(upd Jan 23, 2015) Caramel Mokaccino (Open-ish Dev)

[Deji]

Ok, today I wanted to work on the script of day 1 some more, and it helped that now I know more about my main character!

...But I found another problem along the way. Remember I had this schedule with pieces of colored paper representing the characters and that I had a lot of room to put events and stuff so you'd get to *really* know the characters? (read: a lot of fluffy fillers).
Well, it seemed like a nice approach before, but now that I though about going FFD (comic-like), it seemed like a really crazy idea.

So I looked at the story planning again and decided to organize things better and limit my range of action some more, so i only get the important stuff down and avoid excess of work.

First, I looked at my calendar and my story planning and I realized I was looking at it the wrong way; You see, I was looking at it in terms of single days (58 of them in the whole story) and how many things I could do each day to advance the story. I divided the 58 days in three acts: 16-18 days for the intro (common route), 36 days of development of the chosen character's story and 5 days to solve that character's problems.
It sounded like A LOT.
Also it sounded like a lot of time for the character's development and I didn't know what to do with it D:

So I looked at my calendar and saw it was about 9 weeks of story, so I thought that it was better to tackle things in terms of weeks than in terms of days. 9 is a lot more manageable than 58!

In the end, my new planning ended up being like this:

1st week: intro
2nd week: Getting to know the characters a bit.
3rd week: These characters seem to have some problems...?
4th & 5th week: Bonding and getting close to the character you like - you may neglect some characters in the process.
6th week: Getting close to a singular character based of previous actions.
7th & 8th week: Finding out what's that character's problem and ways to solve it - also defining if it's friendship or love.
9th week: Solving the character's problem.

So now the events that originally took place on like the second and third week of the story got moved to the 5th and 6th, and some stuff that happened like, on the very last two days of the story or so, I now had a week to develop them! And now it seems to me they make a lot more sense xD
Also, originally I wanted Penny to move out of the Salviati house really quick, by the end of week 1, so I could have her living by herself from pretty much the beginning as a core part of the story (though I always felt it was kind of rushed >>; ) ; but when I started moving things around, it felt like a better idea to have her move out after two or three weeks, so she can back up her decision better and make the event of moving in to her new place more important; I could still use the fact she's living alone in the 'Bonding' weeks and have Ian visit her, Annie go to sleep there, Nico going to check up on her, etc., and fulfill the role of those weeks perfectly C:

Again I used my big sketchbook to put things on paper and I wrote down some very basic things for each week, and I pretend to clean them up tomorrow and/or next week so I can get my mind off this issue before picking up script again.

After that, the plan is to finish script for Day 1 once and for all, and produce some rough assets to test both regular VN style and FFD/comic-like style; I'll probably won't even try to code the FFD one properly, just use a lot of fullscreen images just to see how it looks like really quick xD;

I'm happy, this project seems a lot more manageable now C:

[Starling]

It does seem like it's really coming along. It's really exciting I love it when things just start to fall into place. And I like the way you're dividing it. Chunks are indeed a lot easier to work in I've found and they allow for changes in gameplay when you replay it.

Good luck~!

[Deji]

So yesterday I wrote all the stuff about the weeks on a more organized manner on my private Wiki, and filled stiuff in with things I planned before. That made me realize I have plenty of 'events' with Ian, Franco, Annie and even Nico, but Barbara and Julieta are lacking screen time D: I have to work on that!

Last night I sketched a colored Barbara that you can find in my blog, and I realized how much I sketched the chaacters but I rarely did any finished piece with them ^^; Not to mention the character design sketches are a few years old already.
So I thought it could be nice to draw a promo art or a cover of sorts C:... at 3AM in the morning, lol.
Here it is the rough sketch for it! (my roughs are not particularly pretty, though >>; )

Being the unimaginative person I am when it comes to drawing groups, after failing a couple of times to come with a good composition, I ended up borrowing a composition from an existing game and modifying it to my needs >>;

[Deji]

I refined the sketch today C:
(still not clean, though, I'm a mess when it comes to sketching things Dx )

Sorry for the souble post >>;

[YuukiCrossPudding]

@deji:
Kyaa!!
Cute!
I'll look forward for this one~
Good luck with it!
I hope you can make this without any problems at all... (amen...)
Because I'd love to see your art and your VN
xD

[Deji]

@Yuuki: Thank you so much ^__^
Hopefully, this time around i'll manage to actually do it xD;

Plans for today: resist the temptation to work on that sketch and keep on writing day one!

[Tsundere Lightning]

I refined the sketch today C:
(still not clean, though, I'm a mess when it comes to sketching things Dx )

coversketchsmall2.jpg

Sorry for the souble post >>;

I love the faces. One look at those and you know you're dealing with very different, very charming people.

'Very different' is rare in this art style.

[Deji]

I love the faces. One look at those and you know you're dealing with very different, very charming people.
'Very different' is rare in this art style.

Thank you ^^ I do try to make them different to a point, but even I see they're pretty similar anyway >>; Especially Franco and Enzo, those two are very hard to tell apart when it comes to visual cues in my mind >>; The two are just labeled as 'blonde nice smiling' Dx;

----------------------------------

Now, there has been some unexpected development in the Story of Caramel Mokaccino!
Which is awesome and awful at the same time, haha.

The thing is, yesterday I met with my co-author friend in our once-in-a-while Caramel meetings to discuss things.
She liked the idea of me going FFD with it, but wasn't so convinced as it would take away interactivity from the original idea. That means, I'll have to keep that concern in mind when scripting, so it doesn't become an issue. She approved of everything els, yay!

We discussed Franco AGAIN... and there's where the awesome stuff happened and the awful ended up happening as a consequence xD

You see, we always had this issue with Franco. No matter how pretty and smiling he was, we just never got around to like him. He was an idiot and a douche to us, to some extent xD; We were discussing that, and it downed to us that if he kept being like that, he would never be somebody's favorite character!
She said "let's make him fail at something. Something so bad that if it's known, he's reputation with the girls would be ruined!" And I said "Nooo! Dx We should make him vulnerable and lovable instead!"
So we did exactly that, and now he's a brokenhearted human being that happens to be very likable because of that. Problem is, we changed the story so much, we screwed Ian's story xD;
We changed the story with the evil teacher Franco was involved with, and instead we turned her into the love of his life, the only woman he ever truly fell in love with. But they were discovered and she was ultimately fired, with her reputation as a teacher ruined and ended up leaving the city altogether to look for a fresh start somewhere else. And so they parted. Sob Sob.
We previously had discussed how Franco is really worried about Ian, despite the fact they are on bad terms, and that was actually one of the reasons Franco approached Penny in the first place, to know how Ian was doing in an indirect way. We thought "Hey, how about Franco is indebted to Ian because he's dealing with all the bad looks at the university because he was the one that was thought to be the one in a relationship with Miss V.?" And Ian is dealing with that himself and not saying "I didn't do it, it was Franco! >O" because he knows how brokenhearted Franco ended up being after Victoria left and how bad it'd screw his career and family and stuff if he was kicked out of the university or something... but he's still hurt. Ok, Franco's story solved, Ian's story with his 'I'm still loyal to the friend who betrayed me" went to hell xD;
But there was still the university investigating him and menacing to kick him out, right?
Actually, we thought that it was a horrible plot hole/plot device the fact that Ian was still being investigated for the issue with the teacher after he dropped the career and started a new one and the teacher was already fired, so that element also dissapeared.

So now we have Ian with lots of hints of issues but not 'big' issue to solve.
We have that he's on bad terms with Franco (probably they had a big fight after he dropped the career, Barbara got in the middle of that fight too and they ended breaking up - she has enough to deal with to be dealing with those two idiots as well), he meets unfriendly gazes and bad attitudes from former classmates and teachers at university because they believe he was the cause why she got fired (and she was really loved), and we have the lingering fact that he actually comes from another city, BUT he still decided to stay in that city and study at the same university despite all the previously mentioned stuff (we came up with something that has to do with his family situation... but it could be something else).
We believe there must be something we've not discovered yet that ties all that up and makes a good conflict for Ian for Penny to help with, but so far we found nothing worth pursuing D:
We actually came up with many weird, stupid, bad and incomplete ideas, but we discarded most of them as we would have to include external things to make them work or because they were too similar to Annie's family issues and Barbara's issues with wanting to study something else and pressure from the parents, and we wanted every story to be different.

So now we're stuck there xD;

For now, I'll just keep toying with this promo/cover art and with the script for day one, and keep thinking this thing with Ian over and over until I find something, hopefully before our next caramel meeting in two weeks from now.

As usual, feedback, suggestions, ideas and critics are more than welcome!!

I should edit the first post after all this development >>;
See? this is what happens when somebody like me tries to write a story xD;

[Deji]

Sorry for the double post >>;
A WIP from the cover/promo art, which has been so much to fun to work on that I actually have troubles focusing on anything else X_X;

[qq]

@ Deji
I like the color scheme of your cover, it really fits.

[kinougames]

I also really like the color in the cover, and I prefer it heavily to your more saturated work, actually.

[Deji]

Thanks, qq and kinougames ^^
The brownish palette seemed to fit to me too, and nothing else seemed to work anyway against the brownish uniforms ^^;

@kinougames: I've been looking back at my art and thinking that I don't really use much saturated colors, but then I was only looking at the base colors I use. The problem seems to be the strong and too-saturated-to-be-shadow colors I normally pick to shade things >_o;
I'm trying to tone them down lately, and it seems to work better C:

[kinougames]

I think part of it is your penchant for pink and pastel colors in addition "shiny" highlights, but I heavily prefer the brown, the muted greens, and the muted overall highlights. Gives the cover a very old-school, sepia, nearly film noire kind of look.

[Julie]

Ohmygod, that promo art looks amazing! Your coloring style has improved a lot, Deji. I really love how the colors blend so well together and that the whole picture gives a warm feeling when you look at it. It's very pleasing to the eyes. ^^ Good job! I wish you luck on this project.

[Deji]

First, more WIP for the cover art. I shifted the colors a bit, the browns were still too bright, so a bit of blue overlay and multiply layers did the trick.
Julieta in the back won't be as brightly colored in the final version, btw. I need to toy with filters once I finish the rest of the cast ^^;

So, latest development!
I had a meeting with my co-author friend this week, and we finally fixed Ian's route.
It ended pretty much being the same as before, just without the obvious plot-holes and more plausible causes for the tension at Uni.
Now we're facing some issues regarding Franco's route changes, that changed a rather important scene with Ian and Penny in the middle of the story that we refuse to let go >>; So we have to figure out how to fix things there now and make them work.
Our next meeting will be this Monday C:

We also narrowed down things to happen on days 1 and 2, and I just finished writing Day 1 following that
Since I was planning the FFD approach, I removed Penny's NVL narration parts, and I guess I'll dump that info on exposition dialogue later on instead if i keep on with the FFD idea.
I've sent it to my friend for revision, hopefully she'll take a look at it soon.

Now, I need to sketch things to test VN and FFD mode and see how that works.

I'll post more updates next week, hopefully! *is excited*

The game contains 867 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 7,809 words*,
for an average of 9.0 words per screen.
The game contains 0 menus.

*Some of those words and screens are part of descriptions I'll get rid of later when I have the drawings in place.