What I Did Last Week #4 (week ending 2/6)

[Radhreni]

Week four! Since no one's posted a new thread yet-

(excerpting PyTom's original post, as Aleema did last week)

Welcome to the first "What I Did Last Week" thread. Over the last couple of years, I've noticed that there's a lot of posting, and especially concrete posting, towards the start and end of projects --- but not much in the middle. The hope is that this series of threads will fix this, by providing a place for people to talk about what they've done over the course of time. To help foster a sense of community, I want to try time-based threads, rather than project-based threads.

The challenge here is simply to post, once a week, a synopsis of what you did in the last week; and to do so at a level of detail that will let people follow along and make suggestions.

A couple of rules:

1. Anyone can make a new What I Did Last Week thread, if the old one is out of date. The goal is to post at least once weekly, with weeks running Sunday-Saturday. If you don't see a thread, make a new one. (If more than one thread for a week is created, we'll merge them.)

2. Be specific. Don't just post, "I wrote 100 words, made 2 sprites, and made 1 background." Show us - give us a synopsis or excerpt of the writing, or post a picture or two. The idea is to give people something to comment on, rather than going "yeah, that's nice." Use spoiler tags for large, game-ruining spoilers - but maybe not small ones, as people should expect some spoilers here.

3. Collaborative Criticism is welcome. This should be considered a "Critique Please" thread. That means that if you have suggestions for how a project can be made better, post them. If there's something you especially like or dislike, post about it.

4. Don't post lack-of-progress reports. If you didn't do anything this week (and it happens to everyone), don't post about it here.

This is an experiment; I hope it leads to more discussion of in progress games, and I hope that discussion leads to more and better games.

As a reminder to everyone, the motto here is Be Specific. We want to know what's going on, not just raw counts.

[Aleema]

Getting seriously close to releasing a new demo, which means having my system torn to pieces by the beta testers. ^^;

- Starling finished the chibis!! And Chansel was able to hop back on and start coloring again!! The chibis for the new demo are done.

- Cookie_Theif has joined the writing staff. Oh, also, I argued with said writing staff. You know. The norm.

- The mini-game has been thoroughly tested! Balance issues have been worked out and may continue to be worked out. There is now an Easy and a Hard mode. Easy minigames double the amount of time you get to play the game, but Hard lets you add on any remaining time on the timer to your score. The animations I had for the fogger, lasers, and fireworks lagged the game, so I took them out. =\ I liked them, but if there isn't a way I can use them, then they're gone.

- Debuggggin'. I uploaded a working Daily Planner to the dropbox for the writers to exploit, and it's not pretty. I found some of my code didn't work simply because of an upgrade in Ren'Py, and a lot was just because I forgot to go back and finish what I started. Debugging is really a team effort, as the whole writer pool is reporting bugs they find. Thanks guys!

Got the gift system working today. Now I need to painfully go through every character and see what they like out of 100 gift items. Characters can either love, like, or feel okay about items. Some have special reactions to certain items, and if they just don't like your gift, they refuse to take it. I'll need to make a delete button to throw away items you don't want in your inventory anymore.

My next debugging adventure is fixing the Public Opinion screen which is incompatible with my updated CD code.

- Writing, lots of it, and editing. A lot being done by Serenity Frost. Because there are more people sharing the dropbox now, I think everyone's pretty psyched that the game might actually get finished sometime soon, lol. Big thanks to Mikisweety for sitting through my crap writing even though she is a busy girl.

- I created a twitter. O_O And I added new smilies to the forum. Everyone seems to like them.

- I have added an introduction the minigame that asks the player to click before the game starts, and then counts down, so you play when you're ready. Tweaked balance, added a writing speed boost for the demo so people aren't so frustrated by not writing songs as easy in it.

- Updated the tutorials in the game so they're not so BLAH INFORMATION BLAH. Now only 4 boxes with arrows pop up, one at a time, to show the most important features on the screen, and then everything else can be learned by hitting the ? button in the upper right corner.

- Fixed the Stress mechanic, so that when a band member completely stresses out, they are forced to "cool off" and can't do any other action BUT relax until they've reduced their stress by half. Hopefully this will deter people from stressing out their peeps, because their relationship with you lowers every time that happens. >=[

- Basically, just generally prepared for releasing a new demo.


- Decided on branding our VN circle "Happy Backwards". The circle includes myself, Serenity Frost, Starling, and Chansel.

I know this doesn't feel like a lot of progress, but that's just because most of this week's work was on debugging and writing, not necessarily things I can screencap and ramble on about.

~~~

LAST WEEK'S POLLS
Will you make use of the game's jukebox?

Yes: 77.8%
Not sure: 22.2%
No: 0%

Yay! Cool.

In the game's scene archive ("Memorabilia") ...

... hide scene names that I have not seen: 53.6%
... show scene names if titles are ambiguous: 46.4%

Screw you guys. How am I supposed to respond to that? Nearly 50/50 division. Since "hide" technically won, that's what I'll do. lol

[mugenjohncel]

Finished making improved BG graphics intended for "The Question" Demo Game. All of the BG's are being done in Sketchup rendered in Twilight Render with a bit of Photoshop Touch-up to smoothen some corners.


This BG is the easiest to do since once the components are in place... all you have to do is render and quick touchup.


This one is a challenge in the lighting. Actually took several attempts to get the lighting close to the desired "almost" hand drawn look... then a bit of photoshop in a few places especially highlights.


same as the first BG. To speed up process, I just downloaded most of the components you see here from Google 3D warehouse.


This, believe it or not... is just composed of two planes... one for the meadow and one huge textured tree line near the horizon. Heavy Photoshop was done to make it look consistent with the rest of the BG's.


__________________________________________________________________________

Others:
Sketched the remaining BG-CG's needed for Sake-Chan's project. Started modeling the base mall 3D object for Sepia Tears and secured Blue Lemma's permission to create (actually resume) and release the Tales of Lemma parody. Also, began restoring old articles and working on a couple of updated OELVN BG-CG tutorials centered on Sketchup usage.

"POOF" (Disappears)