After a month of procrastinating because nobody cares (except the guy on /jp/ who sparked me writing this):
All Quiet on the Western Front
Unsurprisingly, nothing particularly special happens progresswise, more words/art come in every week and that's about it. Well, we do have kinda many source photos for the backgrounds now which is very nice, just that some could always be better and obviously the missing ones are harder to get. Directing the game is still behind and stalled for the most part, but it'll get done eventually. The first draft of script is surprisingly close to finished (relatively speaking), after that we just have to race against the artists to see who gets their shit polished and finished first.
On the hilarious sideprojects front however, delta is working on the solution to make translating the game easy and userfriendly, in the hopes of making KS the Asterix of visual novels (guess how many languages/dialects Asterix has been translated to). His aspirations are not completely unbased, as parts of the script have already been translated to Italian.
4LS had its first anniversary a few days ago, marked by the date when crud took over the project leading, even though we didn't start thinking ourselves as a group external to the project until later. Looking back at the past year, it's a god damn miracle this project still exists and is doing so well, so happy birthday 4LS and may the game be out before the next one.
-Aura
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
4LS ANNOUNCES NEW PROJECT "KSS"
Our group announces a new OELVN (Original English Language Visual Novel) in the works, in collaboration with our Fringe Staff members called "KSS" standing for "Katawa Shoujo Shoujo," a play on the first game we are already working on.
To summarize, KSS is a visual novel project created from a spontaneous string of events (all of which are very weird in their own way).
You are introduced to the numerous main cast members one by one as the story begins. From a Czechoslovakian to a Brazilian, from French to Italian, American to Russian, and so on, you get to choose which girl you want to date from these lovely multi-national girls. The girls' personalities range from hot-cold personalities (or tsundere), warm and sweet personalities, and even stalkers. You also have various bust sizes (though nothing over F cup, for those that hate ridiculously huge breasts), ages and so on to go with the game's theme of "variation".
Sample character art:
To summarize, KSS is a visual novel project created from a spontaneous string of events (all of which are very weird in their own way).
Story
The game takes place in Sydney, Australia. A school is founded in the early 1990's with the sole purpose of being multi-cultural. With the current time being early 2005, the school has grown from its humble roots, and has expanded in almost every way. Rather than being students in an exchange student program, people from around the world who truly wish to learn the English language, other cultures and the like go to this school to learn everything they could ever want to learn. The game takes place inside the high school division of the school, focusing on the relationships of the various girls in the story. Yes, girls. Apparently, despite the school not being gender-centric, it has an overflowing amount of female students; due to the various advantages to women the school has to offer. Be advised that even despite the game being lesbian-centric (or yuri, as the Japanese call it), there are indeed normal male-to-female relationships available in this game, despite few. Due to the humongous amount of characters in the main cast, you can enjoy the game and its various stories.You are introduced to the numerous main cast members one by one as the story begins. From a Czechoslovakian to a Brazilian, from French to Italian, American to Russian, and so on, you get to choose which girl you want to date from these lovely multi-national girls. The girls' personalities range from hot-cold personalities (or tsundere), warm and sweet personalities, and even stalkers. You also have various bust sizes (though nothing over F cup, for those that hate ridiculously huge breasts), ages and so on to go with the game's theme of "variation".
Gameplay
The game will start with you choosing which branch (out of three total story branches) that you want to play through. Each branch has its own set of characters, despite everyone being in the same school/location/area. Each branch will also have its own style of gameplay, varying from the standard POV (point of view) to styles never been used much, or even not at all yet. The game will still retain its "choose your adventure" style, like with every visual novel made, to stay true to our roots, and to provide choices for the player in order to get the girl he/she so desires. Due to the immense amount of characters, this was the only way to do so, to make sure that the theme of variation is still contained in the game itself. Think "a Negima visual novel, but without Negi" or something among those lines, and there's your description for the game.
Summary
This will probably be the first OELVN to utilize an immense amount of characters and storylines, unless someone is already working on one. With all sorts of craziness being packed into this game, and the humongous amount of work going to be put into it (I pity the artist, unless he gets a lot of help), this will be a game to wait for. And yes, it's a free game.Sample character art:
Monday, March 17, 2008
Developer Diaries, episode 21
Writers, especially crud, broke the heavens (300 000 word milestone) with their keyboards and there was next to no celebration. Which is why I'm writing this a day too late. Incidentally, the script of Hanako path is now finished as well, so we have at least one story in the bag (save for rewrites, edits, QC and all that sort of thing, which will take ages).
In other news, our artist harem is expanding again with the inclusion of the charming kamifish, and the results are showing. Alpha testing of first "Act" of the script has produced good results and I am hoping to get over that Namek soonish (which will not happen).
As for today's bit of VN design philosophy: the passing of time.
How to portray the passing of time, or explain skipping over an hour, an evening, a day, a week? VNs usually are read from first-person point of view, so timeskips are bound to cause some disjointing in the storytelling. This was a personal hurdle for me, but eventually I settled with just skipping without explanation just like everyone else. Not that the reader "loses" anything if he misses discussion number 9001 with some side character, or the events that have no bearing to the story, but it might make it harder to identify oneself with our protagonist.
Other kinks with time show especially strongly in KS if you compare the first "Act" to the others. Almost half of average playthrough lenght (measured by number of words) is spent during the first week in Yamaku, and the rest varies between 2-4 months of time inside the game world. I wonder if the shift will feel unnatural because the change, in most stories, is rather sudden. We'll see.
In other news, our artist harem is expanding again with the inclusion of the charming kamifish, and the results are showing. Alpha testing of first "Act" of the script has produced good results and I am hoping to get over that Namek soonish (which will not happen).
As for today's bit of VN design philosophy: the passing of time.
How to portray the passing of time, or explain skipping over an hour, an evening, a day, a week? VNs usually are read from first-person point of view, so timeskips are bound to cause some disjointing in the storytelling. This was a personal hurdle for me, but eventually I settled with just skipping without explanation just like everyone else. Not that the reader "loses" anything if he misses discussion number 9001 with some side character, or the events that have no bearing to the story, but it might make it harder to identify oneself with our protagonist.
Other kinks with time show especially strongly in KS if you compare the first "Act" to the others. Almost half of average playthrough lenght (measured by number of words) is spent during the first week in Yamaku, and the rest varies between 2-4 months of time inside the game world. I wonder if the shift will feel unnatural because the change, in most stories, is rather sudden. We'll see.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Monday, March 3, 2008
Developer Diaries, chapter 19 & 20
Aura wrote this DD in the forums recently:
When reading a book, one often imagines what the events of the story would look like, how the characters look like (raise your hand if you were surprised that Legolas had blonde hair in Jackson's movie trilogy) and so on. Visual novels skip a part of that process, and use someone else's imagination instead, leaving your brain only with the task to animate the static pictures shown on the computer screen.
Who is the person whose imagination is used to potray the script? It seems that it often is the writer, not the artist, because of a thing I call here "The Hegemony". The Hegemony is a phenomenon where the writers (or other equivalent) have a judo grip on the visual outlook of a visual novel, essentially having the script rule over the art. In name, visual novel has both aspects on equal standing, unless someone wants to argue the superiority of having one word before (or after) another. In practice however, they are often more like illustrated novels. The visual side is subjugated to only serve as support for the text instead of being a free-standing element. Still, most often the writer has an image of a character, an event, or so in his head and asks the artist to illustrate it. The end result will probably not look exactly like what the writer is thinking, it looks like what the artist is thinking, based on the descriptions he heard, or reading the script. So, will the writer try to bring the text closer to the visualization, or the artist the picture closer to the description? In most cases, the latter.
Now then, is that such a bad thing? No, The Hegemony is a healthy symbiosis after all. The pictures bring the text alive, giving it much more soul than just the words alone. The text gives the drawings a purpose to fulfill. Also it's only natural that the arrangement is made like this. After all, without the script there would be nothing to visualize (ignore for a moment that I am making a game using a single picture as the source), just like movies are filmed after script has been written. Not the best analogue ever, but to continue it we could talk about directors or animators of a movie or theatre production compared to VN artists. The screenwriters rarely participate in the actual production of a movie, leaving it to the director, the animators or the actors to do that kind of stuff. Of course, a VN is not a movie and it seems that The Hegemony is an essentiality for succesful VN creation. It's just that...
Can the visual artists be co-creators instead of just illustrating the writers' (or someone's) dirty dreams, and would it be a good thing? I'd answer yes to both, to an extent. I requested a design for one of the side characters in Rin's path from the artists a while ago. The end result doesn't look like anything I imagined the character to look like, but it's absolutely amazing and fits the character perfectly, so why would I complain? It's perfect. Obviously I, too support The Hegemony when talking about KS. It is the most natural way of working, and I too prefer most of the visual stuff in game to look at least somewhat like what I imagined when writing, but I fully support the artists giving their own flavour to the game (I'm surprised nobody raised a shitstorm about Misha's new eyecolour). As for us, the artists often ask for confirmation of their illustrations and all in all, I feel that we are working somewhat fluidly and loosely in that aspect. The place where to draw a line is the most important thing. If something looks good, is there a need to try fixing it?
After which, TcDohl added:
I haven't really been in the limelight as of late, but when I do talk about the look and feel of the final product, I often talk about a balance between the "visual" and the "novel". I talk when the "visual" should have more emphasis and when the "novel" should have more emphasis. Overall, we've gotten to a point that the balance between the two becomes more apparent. This is what I keep in mind when I direct the game. Should I emphasize the "visual" part, like when the prose is flourishing and descriptive, or to emphasize the "novel" part when the dialogue is witty and entertaining. I think of it like a sliding scale, whereas the amount of "visual novel" that you're dealing with stays more or less the same, but the "visual" and "novel" parts change with inverse relationship to each other. In this case, they are indeed symbiotic in the sense that one cannot exist without the other, and it often troubles me when a writer intends his part of the script to be able to stand alone and be able to be published in a book by itself. I say that defeats the "visual" part of "visual novel" and throws the balance out of whack. Prose is nice, but in this context, prose is one leg, visuals is another leg and music the third, (which makes it a tripod - music is another subject altogether, one that does not factor into the sliding scale) and the programming the thing that props it all up. Sometimes writers have to know when to emphasize the "visual" and when to emphasize the "novel" and make this intention known. I am always one who advocates balance of all sorts, and this is no difference. We have to know where the right balance is and when, and this is how we make our visual novel great.
Really soon after, DD #20 was posted as well by Aura:
So, we broke the quarter million words milestone, GET went to A22 with the word "plain", coincidentally in the same scene that completed Act 2 for the last path that was still in writing process of the second act.
Other than that, the script alpha for the demo began today (as in, the build got locked and upped to server), but Tc will try to get us a few more testers during this week cause we have good applications and more testers = better. We are trying to scrounge the background source photos while the script alpha and character art production is underway to get everything together at more or less the same time.
In other, but not completely unrelated news, we are currently trying to decide which platforms to support (obvious answer is the ones that Ren'py naturally supports). While we probably will not go as far as including toasters and C64, Suriko came up with this with the help of some groundwork laid by an anon on 4chan:
When reading a book, one often imagines what the events of the story would look like, how the characters look like (raise your hand if you were surprised that Legolas had blonde hair in Jackson's movie trilogy) and so on. Visual novels skip a part of that process, and use someone else's imagination instead, leaving your brain only with the task to animate the static pictures shown on the computer screen.
Who is the person whose imagination is used to potray the script? It seems that it often is the writer, not the artist, because of a thing I call here "The Hegemony". The Hegemony is a phenomenon where the writers (or other equivalent) have a judo grip on the visual outlook of a visual novel, essentially having the script rule over the art. In name, visual novel has both aspects on equal standing, unless someone wants to argue the superiority of having one word before (or after) another. In practice however, they are often more like illustrated novels. The visual side is subjugated to only serve as support for the text instead of being a free-standing element. Still, most often the writer has an image of a character, an event, or so in his head and asks the artist to illustrate it. The end result will probably not look exactly like what the writer is thinking, it looks like what the artist is thinking, based on the descriptions he heard, or reading the script. So, will the writer try to bring the text closer to the visualization, or the artist the picture closer to the description? In most cases, the latter.
Now then, is that such a bad thing? No, The Hegemony is a healthy symbiosis after all. The pictures bring the text alive, giving it much more soul than just the words alone. The text gives the drawings a purpose to fulfill. Also it's only natural that the arrangement is made like this. After all, without the script there would be nothing to visualize (ignore for a moment that I am making a game using a single picture as the source), just like movies are filmed after script has been written. Not the best analogue ever, but to continue it we could talk about directors or animators of a movie or theatre production compared to VN artists. The screenwriters rarely participate in the actual production of a movie, leaving it to the director, the animators or the actors to do that kind of stuff. Of course, a VN is not a movie and it seems that The Hegemony is an essentiality for succesful VN creation. It's just that...
Can the visual artists be co-creators instead of just illustrating the writers' (or someone's) dirty dreams, and would it be a good thing? I'd answer yes to both, to an extent. I requested a design for one of the side characters in Rin's path from the artists a while ago. The end result doesn't look like anything I imagined the character to look like, but it's absolutely amazing and fits the character perfectly, so why would I complain? It's perfect. Obviously I, too support The Hegemony when talking about KS. It is the most natural way of working, and I too prefer most of the visual stuff in game to look at least somewhat like what I imagined when writing, but I fully support the artists giving their own flavour to the game (I'm surprised nobody raised a shitstorm about Misha's new eyecolour). As for us, the artists often ask for confirmation of their illustrations and all in all, I feel that we are working somewhat fluidly and loosely in that aspect. The place where to draw a line is the most important thing. If something looks good, is there a need to try fixing it?
After which, TcDohl added:
I haven't really been in the limelight as of late, but when I do talk about the look and feel of the final product, I often talk about a balance between the "visual" and the "novel". I talk when the "visual" should have more emphasis and when the "novel" should have more emphasis. Overall, we've gotten to a point that the balance between the two becomes more apparent. This is what I keep in mind when I direct the game. Should I emphasize the "visual" part, like when the prose is flourishing and descriptive, or to emphasize the "novel" part when the dialogue is witty and entertaining. I think of it like a sliding scale, whereas the amount of "visual novel" that you're dealing with stays more or less the same, but the "visual" and "novel" parts change with inverse relationship to each other. In this case, they are indeed symbiotic in the sense that one cannot exist without the other, and it often troubles me when a writer intends his part of the script to be able to stand alone and be able to be published in a book by itself. I say that defeats the "visual" part of "visual novel" and throws the balance out of whack. Prose is nice, but in this context, prose is one leg, visuals is another leg and music the third, (which makes it a tripod - music is another subject altogether, one that does not factor into the sliding scale) and the programming the thing that props it all up. Sometimes writers have to know when to emphasize the "visual" and when to emphasize the "novel" and make this intention known. I am always one who advocates balance of all sorts, and this is no difference. We have to know where the right balance is and when, and this is how we make our visual novel great.
Really soon after, DD #20 was posted as well by Aura:
So, we broke the quarter million words milestone, GET went to A22 with the word "plain", coincidentally in the same scene that completed Act 2 for the last path that was still in writing process of the second act.
Other than that, the script alpha for the demo began today (as in, the build got locked and upped to server), but Tc will try to get us a few more testers during this week cause we have good applications and more testers = better. We are trying to scrounge the background source photos while the script alpha and character art production is underway to get everything together at more or less the same time.
In other, but not completely unrelated news, we are currently trying to decide which platforms to support (obvious answer is the ones that Ren'py naturally supports). While we probably will not go as far as including toasters and C64, Suriko came up with this with the help of some groundwork laid by an anon on 4chan:
Saturday, March 1, 2008
BG CALL pt2
こんにちは～！
最近は沢山の人が私達のBG探しコールに手伝わせてもらった、そしてその中には色んな使える写真が出た、と言うか遣ってしまいました( °3°)。本当にありがとうございます。
けれどまた貴方達の力が必要なんです！
新しいリストが出た！
そう言えば、一ヶ月前の話なんですけど、新しいアーティストが来ましたよ。そして．．．なんと！四人の美術家です！このスレの下にいる絵（はなこちゃんの絵）はその四人の一人のアーティストの作品です。あいつらは始まったばかりですががんばってるみたいですね～！
ええ、んじゃ～ニュースの終わりです～
バイバイ～！
最近は沢山の人が私達のBG探しコールに手伝わせてもらった、そしてその中には色んな使える写真が出た、と言うか遣ってしまいました( °3°)。本当にありがとうございます。
けれどまた貴方達の力が必要なんです！
新しいリストが出た！
- 看護人の事務所。（この写真には窓は無い）
- 校門。イギリスの学校みたいなもの。（ゴシックリバイバル建築）
- 外回りの塀にいる金属製な戸口（戸口は緑色ならBONUS POINTを与える）
- 学生寮の分け取る風呂。（シャワーがいっぱいありうますとか）
- 舞台の着替え所。
- 美術部の物置。
- 校長の事務所。（窓はゴシックっぽいならBONUS POINTを与える）
そう言えば、一ヶ月前の話なんですけど、新しいアーティストが来ましたよ。そして．．．なんと！四人の美術家です！このスレの下にいる絵（はなこちゃんの絵）はその四人の一人のアーティストの作品です。あいつらは始まったばかりですががんばってるみたいですね～！
ええ、んじゃ～ニュースの終わりです～
バイバイ～！
Thursday, February 28, 2008
DD #18: Calling Alpha testers, new BG call, and introducing the art team
Hay everyone. TcDohl here. A jam-packed Developer's Diaries for you this time around with lots of news. Firstly, we are making an open call for alpha testers to test the flow and gameplay of the game. Here are the requirements for being an alpha tester:
Secondly, we had a good amount of response from our BG open call, and were able to choose a couple of them to use in the final game. However, we still need a lot more, so I'll be expanding the open BG call for the following locations:
Lastly, it's been a while now, but our art situation has gotten a lot better. The most recent development being our art team now having four members, and having a moemoe style. This is one CG that one of them has finished.
The art team are ambi07, silentkyon, ramoekki, and weeee. The CG shown above is by weeee.
The character sheet above is by silentkyon.
- Must not be a part of the current development team.
- Must not have read or have access to the development section of the boards.
- Must be able to give instant response to us about a bug, or any overall game problem that one may have.
- Must have a lot of free time to do lots of playthroughs.
- Must not leak the alpha version.
Secondly, we had a good amount of response from our BG open call, and were able to choose a couple of them to use in the final game. However, we still need a lot more, so I'll be expanding the open BG call for the following locations:
- School nurse's office. There must be no window in the picture.
- School gate. Must be a gate for an English public school or a private school that has Gothic Revival style architecture.
- A solid metal door on a perimeter wall. Bonus points if it is green.
- A shared dorm bathroom. Lots of showers and stuff.
- A dressing room for a stage.
- An art storage room.
- A headmaster/principal's office. Bonus points if the windows are Gothic-like.
Lastly, it's been a while now, but our art situation has gotten a lot better. The most recent development being our art team now having four members, and having a moemoe style. This is one CG that one of them has finished.
The art team are ambi07, silentkyon, ramoekki, and weeee. The CG shown above is by weeee.
The character sheet above is by silentkyon.
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