Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

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NialGrenville
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#16 Post by NialGrenville »

I propose an idea. If intense, and I do mean intense, situations occur. The all time favorite camera angle for me: Their mouth, or eyes. Only that! It conveys power of words, or the gateways to the soul. Film and philosophy 201! Most angles shot are taken to convey a meaning linked to our philosophical ideas of person. Eyes are gateways to the soul: powerful, truthful, beautiful, and awe inspiring. Lips are the dam that flows the deadliest poison, or the sweetest water: words!

I film quite a bit :wink:
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#17 Post by ds-sans »

NialGrenville wrote:I propose an idea. If intense, and I do mean intense, situations occur. The all time favorite camera angle for me: Their mouth, or eyes. Only that! It conveys power of words, or the gateways to the soul. Film and philosophy 201! Most angles shot are taken to convey a meaning linked to our philosophical ideas of person. Eyes are gateways to the soul: powerful, truthful, beautiful, and awe inspiring. Lips are the dam that flows the deadliest poison, or the sweetest water: words!

I film quite a bit :wink:
I really liked your idea! So I went ahead and used the camera code by akakyouryuu and came up with this demonstration:

Image

I had to adjust the crop of the gif so that it would work in the thread, but I think it shows the effect off nicely. I'll probably just keep this effect for CGs, and stick to using the close-up sprites during regular scenes. Though I thank you for the idea and the feedback.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#18 Post by NialGrenville »

Excellent! Oh fabjulous day! Calu Calay! It looks adorable, and strangely. Ahem, "warm." (I'm tugging at my collar here at my desk. :oops:) Nice little jab at the breasts. I like a little flavor now and then :wink:

I'll be waiting for this astonishing game to come out! Keep going!
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#19 Post by ds-sans »

Another update:

More work has been done on the writing. Chapter 2 is fully finished and about double the length of the first chapter. This chapter itself is really where things kick off, since the majority of the first is exposition.

Chapter 1 is ~1500 words. Chapter 2 is ~3000 words. Total number of sections/chapters will be about 17 (including variations/ending routes).
So averaging at about 2250 per chapter, leaving an estimate of 38250 total words. Though further chapters will be much longer, so no valid final word count can be given at this point. (Most of these chapters are currently in a guideline/drafted format.)

As for the CGs, they are being worked on. There won't be a high frequency of these, but I will use the camera effect shown previously in order to create multiple shots from one CG to emphasise what is being described in the story.
NialGrenville wrote:I'll be waiting for this astonishing game to come out! Keep going!
Thank you! It's great to hear that you're anticipating it.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#20 Post by indoneko »

The premise has not much to comment on, but the game's art is excellent; the sprite really match the background. I like it. And your approach to use close-up sprites for certain scenes is definitely a good move in my book. I'm going to stalk this thread from now on.
- Is there anything that stands out to you, that you think would improve the VN if changed?
The game menu placed directly under the text is kinda distracting me a bit. I wish you could make it so that the menu can auto-hide itself until the player moves his/her mouse over it.
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#21 Post by ds-sans »

indoneko wrote:The premise has not much to comment on, but the game's art is excellent; the sprite really match the background. I like it. And your approach to use close-up sprites for certain scenes is definitely a good move in my book. I'm going to stalk this thread from now on.
- Is there anything that stands out to you, that you think would improve the VN if changed?
The game menu placed directly under the text is kinda distracting me a bit. I wish you could make it so that the menu can auto-hide itself until the player moves his/her mouse over it.
Thank you for the feedback! I agree with you on the art, the artists did a great job with everything and were excellent people to work with. The premise is also a bit vague as well, so I will update it shortly.

As for your suggestion, in what way do you find the quick menu distracting? If others suggest a similar thing then I will fix it, though I don't think it's that distracting, myself. I wouldn't be well versed in coding auto-hiding menus, though I can probably make it toggle-able through a button rather than a mouse movement. If it's more of a visual issue then I can try altering it, though I don't think there's much of a problem. That being said, if there are further calls for adjustments of the quick menu then I will definitely experiment with the idea. At the moment, writing is being focused on more than the actual final coding of the VN, so I may change my mind about it. Like I said in the main post, the GUI might have a possible redesign.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#22 Post by indoneko »

As for your suggestion, in what way do you find the quick menu distracting?
Well, it's not as if the quick menu is jarring in itself. Actually, it's well rendered. It's that I can actually feel like watching an anime in your last animated pic (using auto advance text) if I don't have that sub menu buttons & cursor constantly reminding me otherwise. If you're going as far as using cinematic effects to increase the immersiveness, then I think it's the next logical choice to hide the submenu altogether or put a toogle button on the corner (out of our eye's focus).

But of course, that is just my preferences. I don't have any academic background on art design, so you might want to take my words with a spoonful of salt... :D
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#23 Post by NialGrenville »

I kind of agree with Indoneko. However, I think there are easier ways of doing it.

Instead of inundating yourself with new code to hide the QM, try making it more natural to the environment. Soften the sides and corners of it. Make it a more "suitable" appearance.

It is by no means awful, but it is just a tiny critique to raise visual appeal. We only want what is best for you and your sales (or the simple desire of pleasing people with your beautiful story). (Of course that is very hard to say it will be beautiful, since beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think it will be amazing.)
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#24 Post by ds-sans »

NialGrenville wrote:Instead of inundating yourself with new code to hide the QM, try making it more natural to the environment. Soften the sides and corners of it. Make it a more "suitable" appearance.
I don't really think it's more of a problem of the quick menu, rather the fact that the reader will be looking towards the bottom of the screen of the majority of the time rather than directly at the CG, so the actual camera change effect is kind of lost.

One thing I'd be rather fond of is reducing the opacity of the text box during CGs in order to increase the immersion. Though I can't find a suitable way to do this effectively without actually creating a separate text box. Even then, I can't really find an effective way to fade from one text box to another.

Image

If you compare the screenshot above with the .gif from before, there's a stark difference between the intrusiveness of the text box. IMO it looks a lot cleaner when transitioning through the different camera positions. (I didn't have time to create another gif to demonstrate this, though.)

At the moment, I'd rather leave it until the programming is the primary focus of the development. Maybe by then I would have found a way to have the opacity of the text box change dynamically, or I might have decided to redo the UI all together.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#25 Post by NialGrenville »

It does not look that bad. Good thinking! It already looks better. It definitely sets the mood, and fixes the vision to the subject at hand.
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#26 Post by ds-sans »

A preview of one of the CGs.

Image

Chapter 3 is currently being written.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#27 Post by NialGrenville »

*Me*, *You, ***Calamazoo: *Singularity-A.I.*: *Proceed to processing
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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#28 Post by ds-sans »

Chapter 3 and 4 are done. Updated the progress section to reflect this and other progress.
This poor quality .gif reflects some of the progress. Animated camera added to the CG shown previously.

Image

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#29 Post by ds-sans »

Here's a quick spoiler, you end up getting Ceri's phone number. (It's not really that much of a spoiler though.)
Instead of just having a BG while dialogue is shown when speaking to her via mobile, I was looking into the best way in doing this so that it wasn't too plain.

One method was to use the split screen phone call trope, and just display Ceri's spite in a separate part of the screen. I didn't really like this idea since it takes away from the actual first-person aspect. So instead, I spent a decent amount of time designing a mobile phone "sprite" which would be used during these scenes.

Image

I've made it so I can edit the layered source image and produce a sprite with anything on the screen, possibly even map it so that it's interactive, but for now it's only being used as an image for simple phone calls.

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Re: Sounds of Her Love [Romance][BxG]

#30 Post by ds-sans »

Bit of a long anecdotal update.

Whilst coding chapter 2 in order to see what it would look like, I came across a problem. I didn't have a BG for the cafeteria. I went in a search but I couldn't find anything that I could use. In my last VN, I overcame this problem by using photographic backgrounds, since I didn't really care whether the background styles remained consistent and they were only used for very brief moments.

However, the cafeteria is a recurring setting for many moments in SOHL, so I needed to get a background for it. I didn't want to resort to using photos again, so I took the harder route. (At least, for my crappy laptop.)

Image

The image above is the BG to be used as the cafeteria. Credit goes to mugenjohncel for the 3D model, and letting me create a BG from it. I gave it a bit of post processing and I like the way it turned out. When compared with the other BGs it still doesn't really fit in, but it does a lot more so than a photo could ever do.

In other news, as you can probably tell I have started to code in the chapters which I have completed. The drafts are done up until chapter 8, so I will begin writing them up fully soon. Past chapter 9, things start to get a little crazier as there are alternatives to each one depending on the players' choices.

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