Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure] [New Trailer!]

[TakafumiSakagami]

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Aidos

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The prestigious all-girls school—Erinna Academy—was once held in high regard, however in recent years it has struggled to remain relevant. Fewer and fewer students join them each year due to a falling population of upper-class youths. At the end of the previous academy year the school was sold off to new ownership, and with it came a change of ideals.

The new owners decided to experiment... For a single year the school would accept a small number of male students, bringing them on for a trial period, and offering them an educational background typically reserved for only the richest people in the country.
The story begins with the protagonist arriving at Erinna Academy. There he will meet three girls. There you will find love.

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Characters:

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Vivienne Laurent:


Vivienne is the daughter of the ancient and aristocratic Laurent household, a family that—until recently—held the largest stake in Erinna Academy.
The changes to the Academy's ideals are insulting to the history of such an important family, and damaging to their reputation.
With her family privilege under threat, Vivienne fights for her reelection as Student Body President of the Academy.



Alyssa Miller:


The Miller family only had one child, but she became their pride and joy. Her path to perfection was paved for her. She became the perfect image of normality.
There is nothing that stands out about Alyssa; her appearance is well-maintained, her grades are high, her behavior is exemplary... But in the world of the upper-class she is but a single drop of water in the middle of a storm.
Is there anything to be noticed about her?



Sadika Bennani:


Born and raised into a business-first family, Sadika's background is one of motion. Country to country, school to school, repeating. She has seen the world, and she is wise to its tricks.

Negotiation...
Manipulation...
Blackmail...

Those are the rules of living.

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The Team

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Hello again! NaNoRenO month is back, and I'm super excited to show off what we've got planned this time around! Last year I made the game By Your Side as a solo project, but this year we have a whole team! One so large, everyone I've recruited has said: "whoa, isn't that too large?" (I don't think it is.)

So, to begin with I'll summarize the main roles for each member. Everyone is doing a little bit more than just this, but I don't want to stuff this first post with too much text.

• Taka - Scenario, Character Design, Artist, Musician.

• Eisen - Lead Writer for Vivienne.

• Natsume - Lead Writer for Alyssa.

• Grim - Lead Writer for Sadika.

• Kud - Writer, Planner.

• Cylfa - Artist, Outfit Design, Character Design.

• Dakota - Musician.

• Zune - Lead Programmer, Proofreader.

We also have some other people doing bits and pieces here and there. I'll drop a full credits list when we complete the project!

The game we are making is—again—a romance novel. This time however there are three heroines and several routes. It's a by-the-books adventure game with a lot of heart to it. That heart will be seen in our three main girls. You'll be seeing a lot more of them throughout this month, so I hope you like them!


Last year I enjoyed doing daily updates, and this year I hope for them to be even better. This is a group project, and everyone deserves a say in the final product. You too should have that right. We'll be making polls and asking questions that will have direct impacts on the development of Aidos. Those will be plugged-in alongside our update posts. You'll see insights from various team members, a look into how we've planned the project, the tools and techniques we use, and many other random things.

I really want these posts to give everyone an idea of what it's like to work in this team. To those who have never participated in a group NaNoRenO project, or to those interested in what other groups are like... I hope this is a fun read.

[TakafumiSakagami]

Day 1 is here, and what a way to start it! After last night's completely normal night, I woke up with a massive headache, a bad throat, and a very bad stomach. Not how I wanted this to start, but better now than later I suppose~

Health complaints aside, let's get into some progress! This'll mostly be personal stuff because I'm the one doing the updates, but there'll be details about the rest of the team in future posts~

To start with the least impressive stuff, we've got a base line-art done for the first Vivienne sprite! She has two poses (arms crossed and arms on hips) but I haven't done any expressions yet. Kinda hard to focus on drawing with a headache~



Continuing on, we have a logo. I actually quickly got this out when the clock hit midnight, so it already feels like a long-ago task. Back in the age before the flu struck! Like all good logos, there's a light version and a dark version. Unlike all good logos, it's designed by someone who sucks at logo making! (me)



The weird triangle thing in the background is rather emblematic. In a literal sense, it is the emblem of the school, and in a more metaphorical sense, it represents the act of passing through the academy's gates. At the very least, there's some meaning to be had.

Onto the next thing... It's a song! I wanted to make a track that felt a bit dreamy, like a flashback sequence almost. I also wanted it to be something that could fit in as an intro track. You'll probably hear what I mean if you give it a listen...

Finally, we have an aesthetic test of what the game might look like. It makes use of a temp-background we created during February as part of our "make BG art without a BG artist" initiative. If you're interested in that by the way, let me know~ I'd be happy to explain the process!
This aesthetic test also has a WIP UI that's incredibly incomplete... But it's a good enough representation to act as a source of inspiration for our many creatives.



That girl you see there is one of the heroines, Alyssa. Her sprite is still a bit incomplete and needs some tweaking (especially the uniform) but she already has one outfit, a bunch of expressions, and a couple different arm positions...



Compared to the outfit insanity I had to go through for last year's project, this sprite was pretty comfortable to make. I was planning to stream the creation, but the coughing was too annoying. Hopefully I'll wake up fully cured (as if!) and I'll be able to stream the Vivienne sprite. Or maybe even a second set of Alyssa sprites~

Actually, while I'm sharing stuff, I may as well show some of the color configs I had for her. See, we concepted the design of a bunch of characters beforehand, however we did it all in black and white... So I just had to entertain my own favorite color combinations...



Ultimately, with the background style we have figured out, the earthy color palettes seemed like a better fit... And also the pink and blonde are totally out-of-character in my opinion. She's the precious unnoticed normie-chan, she can't have an eye-catching pink or bright blonde, y'know?

Matching the characters is probably the most important thing. Hmm... I'm starting to realize, the heroines are pretty unexplained right now. It's early stages in this series of updates, but the heroines are the big draw, so at the very least I should give them some lip service...
To start with, there are three of them. Why three exactly?
A route-focused romance game needs multiple routes, and since we're going with the typical heroine system we need heroines to match each route. Having 2 heroines is too little because the characters will end up being directly comparable as opposites. 3 is the perfect balancing tool, like rock paper scissors. By adding a single extra heroine you massively increase the amount of thought that an audience can put into the main cast. I call it the jan-ken approach~

Erinna Academy was a place of pride for the upper class—until the start of the VN—so it makes sense that at least one of the heroines is a stiff upper class kinda gal. Following from that obvious bit of logic, the following heroines should get progressively less upper class, to boost the diversity and make the girls starkly different from one another. The second girl is on the lower end of the upper class (and is rather casual in behavior) while the third girl has an outside perspective on it all.

That gives us our three personalities:
The OHOHOHO
The Normal
The Delinquent

The next important thing to do is to define their goals. Classic broadway scriptwriting, and therefore classic Disney writing, and therefore classic anime writing, and therefore classic VN writing (that's a big chain) dictates that the first big explosion of story should be the heroine's motivation speech. It's the scene where the main girl of the story states her goals and ambitions. This means that the character's goals become the core aspect of their narrative, and that means it's the most important foundational element to establish.

The Ohohoho's obvious goal would be to bring the school back to prosperity... But maybe the solution is to come to terms with the less than ideal state of reality. Maybe, in reality, she needs to open her eyes to the world beyond.

The Normal's goal is usually one of two things: maintain the normalities, or lament the inadequacies seen when comparing herself to one of the richer girls. Whether they want the endless everyday or they want to be better than average, the Normal is normally the comfy option for a less conflict-involved romance.

The Delinquent's goal is probably the most stereotypical in a VN space: escape the environment. This could be via destroying the environment, or by destroying herself. Or maybe she just wants to run away... Here's where you could easily insert the "fix the bad boy/girl" trope, but I'm not a fan of that, so maybe it'd be fun to go a more engaging route. She could be a great avenue to explore the upper class from a perspective different from the other two girls'.

All that being said... These thoughts may not be what comes through in the final product. Although I came up with the main scenario and the types of characters involved, they have long since been in the hands of our three route writers. Each writer has taken a basic character outline and transformed them into unique and original heroines.

Both yesterday and today were long days of planning for our route writers. We've been working on a method of goal-posting the moment-to-moment in our individual routes while simultaneously tying everything together into a solid timeline of events. It's still a work in progress, and the days of planning will continue for a bit, but I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about in regard to our process...

Until then, thanks for reading!

[TakafumiSakagami]

It's day 2, wooo! Did I wake up feeling any better? You know I didn't! It's been a day of headaches and lethargy, but I'm still getting stuff done!

First up we have a song. I'm not sure I want to upload every song we make... That's a bit OTT, but I'll share this one since we're so early into this series of posts.

https://soundcloud.com/takafumi-sakagam ... ic/s-1OwYb

It's imaginatively called 'panic' although it's not exactly a song that represents panicking... It's more the kind of song that urges you to panic... if that makes sense. It's a rapid-fire high-tension track, and as I listen back to it now, I can't help but feel like it has an FF7 vibe to it. Must be all that FF7remake hubbub.

Yesterday I said...

"Hopefully I'll wake up fully cured (as if!) and I'll be able to stream the Vivienne sprite."

I may not have woken up fully cured, but I did get to stream (part of) the Vivienne sprite's creation. I had some technical hiccups in the first hour, so the VOD has gone, but the other two hours are available to watch on Twitch~ I talk a little bit about... Hmm, well I'm not sure how much was in the first hour, but I talk about my own process a bit (the flaws, the benefits), I talk a bit about art school vs learning online, there's a long tangent about Pokemon in there... Oh, and I say "good enough" a lot.

My favorite moment was probably this little clip~

Unfortunately after around 3 hours or so of talking, my cold-struck throat was beginning to hurt. It's kinda tough to speak anyway, so I was happy to do the rest of the sprite in silence at my own leisure...



It's unfinished, still needs shading and expressions made, but the Vivienne sprite is getting close to completion! The previous Alyssa sprite took me 6 hours, and so far I've put 5 into Vivienne's, so it should only take an hour or so to complete~ I had some real problems with the uniform, but I managed to get it looking pretty nice. Just don't look behind the hair, it's a mess there.

To keep us on a similar topic, our wonderful artist Cylfa has finished the design for our final heroine, Sadika!



She's super cool looking~ It might not be the final design, but I can't wait to get a sprite of her made! I realize I haven't really shown off any of our other concept art, but... it can wait. I'm sure I'll find an excuse to dedicate a post to concept art. But this is Cylfa's first piece for the project, and I'm excited to see more~

We have a bunch of people working in different areas. Some musical ideas are in the pipeline. Our writers are all working away on their scenes. We've got an almost complete plan for the story, with a few gaps here and there. We'll need to come together to fill those gaps in. I also need to write the start of the game, I might be inconveniencing the others by not doing that immediately... But cute girls take precedent, right?

Tomorrow we're gonna definitely fix all that. We're gonna go over the plan, fill in the gaps, and outline all of the assets we will need for this production. Our programmer is currently adding in all the bits and pieces we'll be making use of, so we'll be able to know what UI elements we need to create soon. The backgrounds will need to be picked out clearly too, because we'll have to restrict the amount of rooms writers can use. Don't want the writers running wild, giving all the artists too much work to do.

Writing is, of course, a major aspect of developing Visual Novels. Last year I didn't have much to say about it, partly because I was writing pure slice of life, and partly because I was the only writer.
By Your Side was created in a very spontaneous manner, and so there isn't much depth to it from a developer perspective.

Aidos is a completely different beast. It may be a romance story, however it is so dissimilar to By Your Side in style that I honestly wouldn't feel comfortable writing it alone. There are certain kinds of romance I can work with, but that doesn't work for a multi-route multi-heroine VN. We need different voices and different approaches to the relationships as they exist in Aidos.

Those are the intimacies, but if you pull back and look at the work as a whole, you'll see a construction. The game's scenario is the scaffold that the writers use to build their own constructions. It brings with it the lead voice. The style, the narrative aesthetic, the themes, the overall goal. From a rather mechanical point of view, that is the role I take. The scenario writer comes up with an interesting premise, sets it up in a way that'll keep people reading, and ties everything together so that the several voices of the project merge into one. The rest will fall into place without a thought, as the writers do their own thing, we'll all realize that... somehow... the main themes always seem to wrap back into it. Just recently we had a writer realize that all of the routes—the work of three different writers—unintentionally fit the name of the game: Aidos. That's the kind of magic I've come to rely on in my three years developing VNs and in my many years as a writer. So long as you have a solid skeleton, the rest of the body will naturally emerge.

In order to accomplish this goal of having such a skeleton, we first decided to set up some writing guidelines for everyone working on the project. This (along with proofreaders) will allow us to truly craft the voice we want people to hear. It's a document that decides how we will speak to the audience. And even beyond writing, it's a document that greatly helps the artists and musicians align with the ideals of the narrative.

To give an example page that also avoids giving out spoilers, here's one of the random side characters' pages.



We created all of these pages in Google Sheets, which isn't the first writing tool you'd think of, but it allows us to easily modify information in a collaborative fashion while also having something that can—with a single click—be exported as a common spreadsheet or docs file, or a pdf file, or even an image. This allows people to check it at home, on the go, online, offline, whenever and wherever they want.

It comes loaded with a bunch of notes. Stuff that'll help the writers make use of the character. Stuff that'll help the artists draw the character. Something that'll help musicians find motifs for the character. It's a universal helping tool for the team.

This writing guidelines document also includes the initial scenario notes and structure plan, and is where each of the writers placed their first concepts for their stories. Since then we have taken them into a flowchart program to flesh out the concepts and make them into achievable goals. Nothing is worse than writing without direction, so a flowchart is amazing. It gives each writer an idea of what scenes are on the horizon and where they are heading. It shows them where they are in the timeline of events. It's a map so that no one should get lost.

No spoilerinos, here's a censored example of the first day. It gets... a lot more complex as you go down.



We've split it up into a bunch of things. Color-coded for specific characters. Sectioned off for different dates. Different box shapes for different kinds of scenes. It's very easy to follow~

The other great thing about this is that it allows us to plan for the artists, musicians and programmers... But that's what we'll be talking about tomorrow. So, until then, bye bye~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Once again we have an update for Aidos! 3 days in, but it already feels like a lifestyle. First, let's get some direct follow-ups to the stuff shown off yesterday!

Vivienne's sprite is now complete. Fully shaded, the uniform is done, expressions are ready, and the other arm layout is all drawn up! I'm kinda surprised I managed to match the style to the Alyssa sprite, because I yolo'd it massively and don't quite know what techniques I used to shade the hair or clothing... I think I captured the same style well enough.



I'm gonna be honest, I got some major burnout working on this one. I was feeling it a bit yesterday (complaining about how boring drawing is on stream) however today it really hit me. I was at a complete loss for expressions to draw, so I'll probably come back and add some more in once we've got more of her scenes written up.

I can't ignore the elephant in the room though. One heroine is still missing a sprite, and I'll need to move onto that next. While I'm speaking about her, I should mention that Sadika has had a bit of a style change...



This is the hairstyle Sadika's writer has in mind, so we'll be going with this for the next sprite! I do have to ask though, for my own curiosity... Which version of Sadika do YOU prefer? The one shown off yesterday, or the one today?

Here's a poll~ I'm interested to see what people think.

While I'm covering Cylfa's art, her next role will likely be in doing some very different drawings for the heroines, that will be used for the map screens featured in the game. However... Maybe we'll have some other character designs that need to be done. We have a bunch of side characters in mind, but compared to the heroines, they haven't been planned all that much. Personally, I think side-character art is pretty low-priority, I'd put more prio on having a comprehensive collection of background art and music... But what do you guys think? Is it important to give all the semi-prominent characters sprite art?

Once again, here's a poll!

Alright, with all that done, let's talk about what I said we'd talk about yesterday. How does the flowchart system help us plan for every involved member's tasklist?

Our flowchart is quite a fancy little thing. First of all, it's fully collaborative. Multiple members can edit it at the same time, add their own sections, and make changes to content already added to the document.

Not only is it a useful timeline of events, but each section of it (every scene, every choice, every system) gets hyperlinked to a document that contains all the information about the respective section. The bubble that says "walk to school" can be clicked on, and it'll open up the script file for the walk to school scene (which can also be edited collaboratively.)
The flowchart is both a timeline AND a contents page. It's very easy for writers to work together, and it's very easy for them to find out what everyone else is working on because this flowchart has a changelog. It also makes it easy for programmers because they don't have to cut up anything. It's all separated correctly from the beginning, ready to be placed in a label or menu of its own.

The other useful thing, this time for artists, is that since this flowchart gives us an overview of every single scene in the game, we can quickly get a count of every location used in the game. This lets us figure out exactly how much background art we will need, and lets us establish all of the potential locations for future scenes.

Important scenes can be tagged as "CG" scenes and given a priority number, This gives us a nice list of every potential CG that could be included in the game, and gives us an idea of how important each CG is to include.

And if those weren't convenient enough, you can also one-click export the entire flowchart as an image and draw your notes over it. So if you just wanna share your one-off thoughts with someone that you're in the middle of a conversation with, this is a quick and easy method of doing so.
Personally, I think this feature is best used for planning the music. Scribble some instrument ideas and short progressions that might work, then see if people agree. It could also be used to sketch CG plans next to the relevant scenes.

So there we go! That's an explanation for how this simple little flowchart benefits every single member of the team. I 100% recommend it to anyone planning a project similar to this.

[TakafumiSakagami]

Day 4 for us was mostly a day of writing. Six scenes in total were added to the timeline, and while I don't want to give any wordcounts yet (anything could change in editing) I'll say we have around half an hour of reading submitted today. We've only recently started bringing everything together like this, but I think it's already starting to feel comfortable for everyone. At the very least, it's comfortable to me now~

A post without any visuals is always a bit dull, so I should mention this.
It's early stages, but the final heroine sprite is underway! It's Sadika~



I had some real struggles with the... fringe? I've never done that pulled-back style of fringe before, so it was a bit complicated to figure out. I might end up doing some tweaking of it... I'm not sure yet. Having a character that shows off a forehead makes me realize how similar in style these characters are to my usual drawing style. When they get shaded they look a bit alien to me, because I've never worked with that shading style in the past... But at their base level, they look quite familiar to me. It makes me a bit more hopeful that I'll be able to actually draw the CGs for this game. Though some of the requested CGs I've gotten from the writers are demanding to say the least.

I didn't go too hard on this one. I wanted to take a bit of a break to alleviate some of the burn out I was having... But I can't leave a daily post in such a sorry state. There needs to be some graphics in here one way or another! However with this, we can now make a little preview of all the heroines! Ja-jan!



They're a strange mix, huh? I wonder who'll end up being the most popular?

Welp, that's it for today~ Bit of a short post this time, but it's nice to have a simple one every now and then~ Until next time!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Pin-pon! It's poll time!

Today, I've got some important questions involving the style of the namebox. See, I'm not a UI designer, I've never been good at it, and I've got a terrible eye for what looks good and what looks practical... So I'm tossing the vote over to you! We have 4 nameboxes here, and a poll with 4 options. Please choose your favorite!

The Poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/19491728






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Okay, with that aside, let's talk about updates. So obviously we have some textbox and namebox elements made now. I've been doing a bit of UI work today, and so far we've got... 3 textboxes? I'll post them now...







These could have different purposes, but I'm honestly not sure we'll even use them all. Better to make and program them now than towards the end when we realize we need more. I've learned that from textbox work in the past...

Another UI element I've been working on is the quickmenu, the imagebuttons to be exact. They're a bit lazily done, only requiring a quarter of an image to be made and then copy+paste flipped to create a full circle button, but they look good enough for what they are. I've given them all 3 states: Off, On, and Hovered. I imagine most buttons won't require an On state, but I may as well include those just in case we decide to do something with them. Maybe they'll just make the click animations look nicer.



Now that the image talk is all done, let's get into the story. I really want to minimize the amount of direct information I give out here because spoilers (don't wanna ruin any of the outcomes to the options you can make and such) however it's still the most important part about the game, so I feel that we should talk about it somewhat.

We got the team together today and had a little meeting. We had people dropping in and out of the call, so we weren't all there at once, but at the very least our main 3 writers got to have a conversation about the project's direction as a whole. Amidst all that we got 5 new scenes submitted, however, that really wasn't the purpose of the meeting. We just wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page. We also had a bit of fun talking about some potential comedy scenes, some potential post-launch material, and some unrelated chit chat. It's a fun little thing for the team to do, y'know?

Anyway, that's it for today~ I'll catch you tomorrow, where we'll maybe have some cool visual stuff to show off! Bye bye~

[TakafumiSakagami]

I'm soooo tired, but here's another update post! First I wanna thank everyone for voting in the UI poll. Red and White was very popular, so we'll 100% be going with that. The other name boxes may still get use with alternate textboxes, or maybe we'll even include an option to pick which one you want to use. Dunno yet, but we'll make a decision on it later.

We started planning this project around mid-February, and while I was grabbing up members to join the team, I was aware of one big potential issue. Background artists are pretty hard to find. I really doubted our ability to find one of a highish quality who would work for free, so one of the earliest things we did in the planning stages was plan out a method of creating backgrounds without having an artist. It's effectively an evolution of my method for creating backgrounds last year, with some additional steps.

The first step of this background-creating process is to create a base environment. If you have a camera, go out and take some photos. If you're good with perspective then, by all means, do some sketching. Personally I have no camera and can never be bothered with adhering to perspective guidelines, so instead, I create my environment in 3D. As an example, I'll show off this hallway model.



I should mention this now though, we will potentially be getting some photos taken for some environments. It doesn't change much of the workflow: just swap the 3D stuff for real-world stuff.

Making this kind of model is a bit lengthy and annoying to do, but eventually, you'll have something renderable. What I like to do is have multiple renders with different lighting, which can then be used as a reference for future steps. Usually, 3 or 4 is good enough. Here's the two I ended up making use of:




Then I draw over the initial render to add some analogue to it, smooth out the lighting, and make it look less like a cheap render.



And using the lighting render for reference, I make a version with darker lighting to be used at night scenes.



Another background I managed to complete was this Bedroom one.




I've also got a couple Forest backgrounds in the works, but they'll need some more work...




That's all for background talk! Now for a quick sprite update~ I'm going a bit slower on this one while I recover from having drawn too much, but some progress is better than none, right?



I'm getting better at drawing the uniform. The ribbon was suuuper quick this time. Feels good to see such rapid improvements in my own work.

One last thing. We've had a bunch more writing submissions today, and the flowchart has had a lot more content added to it! Or so I've heard. I've been too busy to actually check it, and it's like 4am here now so I'll check it in the morning after some sleep! So that'll be what I talk about tomorrow! Uh, the writing, not the sleeping.

[grimothy]

Update 3/8/2020

Good mooooorning, internet!

It’s an exciting day for the Aidos team, we’ve all been working hard this last week to start out on the best note we can. Our fearless leader isn’t feeling the best today so I’m taking over the daily update to bring you news and another poll!

Taka’s been working his butt off doing more backgrounds for us, (no wonder he’s tired) the 3D design style looks better than I ever thought it could and it’s amazing watching the game come together. It’s neat as a writer to see the places you’re describing come to life, kind of like a symbiotic daydream where you feed it ideas and it gives you inspiration in this crazy, vivid feedback loop. It’s such a cool experience.
Right, so writing—all three of our routes are coming along nicely. Natsu’s been a busy, busy bean so it’s been exciting to watch her get rolling and decide where to take Alyssa, thematically. She made a lot of progress yesterday and finished out her flowchart. Eisen and I are a bit further, alternating between writing scenes and reorganizing our own parts of the flowchart to add in more scenes or move around the ones we already have. (no spoilers, sorry!)

Writing Sadika has been a trip, really fun, occasionally challenging, and full of new experiences. Writing for a visual novel is simultaneously easier and harder than I’d imagined before starting on this project. Dialogue is a familiar technique—you have to approach it while trying to think through the eyes of your character. What would they be thinking? How would they approach the situation? What would be their next leap of logic from this experience they’ve just had? Visual novels make this an even more engaging process because they force you to think about what the character sees and perceives. If something happens, where does it happen and how do those involved react, visually?

You also have to learn the limits of your resources. Time is a really precious resource in this project since we’re only limited to a month for the initial release and that’s forcing us all to try our best to be realistic about what we can do in that frame and how we can best go about doing it all. Sadika is a challenge because she knows so many people around campus—it’s forcing me to make decisions like “who’s worth trying to bribe Taka to draw?” and “is this scene really necessary for her romance route to progress?” Time is precious. I suppose the best we can do is keep rolling!

I suppose I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t do my best to shill my girl while I have the metaphorical microphone. Zune and Taka are working hard to get a couple systems working for us, the first is a map to give the reader choices for where they want to spend their time on some days during the game. This will lead to different encounters and opportunities, lots of chances to make it or break it with your favorite girl. We’ll reveal the other system in a few days so make sure to stay tuned, folks.

Til then, we’d like to know: What’s the best way to spend a beautiful day with no obligations or responsibilities?

[grimothy]

https://strawpoll.com/gpr5bkp6

[TakafumiSakagami]

I'm baaack! I was out of action for a bit (let's say that my lack of rest finally became a problem) but I'll talk a bit about that at the end. For now, some progress updates!

Honestly when I'm not doing daily updates, I lose track of my progress very quickly. I've been doing some menial tasks here and there, such as making this resource lookup spreadsheet...



It includes the details of assets such as sprites, music, and backgrounds. It's a nice easy lookup sheet that should help the programmers as they plug everything into the game. In the past I've spent many hours on projects scrolling through images files to find the one I need. With this spreadsheet, that problem is gone. It catalogues both the name to be used in-programming as well as the actual filename.

Over on the backgrounds tab you can get this little look at a new background I worked on during day 7.



I've got a bunch of these in the works, but they aren't polished enough to show off yet, so I'll save them for another day.

Earlier I mentioned that this spreadsheet catalogues "both the name to be used in-programming as well as the actual filename." If you're a fellow Ren'Py developer you may have caught on to what that means...



Layeredimage is back~ I spent an incredible amount of time working with layeredimage last year, dealing with multiple poses, clothing pieces, skin tones, expressions... It was a total mess. Thankfully this year the code is much much simpler, and with some of the knowledge I gained last year, I've made some improvements to the overall functionality of it.

To those who don't exactly know what layeredimage is, it's a way of... layering images. Combining images under a single definition. In this case we have Alyssa as the character, so using show Alyssa would show the Alyssa sprite... Like normal images. However if you used "show Alyssa happy", it'd change her expression to a happy one. If you used "show Alyssa 2 bashful" it'd change her to a second pose, and change her expression to a bashful one. You could then just hide Alyssa and it'd all go away. It's so much better than the sprite functionality Ren'Py had back before 2018.

Anyway, this means that despite giving the images names like "FGAL00AU" and "FGAL00 happy" we can refer to them as simply "Alyssa happy." Great for file management, and great for ease of programming.

I'd feel bad just talking about this without actually showing it off, so...



Here you'll see some footage from our debug room. As well as the Alyssa sprite, you'll probably spot some other details.
Our basic UI elements have been programmed in. No menus yet, but the textbox, namebox, quickmenu, and all variations on those things have been completely coded. We've got a font, a click-to-continue animation, and a toggle feature on the quickmenu. I spent quite a while on the quickmenu, so you better like it!

You'll also see our ATL tools at work. I used these last year for everything visual, from positioning my sprites, to zooming in and out, to changing angles and panning over scenes, to having popups occur when you achieved something or unlocked a new item. In the summer update for By Your Side I even did some sprite animation.
For now we only have this zoom to show off for Aidos, but I'm sure it'll get a lot of use as we continue on.

We've also made sure that the protagonist can be renamed by the player, which is a classic VN feature I haven't had a chance to use before. With this being a more classical VN story, it only makes sense to include it.

The more observant ones out there will notice two other details: the phone system and the dungeon system. Whether you are texting heroines or exploring the school, there'll be many methods of interaction to choose from. These are two of the additional systems featured in Aidos. Last time Grim mentioned the map system we have going and hinted at a second system that we've yet to reveal. These kinds of lite gameplay elements are a real treat to work on, and I'm sure they'll freshen up the experience for the reader, and most importantly they'll give the writers more tools to work with.

Oh, and before you get worried about feature-creep, don't worry! It's already all done! We have some assets to make here and there, but they're small and could be done in a single day.

I've got a lot more to talk about, what with me having missed a couple days of update posts, but it's 5am here now. Oh, and I should explain why those days were missed. I spent the entirety of the seventh in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, constantly being brought to consciousness by a splitting pain running up and down my arms. When I overwork, my arms get angry with me. This happened last year, and put my right hand (the one I use to draw) out of action for a few days. This year I'm trying to cut off the problem before it becomes too bad, hence my two-day break. In fact, my arms are probably still bad right now... So doing all this work is probably gonna come back to bite me. Before then I should sleep, so I'll see you tomorrow~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Today is a day of WIPs. I've got so many work-in-progress things on the go that I'm losing count. The best way to do this is probably chronologically, so let's go back to the start of my day...

My morning began with some immediate tweaks to the UI made yesterday. Although the quickmenu was given an opening animation, it didn't have a closing animation, so I made that.
Further quickmenu changes came with the goal of making something intuitive. A right-click toggle was added as an alternative to the manual button-press toggle, and tooltips were added to all of the buttons, just in case people need a heads up on what everything does.

Something I didn't get the chance to talk about yesterday in regards to the quickmenu—something I thought was pretty funny—was the solution to a minor problem we stumbled across. When the quickmenu was open, the game could still be played in the background, however the menu itself covered a large part of the screen. Ideally the game would block inputs when the menu is open, but still allow for functions like skip and auto to work... In reality however, that was not the case. Instead of finding some input-blocking feature buried in the depths of old forum posts or locked away behind scattered Ren'Py documentation... I made one giant screen-sized button, made it invisible, and made it block all clicks (and line-progressing key inputs) the player does outside of the quickmenu. Dumb solution, but it works!

After that I did a couple little things:
I started a new song that is far too early in production to show off. I'm quickly learning that classical-style BGM music is a bit too much for someone like me who doesn't even know what a note is... But I'll manage. It just takes a bit longer than the usual stuff I do.
I started a Library background. It needs tweaking a bit, and the entire second floor is unmodeled as of yet, but it has started off pretty well. Here's the dark moody version of it...



Finally, since my wrists seem better now, I'm back to working on the Sadika sprite. It's still not finished, fully shaded and all, with some expressions too, but only one pose and some other missing details. I actually haven't even asked Sadika's writer if the hair is good enough yet, but I can do that when I wake up tomorrow~



She also has this unfinished jacket thing that I need to color and shade. Not too sure what color to go with, but green has been our behind-the-scenes color code for Sadika, so I'm using it as a placeholder base color.



Anyway, that's all for today! I'll be back tomorrow, hopefully with less WIPs and more completed stuff~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Oooh, okay, day 11. I got some stuff done, not as much as I wanted, but it’s past 5am now and I have to sleep at some point. I’ll keep this short so that I can collapse into my pillow shortly.

The Sadika sprite has been fully fully completed, and exported, and programmed in. I ended up changing a couple things and adding in some new stuff… Here’s a preview~



Some of her expressions are suuuper cute! They aren’t the most expressive combinations I’ve ever made, but I think they fill enough emotion types to work for an entire game. Hopefully I won’t have to go back and add more…

Anyway, this means we now have all three heroine sprites completed! I’m not too comfortable with the style, even now, but I’m glad they all came out looking relatively similar to one another. I’d have hated to put the cast into a state of artistic mismatch…



The other thing to show off would be the Library, which had some changes made at the request of the writers. It’s still fairly incomplete, so forgive me if it looks rough around the edges and a bit undefined in some areas. I need to give it a good detail-pass in Clipstudio Paint.



Finally, I’ve done some work on a main menu screen. It’s missing some art assets, so I’m not entirely ready to show it off, but here’s a glimpse at a small part of it…



Unfortunately, that’s all I managed for today. I ended up losing a few hours to some business stuff (that will benefit Aidos further down the line… I hope) but I did want to take some time to see how the game looked with two characters on screen at once, soooo…



Different zoom levels and all! Looking good if I do say so myself. With that satisfaction in my heart, it’s time to go to bed.

[TakafumiSakagami]

This may sound ridiculous, but I spent almost all of my day working on a single background image... The library.

I've mentioned it as being work-in-progress before, and I did manage to get the entire thing modelled yesterday, however the process of actually drawing it was something that took much longer than I anticipated.



Count every single book in that image. That's how many books I had to draw. If not for the group call I was in at the time, I'm sure I'd have gotten bored with it and done something else.

Like every background I've done, it has multiple variations for different times of day. I'm kinda sick of looking at it though, so I'm going to move on to another topic...

I made sure to update our resource lookup sheet with all the recent assets I've been making. This includes the new backgrounds, and all of Sadika's sprite parts.



Continuing on the more logistical side of things, I announced some deadlines and helped out with some concept work that's going on behind-the-scenes. We've got a couple people sketching CG ideas for us to follow when CG production kicks off, and it's very interesting hearing what the writers have in mind and what the artists come up with in response.

We also did more writing (like always) and one of our writers had a fairly large rework of some parts of his route. I'm hoping it doesn't push them too far back in progress, but I'm sure they'll be comfortable with it all. That's just a small part of the constant evolution of our flowchart, something that only gets larger and larger.

And last but not least, I did some short work on yet another character sprite. It's super work-in-progress at this moment, but I should have something more substantial to show off tomorrow. For now, I'll end with this.

[TakafumiSakagami]

The days aren't long enough! I need more tiiiime! I didn't get much done today, but I'll talk about what I managed to fit in~

One small thing I did was mess with all of the game's keybindings. We have some unique menus, and I also have some problems with Ren'Py's default mappings, so I checked every single input (on mouse, Keyboard, and gamepad) and bound them to the commands I felt were most fitting. It took a surprising amount of time, but it makes the play experience much smoother in my opinion. I also plugged all of it into a help screen that details all of the keybindings, and made a little text document with the same info.

Next up we have another sprite. I showed her off a little bit yesterday, but here's a fuller look at Élisabeth La Fleur, one of the few named teacher characters in the game.



If the heroines were considered children of their respective route writers, then Elisabeth would be mine. She's pretty minor (we currently only have 3 scenes involving her planned out, one of which has been written already) which means I don't get to put as much into her as the other writers would do with their girls... But I think fondly of her. I'm happy to be finally drawing her.

On the topic of writing, here's some script facts. One of our writers, Eisen, revealed that their script has apparently passed 10,000 words! That's as much as I wrote for my entire game last year, so I'm very impressed. I'd guess that in total we're around 25,000 give or take, so all is strong on the writing front. Given the state of the world right now, a lot of our staff have free time to burn, so progress should be smooth sailing from here on out. Lucky~

That's all for today! I've got some busy leadership things to do tomorrow, so I don't know how much I'll have to show off, but I'll keep you all updated. 

[TakafumiSakagami]

It's very very late for me (or early... 7am) so I'm just gonna get straight into this.
Here's another new background that's being worked on. It's a classroom!



Textures and lighting aren't final, so expect some changes in those areas. I also have some other details to add (mostly on the walls and on desks) but the main structure is complete~

Speaking of complete, the Lis sprite is all done. She only has a single pose going on, and she has fewer expressions than the main heroines, but she still has a lot of customizability in how to display her.



With another sprite complete, I spent some time updating the resource lookup document with all the possible combinations.



I also, of course, spent time programming them into the game. It doesn't feel time-consuming when you do it, but it all adds up. Before I knew it, it was almost 7am!

Yesterday I mentioned a lot of my time would be taken up by leadership stuff. The resource lookup document is one of those things. Another is our CG planning document that we've put together for our artists to log their progress and drawing intent. Beyond that, I had a talk with (almost) all of the members 1-on-1, discussing their experience with the project so far, and making sure everyone has goals to achieve and tasks that they understand. That took a while... But it felt like we made some progress through it.

To end today's post, I took some screenshots while testing the sprites in-game, so here's all three heroines together!