I made the animation entirely with Ren’Py code - here it is, in case it interests Ren'Py people here: So it’s possible to make these animations with more Ren'Py and less art. You can certainly use more art and less Ren'Py, though, and you might come up with something much nicer with very little programming. For example, you can make animations with Photoshop or GIMP (though I haven't tried this myself). Another alternative to programming is to use a flash-animation program like SWiSH miniMax, and then convert your animation to a series of images to be used like a slideshow in the game. (This option probably offers more than what we need, but some people might already be familiar with using this kind of program, so I'm giving it a mention.)


If you're interested in either of these tasks (art or magic), please mention your interest here, or post on our forum.

We're recruiting beta testers for the second demo! See the first post.

Demo 2 is out! See the first post for info / downloads.

Here's a separate Manual/Readme download, which has screenshots and a list of changes since our first demo (which was 10 months ago now, wow).

http://dsd.faceroll.net/forums/index.ph ... howfile=65

Added some more screenshots from this demo to the first post.

I absolutely love this game. The main character has such a funny and crazy personality. It is fun to see her point of view on things and i love to make the craziest choice just to see everyone's reaction.

Not only is the main character awesome but i love her relationship with her friends and the way they react with each other. Not only are they friends with the main character, but they are also good friends with each-other and it's easy to tell from the dialogue.

Sorry for the megabump, but is this a finished game or another demo?