Drawing of Wendy laying down

This year I've been trying to draw something every week.

Although it's been a rough beginning of the year 

with moving and an extremely cold winter temperature, 

I've been able to keep my word so far.

 Although sometimes
I have a tough time thinking up of what to draw.

Helena Plays Badminton

I saw a bunch of kids playing badminton and wondered
how the characters would handle light sports.

Helena is always calm and in control.

Dark haired male & SD Sarah

A new freebie sprite for Novelty users.
This sprite can be downloaded here:
http://www.visualnovelty.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&p=4581#p4581

Also:

Soon to be wandering around a desktop near you.

Confessions - Considerations

    oo Even though I had set out to create a vnovel a few years ago, I am still pretty dreadful when it comes to the writing department. It really isn't that I cannot write well or that I have nothing to write, but it's that in sharp contrast to how efficiently I can draw, my writing is quite inefficient. Every story I start I restart at least a dozen times, and even then I'm left questioning whether or not that start is good enough. I think "maybe the plot needs to start earlier in the storyline than this" or "maybe I should just jump to the interesting parts of the story" and after hours and days of burning myself out thinking one of those two over and over, I just go back to drawing.. Heh.

    I think I would had become a fairly decent writer who is able to only include the things that are important to a story if I hadn't moved around so much, but I guess I sort of missed my window to learn the skills necessary to write well, so now I'm struggling to learn those skills the hard way using my frustratingly-hardened adult brain. At one point I did sort things that happened around me by the categories "interesting/funny" and "boring stuff" but these days I sort information by "important/money related" and "unimportant/not money related". Ever since that change has happened in my mind it's been super tough to write any stories because I feel urged to inject every story with an annoying amount of reality.

    I think for Sa'ee it doesn't need as much reality as I try to force it to have. While writing the stories I end up drawing entire town maps about what is where or family trees of every character, but I have a strong feeling that that kind of stuff is not useful for writing: it's just another way to escape writing. Or is it? Does the whole fiction world and reality factor need to be determined before a story can be written?

    One of the biggest problems I have with Sa'ee is that the setting for it and the audience are alien to each other. The game is basically based on late 90s Korea, while practically the entire audience is English speaking Americans. I can deal with the English-speaking part by writing the game in English and by giving the characters English names, but the alien school system and lack of issues important to teenaged Americans (pregnancy, driving, malls, jocks, braces, prom) is probably a little off-putting to a majority of the audience. I don't want folks who play this game to feel like the game is foreign and alien to them, but I don't want to make it so American that it is alien and foreign to me in return.

Which then leads me to wonder if I should just make this entire game in Korean, or if the game would still be significant if it was in Korean. I don't have strong desires to expand into the Korean vnovel field (what with it being practically nonexistent, after all, despite the fact that all the skills necessary to make a successful game are abundant) or to gain/find Korean-speaking fans. But as for the second part...

The game, as it is, loses a lot of its significance if I write it in Korean. Korea has lots of girls-only or boys-only public schools, and those schools converting to co-ed aren't all that uncommon either. The subject has probably been touched upon several dozen times in all kinds of media. But I don't think that significance of the game in the Korean culture necessarily means significance in American culture either. Even if the game was successful in Korean, it could be pretty uninteresting in English for Americans because each culture has its own thing that it finds interesting. I've designed the game assuming that the audience would be English-speaking Americans, so I don't think changing the entire language at this point would do any good. In fact, it's just another way to start over.

So... yes, lots of thoughts going through my mind, and very little writing getting done.
Even though I'm behind in writing, I will probably still draw&stream Tuesday, 7-9PM EST: http://www.livestream.com/skims


Happy Fall-back-one-hour Day, everyone.

Two more sprites for all!

Gah I finally fixed Sarah's face so that her face doesn't look like it's one foot wide.

I feel like I cheated by using hair to cover up the problem, but it's probably good enough that I know not to make such wide cheeks/jaw the next time I draw her.

Oh Helena, why are you so pretty?

And why do you smell a bit like a Mary Sue?

Hmmmmmm.

    Tomorrow I will draw Wendy (hopefully I won't be too stressed out from work to draw -_-) and all 12 characters will be done! I've gotta hurry up and organize a clothe-me contest or something so they don't stay naked all winter... mumblemumble.

    Many of these sprites are available for free use in your own games or other graphic needs here:

    The ones up there are optimized to be cropped, edited (clothe them before use!) and used in a game at a 800x600 resolution. Why 800x600? :3 Because 1024x768 games do not fit on my Netbook's 1024x600 screen, that's why.

Various programs

    Hello Everyone!

    It may have seemed like I may had went off to play SC2 night and day again, but it's not true! I have done some things this past week + one day. 

Checked out a bunch of software:

All this checking out other software feels like reinventing the wheel, it was interesting to see the working environment of the games created in these environments.

Live Maker: http://www.livemaker.net/

It is the most popular choice these days 

in the Japanese scene for creating a visual novel.

It is pretty easy to use. Even a dunderhead such as myself

was able to make some stuff appear on the screen in a mere 15 minutes 

by following the (pretty explanatory but in Japanese) tutorials.

Yep, here be graphics and text.

I didn't resize anything, so things are kind of floating and cut off.

(but easily fixable in your favorite image editing software)

The left side is a graphic organizer for the game.
The blue box is one of the nodes from the visual organized being edited.
On the bottom left you can see the program can also update itself.

I like the idea of a visual organizer,
but unfortunately it's unable to display text in any way other than full width.
Ｆｏｒ　ｔｈｉｓ　ｒｅａｓｏｎ，　Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ　ｌｏｏｋｓ　ｒｅａｌｌｙ　ｗｅｉｒｄ　ｉｎ　ＬｉｖｅＭａｋｅｒ．
It also cannot display any graphics other than it's own GaleGraphics format.
(PNG, JPG, GIF, and BMP can be converted into .GAL
using a second program included in the distribution of LiveMaker)

CatSystem2: http://cs2.suki.jp/

It looks promising, but I'm still in the process
of reading the (rather extensive) manual.

Lanovee: http://lanovee.e-frontier.co.jp/

Looks promising, right??

    Lanovee's special feature is that it offers a TTS (text to speech) engine called "moe voice system", which will read the lines said by a female character to the gamer so that the game maker doesn't need to recruit voice actors to voice act the script..

Yes, kind of like Hatsune Miku.

o_o hey, wait a second, I'm pretty sure I had the same idea several years ago of using TTS instead of voice actors. I was probably not the first one to think of it, but it's nice to see a vnovel maker that uses TTS.

I downloaded the demo and tried it out, but the demo was failing to work left and right (I think it was a locality issue, so hopefully it can be fixed), and it did not match what was shown in the tutorial video.

Oh yeah, and it's 9800 yen retail. (That's about $100USD)

Comic Maker: http://www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~mix/comicmaker.htm

 

The "Visual Novel Making for Dummies" program of Japan.

Indeed the interface is (probably too) simple, 

 

but it's also tough to figure out how to do some basic things, 

such as displaying text in the actual text box

instead of somewhere at the top left.

 (believe it or not, it took almost 2 hours to get this far. OTL)

LemoNovel: http://www.le-mo.jp/lemo/products/LemoNovel/

This is probably the easiest visual novel tool out there.

The scripting language is unbelievably simple,

and it accepts all sorts of graphics and sound formats, 

...except PNGs :( it doesn't support alpha channel graphics.

The downside (or upside?) is that the resulting published game is a flash game.

Novelty: http://visualnovelty.com/

Been checking this software out for years.

I don't think I really need to write anymore about this software, 

since it is in English and you can check it out yourself ;)

Adventure Game Studio: http://www.bigbluecup.com/

 Since all visual novels are adventure games,
I thought I would check out the adventure game scene.
While I love the games produced using AGS,
I'm not totally convinced this is what I'm looking for.
Pro: It was super easy to make a walking character and to make an image map. Also the community was the most friendliest, funnniest, and helpful bunch I have ever met on the internet.
Con: No non-alphabet character support. 漢字は禁物。

November production schedule and more plot brainstorming:

The plot is like a gigantic tangled ball of yarn, and storytelling is untangling that mess.

    I didn't want to say anything until I had something concrete (=playable game) to show, but there is a plan right now to get something out by mid November. That is, assuming I don't move any time soon. I've been anticipating to move since August, so it's a little tough to settle down and begin to work on something. Hopefully I'll move soon so that I can settle down and really focus. At this rate, I might have to unpack a few things that I've already packed up in anticipation of moving. Oh, how I miss my watercolors!

Freemind Mindmap of the Plot Outline

This visual organizer radiates out from the center.
 

The nodes for Sarah's and Judy's branch were added to the freemind plot outline tonight. With this, now Sarah, Felicia ("Fifi") and Judy's paths are very developed (almost done), while Peter, Wendy, Alexis, and Owen still need more work. The other characters haven't been worked on very much, but I have an idea as to what I want them to do.

I hope this week I'll see a lot of progress in Helena and Max.

They are the two least explored characters.

Sarah in a gym shirt.

I've been pretty mentally fatigued lately, 

but hopefully tomorrow I'll snap out of it and get back to being productive...

Sarah's Arc Complete!

Finished Sarah's Story.

It's a little depressing (seems like half of the endings end with someone's death!)

but I didn't want her story to become too unrealistic / farfetched.

As much as we want unfortunate characters to find happiness, 

sometimes they're just doomed from the start.

Drawing more characters and making templates.

When I became stuck with writing and planning, I decided to draw until I knew what to do next instead of unproductively waiting for the next step to come to mind.

I've never actually drawn all of the characters from head to toe,
so if I draw the remaining four it'll kind of be a new accomplishment.

Bigger versions of these drawings can be found here:
http://skimlines.deviantart.com/gallery/#The-Garden

And after I draw all of them, I'll either:
A. Go back to writing
B. Make additional emotions or clothes

Drawing the Gents

Yesterday evening, I spent time drawing the guys of the game:
 

(Actually, one of my rules for distributing these sprites online
is that when they are used that they should be clothed.
I guess I'm breaking my own rules.. heh) 

    I'll probably be drawing a little tonight as well.
Maybe it'll even be streamed!

http://www.livestream.com/skims