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

[TakafumiSakagami]

Today was a day of backgrounds and environments! I'm feeling pretty confident about finishing all the backgrounds soon, so here's a couple new ones I haven't shown off yet...





There's a staffroom and a classroom, both similar kinds of rooms so they share the same aesthetic. I had to make sure to go above and beyond modelling these environments, because they may find use in CGs later~

The other backgroundy thing I did was make some textures for a minigame. Now, this was a bit of a struggle because I was both programming something without visuals and drawing visuals for something that wasn't programmed... It was kinda mind-boggling... But I think I figured it out in the end.
It'll all need some polish, but the main objective was just understanding how to do it, so I'm happy with the results.



I don't wanna show these off much because they're so unpolished, but if I remember to, I'll post some screenshots of the final result.

Welp, that's all I have for the day. A couple new backgrounds today, and hopefully some more tomorrow!

[TakafumiSakagami]

We're over halfway through NaNoRenO, and we're over halfway through making backgrounds! Here's some more of 'em!

First up, a quaint outdoor scene.



We also have a teacher's office... 



And an office for Elisabeth...



I think I've mentioned this in the past in some other non-Nano blogposts, but I really do dislike making backgrounds. It's just so... boring, and mechanical. In a call with one of the team members a couple days ago I jokingly said that I don't understand a certain war criminal; how could he enjoy drawing environments but dislike drawing people? Characters are where all of the expression is, y'know? Architecture has too many restrictions to it...

I don't put much thought into the process because it feels so thoughtless, so I don't have much to say about it. Usually I try to pad the time out by listening to videos in the background, so all my attention goes into them.
I had this one 19-hour video prepared for this month of someone playing Ghouls 'n Ghosts. The person playing had a really relaxing voice, so I was looking forward to it... But I burnt through it in the first couple of days, so now I'm at a loss. I tried putting on a video of the same person playing Bomberman, but I was too invested in the gameplay to simply leave it on in the background...
I've spent the rest of the month going through my looong playlist, but after 14 days of music, it gets a bit obnoxious... I really need to find something new. Send me recommendations if you have any!

[kohdrams]

I'm impressed by how the first posts had these rough sketches and your latest updates show some real progress. The rendering on the heroines look great, 3D backgrounds are looking pretty good. And nice job on the menu design! I get your pain of burning out. It sucks when it happens, but make sure to take breaks when you need to and take care of yourselves. Keep going!

[TakafumiSakagami]

Thanks! I always have fun seeing step-by-step progress~ I really love this kind of daily update format for that very reason.
I really didn't show off our sketchy stuff as much as I should've... Here's a couple that had no mention. Early versions of the heroines~

And nice job on the menu design!

This means a lot! I have no faith in my UI stuff, so thanks.

[TakafumiSakagami]

Alright, I've had enough of backgrounds, so let's start doing something more interesting. Our two other artists are heading into CG-land, working away on fancy full-screen images, and I want to join in! So I'll start with the girl who has been the latest topic, Elisabeth.

The nice thing about having our backgrounds as models is that we can quickly get some nice angles to base our CGs around. I got a few angles of Elisabeth's office, then picked my favorite of the bunch. This would become the foundation for the CG.



I foolishly deleted my planning sketches when I was cleaning out the folder everything is being stored in, but I tried finding good places to put Elisabeth. She couldn't be too far forward 'cause she'd get cut off the screen. The positioning of the chair was pretty awkward 'cause unless she slouched, her head wouldn't fit in the frame. I tried rotating the canvas and scaling the sketch up and down, but eventually I settled on having Lis rest against the table.



I made some minor changes here and there while shading, but nothing major.



With some finishing touches and some alternate expressions, I had the final piece!



There are six versions in total. I notice I tend to go a bit overboard in adding expressions to CGs, especially compared to more traditional VNs, but I think it helps the conversation flow a bit better.



It's by no means a perfect piece, but there are a lot of CGs to do and I can't spend all my time on a single one. There's a point in which an image becomes good enough, and I think this CG has hit that point. It does its job.

[TakafumiSakagami]

My god, I've got a story for today. We've got some personal progress, but before we get into that, I want to talk about the giant priority we've been working on all this time: writing.

We have a bunch of writers, with our main three focusing on routes, and a couple others (myself included) helping out here and there. Today I finished writing a scene involving Lis, so I went to add it to the flowchart. In doing so, I decided to try and read everything that had been submitted so far...

I failed. There's too much. I've been reading for a while now, only ever stopping to take notes, and I have quite a lot more to cover. The writers are all doing so well, and one of them has already completed a route!
As I read through them, I had some laughs, got pulled along by some intrigue, and really got a feel for the characters. Alyssa is adorable with her reactions. Sadika's action-packed, but the moments of downtime are really sweet. Vivienne... Well, at the point I've read to, a character named Thaddeus has been the central focus. I'm excited to finish reading and find out what happens to him.

The problem is, regardless of the time it'll take to finish reading it all, every minute I spend reading gives me an idea for something new. That's bad. I can't do that. I've got backgrounds to make, and music to make, and... Well, let's just transition into the progress report now.

I already mentioned the Elisabeth scene that I wrote today. This is the scene that matches yesterday's CG, and I realized while writing that I was missing a crucial expression, so I quickly drew another variation of that CG.

I also decided that, since my own scenes are the ones I know for sure are finalized (the other writers want to tweak their stuff a bit), I may as well program in what I've written. I didn't end up programming the Lis scene, but instead, I programmed the first two scenes of the game. While doing so, I set up the file structure we'll be using to organize all of our scenes. The goal is to have a nice catalog of scenes that our testers and programmers can easily jump to.

Oh, and while I was putting these scenes together, I realized that there were some problems with the font we're using to display text in the textbox. Some punctuation marks were the wrong size, or positioned incorrectly, or just... the wrong shape entirely. So I went through and resized, repositioned, and redrew parts of the font. Now it looks a lot nicer.

It's been a while since I mentioned music, so here's something new on that front. I've got two new songs made and exported: As We Sleep and As We Breath. Similar to what I did with By Your Side's soundtrack, these two songs are remixes of the same core melody. I imagine I'll be able to do one more variation of the track before needing to do something completely original.

As you may be able to guess from the names, As We Sleep is a night track, and As We Breath is a sort of victorious after-a-conflict track. They're pretty general in their purpose and identity, so hopefully they can find a lot of use~

[TakafumiSakagami]

I pulled an all-nighter the day before yesterday, so I ended up falling asleep before I could post this update. It’s here now though, so let’s talk about day 19!

Well, I say that, but I don’t have much to say today. Day 18 was all talk and no visuals, but today will be mostly visuals. Aside from a little writing sesh I did (3,394 words) I spent the entire day working on backgrounds. Here they are~









Four new backgrounds. All but the shop have night time variations as well, so it was quite a bit of work. We’re sooo close to being done with backgrounds though, and I can’t wait to put it all behind me.

[TakafumiSakagami]

This isn't something I do very often... But today I drew a chibi.
The last time I even attempted that (if you don't include the incredibly rushed By Your Side one) was back in 2018 with my Rinko Hanazawa Shimeji, and that wasn't particularly high quality... Chibi art really isn't something I'm comfortable with. But I gave it a whirl, and this will be the first of three... Hopefully.



Actually I drew one and a half. This Alyssa Chibi has a second pose...



It comes with a second pose because this isn't a simple image to be displayed in-game. It's actually a button. A heroine-shaped button. It'll get some use in various areas, but I'm sure that'll be shown off in a future post.

The rest of my day, once again, was spent on backgrounds...




The river one has a daytime, afternoon, and rainy day version. The labby looking thing has a day and night version.

Tomorrow I have some talking to do with the rest of the team, because I'd set the 20th as a big deadline for a few things. I don't know how much individual progress I'll be able to make, but I guess we'll find out when tomorrow comes.

[TakafumiSakagami]

No backgrounds this time! Instead we're all about the cheebs. First things first...
I did write 2159 words for a scene, but that's not very interesting. We also finally began programming in some scenes (the Vivienne route) and I've done more UI stuff. 


These, like the Alyssa one yesterday, come with two different states. Now that they're complete, I can move onto doing some menu stuff, so I'll show that off tomorrow.

[TakafumiSakagami]

Yesterday I said I'd be moving onto menu stuff, and what better way to start than with the title screen? I had a vague idea already planned out in photoshop, I believe I even showed it off in a previous post, but today I sat down and finalized it. I then exported all the elements, opened up the code, and got to programming!

Since I spent some extra time on the animation, here's a motion version of it.


The sound effects are placeholder, taken from another game I did, so ignore them~

It's a pretty basic menu. There are two versions, one that is shown from the start of the game, and one that takes over once you complete the game. Buttons like the Load and Extras buttons are disabled when you first run the game, so there's some unique art for that too. The idea of the bar is repurposed from the quickmenu, but this version is a bit different to the quickmenu one, so it had to be fully redrawn.
All the submenus will be on their own screens, and to show off a bit of early work, I've made a start on the Extras screen...



The bar on the left pops in when you hover over the left side of the screen. The main menu button on the right also pops in when you hover on that side. Below that we can see the layout for the CG Gallery and the BG Gallery, which will eventually be populated with our art.

Speaking of art, our artist Cylfa finished her first CG! It's a Sadika one, and I actually haven't asked her if I can share it, so I'll leave it out for now. Really it's a shame to give up all the CGs in these update posts anyway, so maybe I'll hold back on posting that kind of stuff in future...

Along with all the coding for the menus, I've also begun adapting our writing into the format we use in-game. It requires some changes for programming's sake (changing quotations and apostrophes, adding speaker-names to lines, splitting up paragraphs, etc..) and has also led to some editing to bring everything into the correct tense, so it took a lot of time.
Currently, all of the locked-in common route content has been fully programmed. It's quite addicting, so I'm looking forward to having more content to add.

I didn't get everything done that I wanted to today, but it's nice to finish up mandatory tasks like making menus~ Onto the next day!

[Kokoro Hane]

Those chibi are really cute ^^
I also like the GUI. Even if it's simple, sometimes that is all you need~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Today I woke up super late, ate some food, then worked for 11 hours straight. I was thinking "we're close enough to the end that I can justify spending all day on this, right?" but as soon as I stop, I hear that the deadline has been extended. Guess I'm holding off on the crunch for a while...

Anyway, today I mostly worked on UI. I did some little things and I did some big things, so let's go through them in a completely random order.

First up, the choice menu. It's a small thing, but we didn't have it until now, so I'm glad it's added.



Then we have a CG gallery, a background gallery, a music player, and a menu where you can replay scenes that you've already read.



Now the musicbox section hasn't been done yet, and the scene and CG menus are pretty empty until we add in the content, but the code is all there ready to be added to. Once again the visuals are very basic, but I've only got so much time. Maybe I'll come back to it if I have free time at the end.
Oh, but this menu is overly interactive. The side bar can be hidden, and the menu button only pops out when you hover over it. Lots o' stuff going on in the backend.

A tiny change (but one that took a while to program) was this little... mosaic glass effect(?)... I added to the quickmenu. Now when you open it, the rest of the game blurs into the background, making the whole thing look a lot less flat. Probably not worth the time I put into it, but I couldn't stop myself once I started.



Finally for UI stuff, I began working on the Game menu. It's not very far along yet, but I think it gets the idea across well enough. There's some animation in here too, so the coding will be annoying, but it'll be worth it in the end.



To end with the only non-UI thing I did today, I did some further programming to Vivienne's stuff. It's more accurate to say that our programmer Zune plugged everything in, and then I modified bits here and there. The first day of script-programming is always the most uncomfortable, but by the time we're onto the other heroines, I'm sure we'll be super familiar with the unique code we're working with.

Those chibi are really cute ^^
I also like the GUI. Even if it's simple, sometimes that is all you need~

Thanks~ Unfortunately we couldn't get a UI artist proper, and I have a pretty tight time budget, so I can't dedicate myself entirely to fancy UI... But so long as it's custom and suits the game's aesthetic, then it's better than nothing!

[TakafumiSakagami]

I haven't been awake and working for long today (I have no idea what times I'm waking up now tbh) but I managed to fit some stuff in.

I wrote 3,377 words for some random slice of life scene, and I made some progress on that game menu I was showing off yesterday.



Programming this was a pain, especially since there are so many different button states. Only the Config tab has been fully completed, but the Notes tab is underway. Hopefully I'll be able to finish the entire thing by the time I post the next update~

[TakafumiSakagami]

Off the back of a 25 hour day, I spent a lot of today asleep. I made some good progress though, so I'm still good.

To continue from yesterday's post, the game menu has had some more additions. Most substantially, the Notes menu has been added in full functionality. This is a menu full of various story information that automatically updates as you progress through the game.


There's a video showing this off, but I'll include a description here too.
There's a screen that gets populated by the characters you meet and the items you collect as you progress through the game. So early on it may look like this...



Then, as you meet more characters, the list will grow.



Clicking on one will bring up a screen full of information about the thing you clicked on. Clicking on Vivienne will give you a summary of all your interactions with her.
This menu requires a lot of new flags to work, but I think it's a nice enough addition to be worth it.

Speaking of flags, I've also put some more work into the Replay menu. That one is self-explanatory. When you find a new scene, you unlock it in the Replay menu. You can then review it whenever you want.



All the icons will be screenshots of the actual scenes, but until we've got every scene programmed, we can't exactly do that... So take the first two icons as an example.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of scene programming, I went and defined a bunch of sprite zooms and placements so that we wouldn't have to manually place the sprites each time. There are 9 placements in total.



The far ones look like this...



The close ones like this...



And zoom is like this...



Typically I'd just copypaste my own transformation codes after every new sprite, but since we have multiple people programming this one, it's easier for everyone if we have some simple placement functions like this.

And finally we have a new background! Been a while since I made one, and I'm not looking forward to the four I have left to make, but this was the easiest to choose from, so I figured I'd be able to fit it in at the end here.

[Kokoro Hane]

Wow, that notebook function is so cool! Also, you deserved a well good rest! It's good to take a break as it avoids burnout ^^