OKAY, SO.  Second blog post.  That means you’re probably going to expect some actual…content, or something content-like in appearance.  So, let’s lay down some ground-rules on how this blog thing is going to go down.

1:  You should expect updates every Monday and Friday, even if it’s something minor like a little progress report

2:  We’ll try to have something new for you to look at every week, but given the size of this project (read: small as hell) if we end up posting too much we’ll end up spoiling everything.  In cases like this, we’ll just have some stuff that didn’t make it to the cutting room floor/ concepts or some story you probably won’t read.

Are we on the same level now?  Yes?  Awesome.  Let’s get this rolling with a list of what’s changed since last time (that you’re aware of, anyway):

-“Mehki” has received a slight name change to “Mekki” due to Mehki being a terrible name.

-The UI has started the process of being reworked.  The following images are early mock-ups of a couple different proposed designs.  Note that nothing is final.

So, given the odd nature and setting of this project, we figured we’d probably need to eventually explain how this project got off the ground.  Best to get this out of the way first, I think.

So, one night, twrlare was making quick sketches of how he saw people participating in the Capschat.  Soon enough, he posted this image up.

Okay, that’s cute and silly.  Everyone got a quick laugh at it and continued on.  Except they didn’t, because later in a night thread someone thought they’d be funny and color the picture in and post it in the thread.

This time the reaction was a tad different.  It was early-hours chat, meaning most of us were tired enough to take a comment like “Oh man, that’s adorable!  YOU KNOW WHAT, WE SHOULD MAKE OUR OWN VN WITH IT” seriously. 

So we did.  OPERATION CIRCLEJERK was formed, and we slowly began on our work.  We decided two things off the bat:  It would need to be something quick and easy, and it would act primarily as a parody.  Simple enough!  We contacted Mehkanik/ That Guy and Mountaineer from Crispybooks and asked if they wanted to help, and we got to work.

For our visual style, the idea came up of using paper cut-outs.  It fit the art-motif, was quick, and looked decent even if sloppily done.

Neat!  Simple and it works.  We twiddled our thumbs around with this idea for a bit, but then something happened.

We started CARING ABOUT QUALITY.

So, practically overnight everyone jumped on board and started pushing out some really great material.  In less than 24 hours we had Twrlare and Dubs working on drawing and coloring sprites, Djeezus working on music, Shades producing a CG, our plot outline taking shape thanks to our writebros, Wayfarer trying to learn everything there is to learn about the Ren’Py engine and Curchack doing pretty much anything and everything he decided he wanted to do (backgrounds, music, concepts, CAN’T STOP THE CURCHACK TRAIN).  On top of that, the team has actually managed to grow ever so slightly beyond these examples.  Even with this massive quality spike, we still decided to stick with our paper cut-out design, just because it still looked really nice and it’s a nice balance between talent and style.

So yeah, that’s where we are now.  With any luck we’ll have some proper media to show you next week.  Five days is plenty of time!  Probably.