Witching Hour [Political Intrigue|Action|Fantasy] 10/18

[SelLi]

Your art is very inspirational I especially like seeing the line art and rough sketches before the finished work. And of course, the finished work is great too. Nice job.

Edit: (Claire has white hair but also sometimes has brown hair and a dress?)
Another note about the art- a small pet peeve of mine is that sometimes people won't change the sprites for when a character's in a dark place or in a light place, they always keep it all bright like it's day time or something. I know it's very small but It's nice to see you changing the the red dress Claire(?) sprites' lighting depending on the scene.

[chocojax]

GGG, Coren, SelLi: Thanks for the comments, guys!! :0)

SelLi:

Claire has white hair but also sometimes has brown hair and a dress?

Mhm! In the demo/prologue, she's a child at first and then there's a time-skip to her as a teenager. So, her original hair color was brown, and then it turns white due to magic.

Another note about the art- a small pet peeve of mine is that sometimes people won't change the sprites for when a character's in a dark place or in a light place, they always keep it all bright like it's day time or something.

Yeah! I don't think I've actually seen a VN that did that yet, but it does make me happy when there are different day-time sprites. :D

[chocojax]

More updates, wheee.

(I'd like to show off another tune, but I'll hold off until I get a few more backgrounds done.)

I don't think I've actually said this before, but the demo/prologue is pretty disturbing. I'm looking forward to drawing the CG scenes, though.

Writing: Still going through to revise. It's shamefully only ~4.5k words, but eh. I'll see if I should add anything else to pad her character out more.

Art: Spent quite a bit of time working on these two last night. The GUI looks pretty cool, since I animated a whole bunch of stuff!

Any sort of critique/comments on the GUI would be really helpful, by the way. It's still a WIP, so I can still change things around! (Just not until Sunday, haha.)

[kukiko-tan]

The story seems quite intriguing and complex. You've done a great job so far. The art is quite lovely and eye-catching. Keep goooooooinggg!

[SelLi]

There's nothing shameful about a shorter story. If you know what you want your story to be and know what you want it to say, and your full story happens to come to a shorter word count, then there's nothing wrong with that. But if it's shorter because it's not... "full", then maybe let it grow a bit. Flesh things out a bit more- ask and answer some more questions about the settings, conflicts, and characters, and just let things expand. That will result in the entire thing being- well- bigger.

Edit (a bit of a rant) :

I don't think anyone should go out of their way to add something that they'd call "padding". Padding is just fluff that contributes nothing. There are some things that are kind of like padding that can be good for a story, though, like "drawing", or "fleshing" things out.

Like if you have a character meet another character and want them to fall in love, it'd probably be awkward to do that right away. You should perhaps draw it out over a longer amount of time to make it feel like more like an actual relationship.

Or if you have a character who's a bit flat, then you should perhaps flesh them out a bit more to make them more interesting or whathaveyou.

Drawing things out can add a healthy pause for the reader to breathe. It adds more of a journey between point A and B, and while on that journey, the characters will probably grow more, too. And fleshing out things is just adding more to something. Both of these can be over done, of course, but are both more or less often good for a story.

I'm going on a rant now, but I guess I just get a bit ticked when someone says that want to add padding to their story, when a good story has nothing that's really padding... right? I donno~

[chocojax]

@kukiko-tan: Thanks! I'm trying, haha! :P

@SelLi: Sorry, I didn't mean to make you rant!

I completely understand. I know it's a short story in itself, but by padding, I meant that I wanted to try to add some more stuff that would give more insight/view into Claire's character, and in turn making the reader enjoy/like her more or something, rather than only pity her (because at the moment, most of it is just conflict that happens at a pretty rapid pace).

Much like what you said about two characters falling in love, that's how I feel about the story right now. Everything's happening pretty fast, and there's hardly any time for the reader to take a breather. I mean, I already had a few calming scenes, but it still feels a little too fast. So, at the moment, I'm trying to add/expand more on those scenes while fleshing out the important characters of the story. It's especially important too, since this is a backstory to one of the main protagonists.

[SelLi]

It's quite alright- I'm the one sorry for ranting.

That sounds great ^^ what you're adding will add very much to your story, I think. Good job.

[Giovedi]

Delicious art. Keepin' track. <3

[chocojax]

@SelLi: Nah, man. I can understand, since it seems like a lot of people (including me, when I was younger) feel like they need to pad the writing with nonsense just for the sake of a larger word-count. I'm gonna try hard to make all of the scenes count, though!

@Giovedi: Thanks, man!

---

Update: April 18th

Music Update:
I... I feel kinda bad, since I don't think anyone has commented on the music at all. So, please do listen to this! Butler's really great at makin' music, so I'd like it if people would look and listen to it, haha!

Witch's Lament (currently an OGG, will change to MP3 later.)

And in addition, I've contacted one of my friend who (I believe) is pretty well-known in the UTAU community to compose a theme song for tWH. I'm hoping for her to start when I'm about 50% through with the main story, so, won't be seein' it in the prologue. :0)

Everything-Else Update:
It's going pretty well! I'm doing a fair amount of progress. Once I get most of the art assets done, I'm going to be compiling a beta for a few of my writer friends for critique.

[SelLi]

The song seems to fit the air of the story pretty darn well and it's well done, too. Much better than anything I could do lol! XD
Seriously though sounds good.

[LucaMadison]

Oh, wonderful art! Is amazing! <3

[chocojax]

(@SelLi,LucaMadison: Late replies, but thanks you guys! )

Been a long while since I last updated, but here I am! Although, I bring along some bad (?) news:

I'm scrapping the back-story demo, mainly because it's really... it's really weird and over-the-top sad. The most I'll do is briefly mention it in the real game and push hints towards it. I really appreciate all of the support and criticisms that all of you have given me about it though! It's gonna help me with the original game a lot.

Though, I'm pretty proud of the art assets I did for it, so here are some screenshots, along with a background compilation. I guess it can serve as a sort of preview for future art assets. (click to view in high res.)





All right! On the other hand, I've started working a lot more on the real game! Wooo.



In terms of art: I've only drawn some more concepts/sketches of the sprites for Claire and Kowen. I might do the same for Icario and Christoph later, though.

In terms of writing: I'm forcing myself to write at least 500 words a day, so I've been making quite a bit of progress! I used to get really stressed out when writing, which is why I was pretty slow on the written portion of the VN. I'm starting to get a little bit more relaxed by ignoring most grammar errors, adverbs, and words that I keep using. Since I can go back over it in the 2nd draft and fix 'em up. I've also started to make my outlines a lot more detailed, so I feel a lot of secure-ness in "what's gonna happen next in this small piece in the event."

I'm hoping I can write enough for just one VN, but I might split it into two episodes if it starts getting too long/takes too long to be released. I don't think it would, but it's a possibility.

Overall, I've really learned a lot through the tiny demo, and I'll try to carry as much knowledge as I can over to the real VN itself. :>

[Hazel-Bun]

Great stuff so far! Writing is a chore that slowly needs to be morphed into habit >>" But, I'm sure it'll come out just as lovely as the art

[chocojax]

@Hazel-Bun: Thanks, yo! Yeah, it did feel a lot like a chore before. One of my friends told me that he actually just... keeps writes forever and still enjoys it, so there's still hope for me! Hahahaha. :P

[chocojax]

Some mo' updates!

Writing: It's going well! Right now I'm trying my darn hardest to just vomit anything that comes to mind! Of course, I'm keeping it aligned to the plot outline, but it's starting to become more of a habit and less stressful. Yay! So, in total, I've written about 6K words! I might start on making a short demo (probably the first 2 acts, which may turn out to be ~9-10K) once I start getting into the meat of the story.

The writing updates are never as meaty as the art updates, hahaha. I guess once I start editing/going into rough drafts, I'll spill out some more stuff on backgrounds/some quote stuff. Just lemme know if you guys are interested in anything at all, though. :O

Art: Of course, art always progresses a lot more than writing, hah. I've added some concept art portraits for Christoph and Icario, yay! Icario looks pretty... aristocratic, but that's just 'cause I wanted to draw him in something other than tattered clothes and show his face a bit more, heh.



I've also noticed that basically all of the art I've drawn so far were just guys (because I need to draw guys a whole lot more!), so I doodled up something for Christoph's lovely sister, Catherine! Hahaha. She looks pretty frumpy because she's not very ladylike. :P

To the right is a mockup of a sprite! Of Claire! I'm hoping on having a lot of differently posed sprites whenever I can, but I can't promise it, yo!



Aaaand, here are some doodles for the background. I've started on the tent one, but the colors are slightly messed up because my screen settings were kinda weird from the way I was sitting. I always hate that. :(