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

NaNoRenO is an event where creators make a game from scratch during the month of March.
Message
Author
TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#31 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

All of this stuff was in such an unfinished state yesterday, and I was so tired, that I decided to just sleep instead of giving an update. Today I'm here to show off everything I've been working on~

To begin with, let's talk Credits. We have three routes, so I felt like it'd be a shame to give them all the exact same credits sequence. I didn't want to spend too much time on this, so I tried to limit the differences to very minor details, but I at least wanted every route to have a unique ending screen for the credits to be presented on.

With that in mind, here are the three (abridged) EDs!





I wrote a post forever ago, when developing another game, about the effectiveness of using walk cycles in character-focused animation. It's a simple loop to create, and it shows off a lot of personality. That was the gist of it, however I never got a chance to actually make a proper walk cycle last year, so I'm doing it now.

For the background I was thinking of going for that Cardcaptor Sakura style, but the rougher textured backgrounds of the '80s ended up being my inspiration. Last year I used Urusei Yatsura for my character design inspiration, so this year I decided to go with another Rumiko Takahashi work in Maison Ikkoku. The not-quite-black silhouettes blurred ontop of a desaturated canvas painting is a more mature look, and I feel that fits better for an ED. There's more closure in a completed character arc... Or something like that~

Internally—for whatever reason—we've been using colors to identify our characters. Vivienne has always been yellow, Alyssa has always been blue, and Sadika has always been green. That hasn't shown up anywhere in the actual product until now, but it's nice to be able to finally make use of those established character colors. I think they also help set the mood and show off the character personalities a bit more.

I've also been working on a Save/Load screen, but it's not fully programmed yet, so that'll overlap into tomorrow.

Image

User avatar
Zelan
Lemma-Class Veteran
Posts: 2436
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2016 7:23 pm
Completed: The Dark
Projects: Cosplay Couple
Tumblr: evns
itch: Zelan
Discord: ltnkitsuragi#7082
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#32 Post by Zelan »

I was really impressed with your animations last year, and I would say even more so this year. The EDs look fantastic. (:

TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#33 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

I did some stuff on the 28th that I can't actually talk about yet, 'cause it's not quite finished, but I also managed to fit in some small things here and there. The Save and Load screens I mentioned before are now finished, though I did end up tweaking it from its initial concept.

While I was working on that, I decided to tweak the confirmation screen as well, so you can see the two combined in this image:
Image

While working on that I did a bunch of recoding and image altering in order to optimize everything. A full save menu was taking up 100% of my GPU which... Isn't ideal. In the end I managed to lower it to around 20~30%, but I'm still a bit annoyed it gets that high in the first place. Thankfully I don't have to worry about mobile performance this time around.

Oh, I also did another background. Only a few of these left to do!
Image
Zelan wrote: Fri Mar 27, 2020 11:43 pm I was really impressed with your animations last year, and I would say even more so this year. The EDs look fantastic. (:
Thanks~ I definitely learnt a lot from last year's attempt at it. Most importantly to keep it simple!

TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#34 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

We're entering awkward territory here. As I get closer and closer to finishing up all the visual assets, I begin to spend more and more time on writing. The unfortunate thing about writing is... I can't show it off. All I can say is something like...

On the 29th and 30th I wrote 6,823 words.

It's very good progress. I've written over 15k altogether in what is really only two sittings, which is much better than my usual pace. I'm not even sure how I'm working this fast on it... But it's a bit disappointing to talk about here because it ultimately amounts to nothing but a "believe me, I wrote stuff."

I've done some other stuff, but none of it is finished. Here is a work in progress background image of the school entrance.
Image

The building looks a bit impressive without anything on it, huh? Honestly something like this is far beyond my capabilities modeling-wise, so I'm not too sure how I'll progress with it from here. I'm tempted to just draw all the details, but it might look inconsistent... Oh well, we'll see.

I've also done some SFX work, got a couple unfinished songs in the works, and did some collabing with another writer on a scene. I say collabing, but she did most of the actual writing once our discussion of plans for it came to an end.

User avatar
Zelan
Lemma-Class Veteran
Posts: 2436
Joined: Tue Mar 01, 2016 7:23 pm
Completed: The Dark
Projects: Cosplay Couple
Tumblr: evns
itch: Zelan
Discord: ltnkitsuragi#7082
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#35 Post by Zelan »

I know some people try and post small, funny or meaningful tidbits from their writing if they want to at least show off something from all that hard work. As long as you don't post anything you think is too much of a spoiler, that could be a way to keep writing updates interesting. (:

TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

Re: Aidos [NaNo2020] [Romance Adventure]

#36 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

A majority of our writing hasn't been edited or proofread yet... So instead I'm going with the waiting approach. I'll just wait until we've got substantial progress to share before posting~ So here's a post! I was gonna do one yesterday, but I was too tired... Instead, we'll be doing a triple-whammy of progress reports.

I've made a cute little map screen. It's a bit basic visually, but there are 7 different versions that we use throughout the game, and making sure I had every variation accounted for took some planning.
I've made so many map screens in my years with Ren'Py that I almost made this an imagemap by default. Imagebuttons didn't even exist when I got familiar with this stuff! Gotta say though, the switch to imagebuttons makes the whole process a lot nicer. It takes some extra work to export everything, but the result is a lot sleeker and gives some much-needed flexibility in every area imaginable for a map screen.

Image
The idea behind it is that the destination text appears when you hover over the heroine image (as the location is often secondary to the heroine in importance) so it leaves us with something like this...
Image

I wanted to test this map screen out and make sure that everything was working in a true-to-player experience, so I went and programmed all of the common route up until the first map screen and the following Alyssa scene that one would arrive at from this map screen.

Oh, and that's reminded me. I finished that background image I was showing off last time!

Image

I cut some corners here and there because we're really running out of time, but it's in a usable state.

We've also got 13 more backgrounds, though they are pretty minor in nature. Two skies (each having a clear, cloudy, stormy, and night variation) and then a bunch of visual effects that we realized we needed while discussing some scenes.

Image

Music-wise we've got a few new songs. I'm growing wary of my ability to actually make music in the genres we need, uncertain whether I can actually fulfill the requirements or not... But I've tried some stuff. I've got a couple WIP melodies that I'm working on right now, but I'm not too sure how to fit them into actual songs. It's tough.

Back to my comfort zone, I wrote even more, edited some large chunks of our current script, and finally got onto drawing another CG. This time it's an Alyssa one!

Image

I may not show off the final piece here, but I'm sure there'll be some changes to parts here and there. I've got some stuff I want to mess with before moving on to coloring.

TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

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

#37 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

I've been in super-duper crunch mode to get all of the programming finished in time, but I'm dropping in to leave our PV here~

User avatar
Kokoro Hane
Eileen-Class Veteran
Posts: 1236
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2011 6:51 pm
Completed: 30 Kilowatt Hours Left, The Only One Girl { First Quarter }, An Encounter ~In The Rain~, A Piece of Sweetness, Since When Did I Have a Combat Butler?!, Piece by Piece, +many more
Projects: Fateful Encounter, Operation: Magic Hero
Organization: Tofu Sheets Visual
Deviantart: kokoro-hane
itch: tofu-sheets-visual
Contact:

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

#38 Post by Kokoro Hane »

I really love that PV! The instrumental sounds nice, and the tone of everything feels so serious~
PROJECTS:
Operation: Magic Hero [WiP]
Piece By Piece [COMPLETE][Spooktober VN '20]
RE/COUNT RE:VERSE [COMPLETE][RPG]
Since When Did I Have a Combat Butler?! [COMPLETE][NaNoRenO2020+]
Crystal Captor: Memory Chronicle Finale [COMPLETE][RPG][#1 in So Bad It's Good jam '17]

But dear God, You're the only North Star I would follow this far
Owl City "Galaxies"

TakafumiSakagami
Regular
Posts: 101
Joined: Thu Aug 30, 2018 5:22 am
Completed: By Your Side, Yoshioka
Projects: Aious ~Proof of Concept~, Aidos
Organization: Kyacchi22
Deviantart: takafumisakagami
Contact:

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

#39 Post by TakafumiSakagami »

It's been a while! I went into super-crunch mode to get Aidos in playable condition before the deadline, and we put out a trailer and set up our store page on Itch. The NaNoRenO deadline just hit, and so you can check out our itch.io page here:

https://takafumi.itch.io/aidos

However, a few days before the deadline, we had a little talk. The game was—theoretically—fully playable. 70k words, all programmed, and all fully working... However I realized that we wouldn't quite have time to proofread and edit everything on time, nevermind playtest. Two of our routes lacked intricacies such as perfect transition timing and duration, music timings, and all the typical signs of care. It was far from a polished product.

Furthermore, we have menus in Aidos. A CG menu, a BG menu, a replay menu, and a music menu. The CG and BG menus were fully complete, however, Vivienne and Alyssa notably lack CGs (Vivienne having 0 and Alyssa having 1.) The replay menu had only been fully set up for Alyssa's route... And the music menu was entirely incomplete.

So although our story was complete, playable, and in a state that some people would accept... I didn't want to accept it. I wanted to fully edit everything. I wanted to make sure every single transition was perfectly paced down to the millisecond. I wanted to make more CGs, and finish all of our menus, and refine the UI, and improve the game's performance.

I asked the team for their thoughts on if we should release to meet the deadline and then put out improved versions later, or if we should hold off for a better initial release. Everyone who responded believed that having a product we are satisfied with is more important than meeting a deadline. So we're transitioning Aidos from a NaNoRenO project into being a traditional release.

I should specify however, we are not increasing the scope of the game. We've had ideas of things we'd like to add post-release, and spinoff material to work on in the future, but none of that will be added to the game's initial release. The goal is to make Aidos as polished as we can manage.
I don't believe there's ever such a thing as finishing development; rather we decide when something is good enough to abandon. When it comes to Aidos, it is not the time to abandon it, and the goal is not to finish it.

When the time comes where Aidos is at a consistently acceptable level of quality, it'll be released. Until then, there won't be any more Aidos posts.

But before we end this post, here's a brief summary of things we achieved in the time since the last post...

All of the routes were completed (totaling 65k words.)

I made 5 new backgrounds: A hospital lobby, a couple bedrooms, the Assembly building, and the inside of the Assembly building. This marked the completion of our list of needed backgrounds.

Image

We have 4 new CGs, one of which being the Alyssa CG I was working on before.

Image

There's a new song named Lily (which shows up at the end of our trailer.)

I made a quick backlog menu.
Also I put together some assets for the phone menu, including the phone itself, and emotes/stickers for the characters to use.

ImageImage

We completed programming the entire game.

We finished all of the SFX work for the entire game.

And I did a full playtest of the Alyssa route!

Image

And that's it for our NaNoRenO! I hope to see you for the eventual release of Aidos!

User avatar
Kokoro Hane
Eileen-Class Veteran
Posts: 1236
Joined: Thu Oct 27, 2011 6:51 pm
Completed: 30 Kilowatt Hours Left, The Only One Girl { First Quarter }, An Encounter ~In The Rain~, A Piece of Sweetness, Since When Did I Have a Combat Butler?!, Piece by Piece, +many more
Projects: Fateful Encounter, Operation: Magic Hero
Organization: Tofu Sheets Visual
Deviantart: kokoro-hane
itch: tofu-sheets-visual
Contact:

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

#40 Post by Kokoro Hane »

Congrats on all the things you achieved!! It's a shame you could not meet the deadline, but the fact you got pretty much majority of the game done of this scale in a jam is a feet all its own! It was fun reading your updates and the care that is going into this project. May your polishing go well, which should be a lot easier since the bulk of the game is done. It's apparent you all love this thing you're making, and I think that's wonderful! Looking forward to see what the completed project brings to the table~
PROJECTS:
Operation: Magic Hero [WiP]
Piece By Piece [COMPLETE][Spooktober VN '20]
RE/COUNT RE:VERSE [COMPLETE][RPG]
Since When Did I Have a Combat Butler?! [COMPLETE][NaNoRenO2020+]
Crystal Captor: Memory Chronicle Finale [COMPLETE][RPG][#1 in So Bad It's Good jam '17]

But dear God, You're the only North Star I would follow this far
Owl City "Galaxies"

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users