It's day 2, wooo! Did I wake up feeling any better? You know I didn't! It's been a day of headaches and lethargy, but I'm still getting stuff done!
First up we have a song. I'm not sure I want to upload every song we make... That's a bit OTT, but I'll share this one since we're so early into this series of posts.
https://soundcloud.com/takafumi-sakagam ... ic/s-1OwYb
It's imaginatively called 'panic' although it's not exactly a song that represents panicking... It's more the kind of song that urges you to panic... if that makes sense. It's a rapid-fire high-tension track, and as I listen back to it now, I can't help but feel like it has an FF7 vibe to it. Must be all that FF7remake hubbub.
Yesterday I said...
"Hopefully I'll wake up fully cured (as if!) and I'll be able to stream the Vivienne sprite."
I may not have woken up fully cured, but I did get to stream (part of) the Vivienne sprite's creation. I had some technical hiccups in the first hour, so the VOD has gone, but the other two hours are available to
watch on Twitch~ I talk a little bit about... Hmm, well I'm not sure how much was in the first hour, but I talk about my own process a bit (the flaws, the benefits), I talk a bit about art school vs learning online, there's a long tangent about Pokemon in there... Oh, and I say "good enough" a lot.
My favorite moment was probably
this little clip~
Unfortunately after around 3 hours or so of talking, my cold-struck throat was beginning to hurt. It's kinda tough to speak anyway, so I was happy to do the rest of the sprite in silence at my own leisure...
It's unfinished, still needs shading and expressions made, but the Vivienne sprite is getting close to completion! The previous Alyssa sprite took me 6 hours, and so far I've put 5 into Vivienne's, so it should only take an hour or so to complete~ I had some real problems with the uniform, but I managed to get it looking pretty nice. Just don't look behind the hair, it's a mess there.
To keep us on a similar topic, our wonderful artist Cylfa has finished the design for our final heroine, Sadika!
She's super cool looking~ It might not be the final design, but I can't wait to get a sprite of her made! I realize I haven't really shown off any of our other concept art, but... it can wait. I'm sure I'll find an excuse to dedicate a post to concept art. But this is Cylfa's first piece for the project, and I'm excited to see more~
We have a bunch of people working in different areas. Some musical ideas are in the pipeline. Our writers are all working away on their scenes. We've got an almost complete plan for the story, with a few gaps here and there. We'll need to come together to fill those gaps in. I also need to write the start of the game, I might be inconveniencing the others by not doing that immediately... But cute girls take precedent, right?
Tomorrow we're gonna definitely fix all that. We're gonna go over the plan, fill in the gaps, and outline all of the assets we will need for this production. Our programmer is currently adding in all the bits and pieces we'll be making use of, so we'll be able to know what UI elements we need to create soon. The backgrounds will need to be picked out clearly too, because we'll have to restrict the amount of rooms writers can use. Don't want the writers running wild, giving all the artists too much work to do.
Writing is, of course, a major aspect of developing Visual Novels. Last year I didn't have much to say about it, partly because I was writing pure slice of life, and partly because I was the only writer.
By Your Side was created in a very spontaneous manner, and so there isn't much depth to it from a developer perspective.
Aidos is a completely different beast. It may be a romance story, however it is so dissimilar to By Your Side in style that I honestly wouldn't feel comfortable writing it alone. There are certain kinds of romance I can work with, but that doesn't work for a multi-route multi-heroine VN. We need different voices and different approaches to the relationships as they exist in Aidos.
Those are the intimacies, but if you pull back and look at the work as a whole, you'll see a construction. The game's scenario is the scaffold that the writers use to build their own constructions. It brings with it the lead voice. The style, the narrative aesthetic, the themes, the overall goal. From a rather mechanical point of view, that is the role I take. The scenario writer comes up with an interesting premise, sets it up in a way that'll keep people reading, and ties everything together so that the several voices of the project merge into one. The rest will fall into place without a thought, as the writers do their own thing, we'll all realize that... somehow... the main themes always seem to wrap back into it. Just recently we had a writer realize that all of the routes—the work of three different writers—unintentionally fit the name of the game: Aidos. That's the kind of magic I've come to rely on in my three years developing VNs and in my many years as a writer. So long as you have a solid skeleton, the rest of the body will naturally emerge.
In order to accomplish this goal of having such a skeleton, we first decided to set up some writing guidelines for everyone working on the project. This (along with proofreaders) will allow us to truly craft the voice we want people to hear. It's a document that decides how we will speak to the audience. And even beyond writing, it's a document that greatly helps the artists and musicians align with the ideals of the narrative.
To give an example page that also avoids giving out spoilers, here's one of the random side characters' pages.
We created all of these pages in Google Sheets, which isn't the first writing tool you'd think of, but it allows us to easily modify information in a collaborative fashion while also having something that can—with a single click—be exported as a common spreadsheet or docs file, or a pdf file, or even an image. This allows people to check it at home, on the go, online, offline, whenever and wherever they want.
It comes loaded with a bunch of notes. Stuff that'll help the writers make use of the character. Stuff that'll help the artists draw the character. Something that'll help musicians find motifs for the character. It's a universal helping tool for the team.
This writing guidelines document also includes the initial scenario notes and structure plan, and is where each of the writers placed their first concepts for their stories. Since then we have taken them into a flowchart program to flesh out the concepts and make them into achievable goals. Nothing is worse than writing without direction, so a flowchart is amazing. It gives each writer an idea of what scenes are on the horizon and where they are heading. It shows them where they are in the timeline of events. It's a map so that no one should get lost.
No spoilerinos, here's a censored example of the first day. It gets... a lot more complex as you go down.
We've split it up into a bunch of things. Color-coded for specific characters. Sectioned off for different dates. Different box shapes for different kinds of scenes. It's very easy to follow~
The other great thing about this is that it allows us to plan for the artists, musicians and programmers... But that's what we'll be talking about tomorrow. So, until then, bye bye~