Two of the five paths have their second drafts written, and have had low-level critique from the editors and other writers. There will be minor additions to them from the writers and then they will start the long churn of the editing process.
A third path is well on its way to completion of the second draft, and a forth is starting to pick up the pace.
On the art side of things there are now a number of new CGs that have been made, however as we head into the exam season for a number of the artists we are expecting a slow down until December. This should then, hopefully, result in a rebound once the shackles of education are released from their heels.
I wish that I could add more, but in reality, that is about all the progress we have made. Sure, to us it's a lot more dramatic. I can say "two parts are finished" here, but that equates to about 200,000 words worth of keyboard bashing on our side of the fence.
Since this has been woefully short, I'll mention something that I noticed the other night.
Due to various, unforseen consequences, I have been away from the project proper for about 3 weeks. When I came back there were a number of scenes for review, and a couple of comments on a couple of my scenes.
One of the biggest complaints that we've had internally (especially with the first drafts) was that Hisao was a bit of a non-entity. There were debates about just how much attention we should pay to him taking pills, their side effects (you would not believe how many "nightmare" scenes we threw out) and so on.
There were also attempts at making Hisao more of a reflection of the player. At one stage the first decision in Act 1 was "You are about to enter the door to Yamaku Academy. How do you feel?" This failed on a level never seen before, and that is why you now introduce yourself or have Mutou introduce you.
But with this new wave of scenes, it's like everything has changed. One of the comments on my scene was that it was "Hisao-centric – you're writing the Hanako path, not the Hisao path". In the other scenes that I was reviewing I felt a similar effect; Hisao was no longer a penis attached to the psyche of the player; he was a character. And, not only that, he was a different character in each path that shared commonalities at his base level.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that we have, at least partially, forged a character out of Hisao.
Either that or the lack of sleep and KS was playing tricks on my mind. I suppose both are plausible. Toda'y Blog Art comes from Doomfest (albeit a little late).
- Crud
