Ori, Ochi, Onoe.

[yummy]

Wow, that's a game
I really liked it and I particularly appreciated the script.

There was emotion and the characters are so well described, their interwined relationships, the music, the menus animation... I LOVED EVERYTHING!

It's a game I'm quickly adding to my references for sure.

Good job!

[rioka]

Oo, oo! A new mikey game! And so shiny ... *O* <-- mesmerized

Too bad I can't play it yet... TT_TT

[monele]

.... Woa........ This made me want to fall in love again. The mood, the girls, the sheer uniqueness of this game through every bits that compose it... Congratulations to the whole team for making this happen !

Ending 7 (myuu~!)... Must play again >o<... *looks at clock*.... Only ???... It felt like I had been playing for hours o__o... woa... XD...

[papillon]

*sleepily resurfaces after playing for a long time*

seem to have unlocked everything in the galleries... if there's a three-face ending, I don't seem to have found it yet... must... nap...

[DaFool]

edit: hmm don't really have time to torrent the multiplatform package until tomorrow.
A dumb question (coming from me), but shouldn't the multiplatform package be a .zip rather than a .exe?

[mikey]

Whaaa, thanks for the kind words everyone! I wanted to go a bit unconvetional with the layout and the design... and to be honest I think that when the game is running it actually looks better than on the screenshots. There's something about fullscreen Oh well...

seem to have unlocked everything in the galleries... if there's a three-face ending, I don't seem to have found it yet... must... nap...

There is no such thing as a three-faced ending ^_^. But if you unlocked all the galleries, even the dev pictures, then you should have seen all the endings. I dare say it's even possible to get all the endings, unlock all the galleries without getting the bad ending - I think it happened to me in one of the test sessions.

---

Aaaah, the accomplished feeling. I just finished my favorite activity of them all - organizing and packing all the development files, zipping them up and stacking them nicely into one folder that will get burned on a DVD... The project is finished. And today, I will either sleep very well, or not sleep at all. But seeing it works is a great relief.

EDIT:

edit: hmm don't really have time to torrent the multiplatform package until tomorrow.
A dumb question (coming from me), but shouldn't the multiplatform package be a .zip rather than a .exe?

Ugh, probably. But all the ATP releases are self-extracting exes, so I didn't want to break the tradition.

[PyTom]

The multiplatform package is actually a rar file masquerading as an exe, unless mikey changed his usual way of doing things. A zip version is included alongside the linux and mac versions I posted.

[DaFool]

I just realized users who download the multiplatform will probably not know how to run the game unless they visit your webpage to download the dependencies / launchers for OSX/linux.

41 downloads so far, 790 more to go to beat subarashi demo loader (well of course that was posted on 4ch)

edit: 2 Japanese IPs! yeah, mikey & co are gonna take the ACG world by storm!!!

Why hasn't renai.us never torrented anything before? The likes of Garden Society Kikuit and G! MB might have had more exposure during their release time. But yeah we gotta fix the webpages, demos, etc and prepare for flood of traffic once we direct link. I guess so far this keeps the community manageable enough among the dedicated Visual Novel fans. While the other games were excellent (note I haven't finished playing all of them yet so I might be wrong), this game is the one that so far for me stands out as you can't tell its a doujinshi.

[PyTom]

That's true. I'd just torrent up the windows installer, and then point people to renai.us to download the various os-specific versions.

Well, I'll need to list the game on renai.us first. But that's not a bad thing... I'd like to wait a day or two before going super-public, just to make sure no-one reports any bugs.

(I caught a bug that prevented a total-unlock late last night, and mikey found that a picture was missing from the CG gallery this morning. The gallery was somewhat problematic, as it's a real pain to test the unlocking.)

I'm getting somewhat more comfortable, now that Papillion has managed a total unlock.

[mikey]

I'm getting somewhat more comfortable, now that Papillion has managed a total unlock.

Heeey, no fair, I did a complete test and made a total unlock myself, otherwise I wouldn't have released it. But given the cursed state of my computers, it's very good that you don't trust me

Anyway, if there's a way that doesn't consume too much bandwidth, it's always good.

[Jake]

Man, what can I say that hasn't already been said? To say it simply: Awesome. Powerful stuff.

Where to start?

The packaging - the menus, the intro/ending display, the little incidental graphics - was easily the best I've yet seen. It's frustrating, from a programmer's point of view, to not even see how some of that stuff was even done! The artwork - the character art, the backgrounds, the effects - was practically all of an amazing standard, and all in all I'd have been ready to believe it was a professional product that was being sold for real money. Which seems an odd thing to find myself thinking, given mikey's recent comments about the charm of rough-around-the-edges fan works, but... it's pretty obvious that everyone involved put a lot of effort and care into the project.

The music seemed a little overbearing at first, but the more I played through, the more it seemed to fit. Certainly it's well matched-up to the mood as the story unfolds, so I wonder if I just got my initial impression 'cause of the scenes the piece opens with. (I recently had a similar experience with the movie Fargo, and there also when the same piece came in over the denouement it retroactively made the intro seem a lot more fitting.)

The writing, whilst by its very nature not an instant-wow thing like those nifty rotating-in menus are, was equally good; Ochi in particular was a very convincing character, not to mention quite unlike anything I was expecting! All in all, I've typically found it difficult to get emotionally attached to characters in VNs - possibly as much as anything because the english-language productions I've seen have typically been shorter than the time it would take me to accept a character as 'real' - but this has been an happy exception. Well, aside from the path I ended up on (2/9) not necessarily being that happy.

There were only really two areas that stood out as a little weak, in my first play through.
Firstly, a few graphical parts which don't seem up to the (admittedly high) standard of the rest. One was the logo on the title screen (and for that matter the icon) which just seems a little hastily composited. The way the white fringe appears, if it is not actually, unbalanced towards the filled circle and not perfectly-circularly-cut just disturbs my sense of aesthetic. Another was the image that's shown as 4-3 in the CG gallery - the white framing it looked out of place at the time; over the top.
Secondly, the character of Ori seemed a little flat compared to the other two; the scenes she was in made her seem more the artificial stereotypical-girl-game-girl - but I wonder if this isn't just because I really neglected her when I had choices to make, and I might get a more rounded view of her character when I play through again. And I'm certainly going to play through again.

[mikey]

Thank you for such a thorough reply!

Needless to say I am happy that the overall experience works. I don't really know from the reply whether you got the 4/9 ending, but it doesn't matter.

Yes, I've commented on the charm of low-budget works, but that's because I really like them. But of course this is not to put down O3, which has the highest "production values" of all the games we've done. Anyway, the final unlockable pictures also show early design stages, and they weren't really spectacular.

On the subject of the logo and menu BG, it has that organic look and all, but actually it's a part of the (background) story. I had made a more color-conservative design, but in many ways it's one of the points to have it... let's say blood-red. And one of the reasons that all backgrounds are devoid of that color. Well, a bit of orange at times, admitted ^_^

Because the story is focused more on one character than the others, well, the exposure and depth can't really be the same. I especially wanted to avoid "favorite character" debates and the like.

Anyway, all critical comments noted, I am still very happy you liked it. In the end, I'd like the game to be more of an overall, than an elemental experience. But that doesn't mean it's not made up of individual parts.

[PyTom]

The packaging - the menus, the intro/ending display, the little incidental graphics - was easily the best I've yet seen. It's frustrating, from a programmer's point of view, to not even see how some of that stuff was even done!

If it's okay with mikey, I'll release some of the effects code at some point in the future. Some of it needs to be integrated with core Ren'Py, as it uses internals. (The spinning buttons come to mind.) All of it needs to be better documented.

[mikey]

Of course, no problem with me.

[musical74]

I can see only one problem...the 85 MB. I have a dial-up connection, so this would take 6-7 hours to DL. Which is too bad, because based on what everyone's saying I would love to DL it...<SIGH> the pitfalls of a dialup connection <can't afford anything else>.