Like She Had Wings [action/urban fantasy][GxG/B/X]

[kitsubasa]

Whoo, first update in a coupla weeks! So, Cafechan has just revamped the logo so it has the new title, and I've added that back into the first post for everyone to ooh and ahh at.

On a different note altogether; Morhighan's been doing awesome stuff with the GUI for me lately, so here's a preview of that:

Thanks both of you for your help and your awesome work!

On the writing side of things; I'm currently 1/3 of the way into the game, with Armida's route very close to being finished, and Samir+Doc well on their way. Jane and the secret route are on the backburner until all the rest are finished, because I'm uninspired where Jane is concerned and I don't want to go into the secret route without knowing exactly what I've done on the other four. Since no-one's seen my writing yet (for better or for worse!) here's an excerpt from one of the stupidest conversations I've penned thus far.

And, just to cap things off, I've never shown off any of the full character designs. Here are a couple of them for your viewing ?pleasure?

BD Ridiculous outfits ahoy.

[kitsubasa]

Whoo, updated the first post with sprites for demon Art, Jane, and then Wolfgang's sprite is also featured down the page! Also, GUI is done (unless extra features/menus are added further down the track), and Doc's route is almost halfway written. Progress, ahoy!

[Morhighan]

I love the way Demon Art looks! The character sprites are so great. >w<

[kitsubasa]

Morhighan-- Glad you like how she's turning out! Have a bonus Demon Art expression:



Enjoy her shark teeth~ : B

General update stuff-- Doc's route is nearly finished being written! Onto the endings now, and then they're done and dusted and it's on to finish Samir!

Also, Yuri, Garnet, Duke and Laz have had their sprites posted! All are viewable in their posts on the first page. : D Enjoy!

[buttdumpling]

oh my gosh!! Is doc nonbinary? I noticed that you use "they" pronouns!! If they are, that's SO AWESOME~!
I love all of the character designs, and that you have multiple disabled characters u3u
that may seem kind of silly, but as a disabled queer lady seeing this stuff always makes me really happy.
Also I like the sauce conversation bwaahaha

[kitsubasa]

Yup, Doc is nonbinary! : ) As well as Doc being agender nonbinary, there's also a genderfluid character in the cast, though who that is is kind of spoilery since they use different identities depending on how they're presenting.

Also, that's not silly at all, that's really nice-- I'm happy they mean something for you! I'd estimate around half the cast have illnesses or disabilities-- to run off a rough list...

Yuri is blind in one eye and has two missing limbs, Laz is also missing a limb, Samir has severe depression, Emma has insomnia+CFS+anemia, Armida has selective mutism, Garnet has social anxiety disorder, Jane has a heart condition, Lucretia has syndactyly, Noah is blind in one eye and partially deaf in one ear, Milla has insomnia and has recently managed to work past PTSD (though certain things can still trigger it), and while Art refuses to get it diagnosed she's developing COPD of some sort from secondhand smoke in her childhood.

Phew! So those're all the conditions that come up in some form. I'm trying to treat all the characters with respect and avoid shying away from or focusing too closely on their conditions. Some are affected more, some less, but none are going to be defined by them. As in reality, they're just part of the character's lives-- and, in some cases like Lazare, the magical replacements and coping mechanisms they find actually make them more proficient at their work than people with conventionally abled bodies. One of my big focuses in the worldbuilding for this story is showing how magic effects modern everyday life... especially medicine. So heck yeah, we've got crystal prostheses that you can shove ghosts in, and all kinds of nifty things like that.

I mean who doesn't want to have a ghost arm. Riddle me that. BD

[buttdumpling]

awesome!! I'll be looking forward to the game!!

[kitsubasa]

Whoa, more sprites! Lucretia, Wilhemina and Moses have had their sprites added to the first page, taking us to a total of 15/24 base sprites done.

Also, while I'm going to be sitting on the cast list for a while, I've been making progress with getting the voice actors sorted out. While I intend to hold open auditions for a few of the characters, for the sake of reliability due to the scope of the project, I'm drawing a lot of the cast from voice actors I already know. Doc, Jane, Samir, Wolfgang, Will, Lucretia and Cecil have been cast, and a couple more of the characters are being organised at the moment.

The characters I intend to open cast eventually are Milla, Yuri, Garnet, Coro, Duke. Sunshine, Moses and Lazare may end up open cast as well, depending on how things pan out.

As for the characters I haven't mentioned yet... Clarence, Emma, Erin and Art are all supposed to have New Zealand accents, and due to the relative scarcity of New Zealand voice actors online (ie. I'm the only active one I've seen kicking around most of the communities I visit...) I'm more likely to seek people in real life to polish off these roles. As always though, if you're a New Zealander and you're interested in auditioning, just give me a shout and I'll offer up some audition material for these four. : D

[kitsubasa]

Aaand more sprites! Noah, Erin and Coro have been added to the first page. Coro is the only male love interest in the game, so if you're into that kind of thing, he's probably worth a look-- I mean, come on, give the poor near-extinct dragon boy a chance. He's wearing midriff-bearing armour. Just for you.

(Maybe not just for you, maybe to be an exhibitionist, we just don't know.)

Oh, hey, and on the topic of near extinction-- it's fitting that Noah and Coro get their sprite updates together. Coro's species, the zmeu, were originally a set of eight elemental dragon dudes who, after causing no shortage of trouble for the human settlements of Medipacifica, were hunted down to just three. Noah's claim to fame is being the only human to take down a zmeu in one-on-one combat-- Sigal, the soul elemental. First, he smashed Sigal's forehead gem... without their forehead gems, zmeu can't shapeshift out of their humanoid form. Then, he ripped off Sigal's wings, and threw him off a skyscraper to his death.

If that weren't enough, Noah later recquisitioned the corpse of another zmeu, Irving, and skinned him. He now wears the remains as a sharp set of vest-and-cowboy-boots, and a loud warning to Coro: you'll be next.

[kitsubasa]

Three more sprites added! Emma, Clarence and Cecil have been thrown onto the front page for scrutiny. With them done, there's only three sprites left and we're finished. Unfortunately, two of the three remaining are spoilerific, but you'll get to see Sunshine, so that's something. After the base sprites are all completed, we'll be sussing out the alternate outfits, some of which I'll post up, others I won't be able to-- then, it'll be onto the CGs. Mm, delicious progress!

Meanwhile on the writing front, I've been working on Doc's endings. Doc has eight endings, and which you get will be decided firstly by whether you romance our punk science hero, and then by two other variables you'll figure out playing the route. Due to the way the endings are decided, some will be shorter than others, but I'm aiming to make them all plenty exciting, so that whichever you hit you'll feel the route has had an interesting conclusion, even if it's not a very happy one. Hopefully my intentions for that pan out properly, and hopefully everyone enjoys Doc and co's wacky antics (which include car chases, magic, and putting Cecil through the ringer, among many, many other things)!

[kitsubasa]

Whoo, pretty much a month since I last posted an update on this, huh?

Okay, so I've done a big restructuring of the game over the last couple of weeks. Jane's route has been folded in with Garnet's, which is now... less of a secret. Originally the game was going to be resolved within Garnet's route, but I've shunted the finale content over into its own route, so she's less of a secret and also there's more time to enjoy all the major characters mixing, mingling, and punching evil in the face.

Art hasn't gone anywhere in the last while, but I've started seeking some help with music from friends of mine. Hopefully I'll have announcements relating to that sometime soon! Anyway, for the time being, enjoy my big overhaul of the front post that outlines the plot/structure changes, and have a rad day. : D

[Gabylc]

Urban fantasy with actual monster-like characters! Great female lead! NB datable character! (Humanoid exhibitionist dragon!) I feel like it's Christmas Day

It looks like it will be a bit action-heavy in the Finale route and I love that too. Romance get a special taste when your character fight for his/her survival back to back with their loved one. Especially in an urban fantasy setting!

The art is looking great too, the character designs are quite... Flamboyant, if I may say.

You set yourself for quite a lot of work considering the lenght of each route and the number of backgrounds, characters..., so I wish you good luck with it I'll keep an eye on that project for sure!

[kitsubasa]

I'm glad you like how it's looking so far, Gabylc! The monster-like character thing is actually a pet peeve of mine in relation to a lot of games/stories/what have you. I love interesting humanoid species designs, so I'm always bummed out when media is like 'we have demons! ... They are just regular people with horns'. You can't see it on her sprite but on top of the immediately visible stuff, Art has classic goat-like calves/cloven hooves and a tail. I think it's unmentioned on this thread so far, but she used to have wings as well. Doc lopped them off ~for science~ in the interim between New Year's/March. I would have made my characters even more monstrous, actually! ... But for worldbuilding reasons I had to leave it at this.

The Finale is very action heavy, yup. All the routes end in a reasonably dramatic and explosive way, but the finale as it's currently drafted is going to take the cake. I really wanted to pull in some kind of scenario where all of the major characters would be able to do something cool and adventurous, and the finale is precisely that scenario. : U Plus, it wraps up a bunch of character arcs and allows you to see everyone interacting that otherwise missed out on it (notably, Doc and Garnet meet up in the finale-- they're the only major chars that take that long to interact, but I thought it was important they got that chance, haha)

Character designs were inspired mostly by Castlevania, Final Fantasy VII and Shadow Hearts, ahahahaha. I was trying to make it all vibrant enough that it'd give the impression of a fantasy story/scenario, but also kind of grounded in modern fashion until you get into the center of the continent/story and hit on this truckload of magical creatures that're still stuck in the late 1800s, where they essentially came from. And then there is Coro who... um, he has plate armour I guess and that's something. His clothes are meant to seem like an extension of his natural plating/hair, so he looks like he might've just sprung up out of the ether fully-formed with the outfit he's wearing. Which he... kind of did...

It's a truckload of work but hey, I'm a go big or go home kind of person, and having so much to skip around means that in the 10 months I've been chipping at it I've never become bored of the project. Sick of writing grounded and emotional discussion about being undead? I can hop onto a ludicrous action scene with a vampire/demon cat-and-mouse chase through a castle. It's all good times here. I get to design a discarded animatronic version of one of Coro's brothers soon and I'm really excited for it. So much fuuun. : D

[xiaomao]

This! Looks! So! AWESOME!!!

[kitsubasa]

Glad you think so, Xiaomao! uvu

Okay, so immediately after saying art hadn't made any progress lately... Anna handed me the last three sprites! As aforementioned, two can't be shown yet, but Sunshine's been updated on the first page.

'Yay, we don't have to look at Kitsubasa's sketchy designs any longer!'

Well... about that. Sorry to disappoint, but I thought I'd toss up a little something I've been working on the past few days. While I've been rejigging the plot, I've added a couple more characters to tie everything together. Two of them have to be kept under wraps (so many secrets up in this post) but the third I can post some a prelim design for and intriiigue you all.

Meet... well, the name's not important. He's just here with Noah. Please, ignore the scarf. If he was a security issue, Noah would have thrown him out already. He's just a spectator. What is he? Mm. Dead, if you're asking. Why do you think he wears all this? There comes a time in every lich's unlife that there are a few too many holes open, and people get... touchy. That's a wig, by the way. If you'd let him move along unmolested, that'd be appreciated. Thank you.

I'll be finishing this guy up over the next few days. I will even draw hands for him. A whole hand. Maybe two. I will also soon have some alternative 'artfits' to showcase, now the sprites are done and Anna's handling the clothing changes for the cast. Artemis is up first for new digs, with formalwear on the cards for both human and demon sprites, and some other goodies. Full speed ahead, choo choo!