First, a quick note:  we have an embed of our IRC channel on the blog now.  You can access it by clicking the IRC tab in the menu bar.  Alternatively, you can click here.

This week’s update is pretty simple.  As is the norm, we’ve been sitting in the back corner, doing our private little thing and sharing scraps of information.  While we continue working on this and that, we thought it was time to share a bit of music.

Qwheeler has been a real help. We’ve asked more from him than we have any right to, but he’s pushed out a ton of samples and experiments. Everyone on the team is really picky when it comes to music, so he’s been churning out experiment after experiment in hopes of nailing down a sound that really works for ST. This is one of the newer ones. We’ll have a longer blog post about our music process later with an actual, finished piece but for now take a listen to this and let us know what you think!

This week’s progress has gone pretty par-the-course, scenes are getting written up, sprites are being produced, CGs and music are constantly being worked on.  All fairly standard stuff, and nothing we can actually show.  Rather, we’re going to backpedal a bit and show something we’ve been sitting on for a little while.

We have two characters with unique speech patterns.  Working with our writers, we’ve come up with a couple of text effects to accommodate them.  Oliver isn’t the world’s greatest public speaker, and we didn’t want to overly rely on s-s-stuttering.  Our solution was  to implement a gradient system that would allow us to manipulate a text’s opacity.

 It’s not limited to just fading-out text, though.  We can fade-in, fade-out, start the fade at a specific point in the writing, or even just set a flat opacity for the entire thing.

The second was built with Caprice in mind.  She has a habit of getting louder

and LOUDER

and LOUDER

as she talks.  This was addressed by taking the previous gradient system and applying it to font size instead.

In both opacity and font size, the minimum and maximum values can be set and customized for each occasion.  We’ve been making sure neither turn out to be an annoyance in the script thus far.  We’re happy with the results, but we don’t intend to overuse them.

Oh, also.

This week was a pretty productive one on the writing side.  Both of our dedicated writers got to working and produced/ edited/ reworked several thousand words of content for us to sift through.  On top of that, our UI is finally more or less complete, sans a few things like adding information to save files.

We intend to show writing in some shape or form soon-ish, we just need to figure out the appropriate way to make that happen without throwing a portion of the script in your lap.  There’s a few different options we’re considering but nothing really concrete yet.  Our writers are anxious to get something out as well, so hopefully we’ll have something to present sooner rather than later.

Last week I noted that we had made some real progress but couldn’t show it off yet. Well now I can show it off! Apart from writing, music, coding, etc, this is what we’ve been tinkering with for a little while.

Caprice and Mekki were first designed when ST was just getting off the ground; hell, Caprice was designed before the project even EXISTED. We thought the matching outfits were cute for the small project it was going to be and stuck with that.

As time went on, the project grew up a bit, future character designs got a little more detailed, and suddenly two of the primary characters seemed sort of flat (in the design sense, not the Caprice sense) and dull compared to the rest of our cast. So we got to work. Given the odd decision to redesign the two primary interests four months into production, there was actually quite a bit of thought put into their new appearances, so I’m going to talk your ear off a bit and run through everything step by step~

** There were a few goals in mind when deciding to rework these characters:** -This would be a pure clothing change. Caprice and Mekki’s faces are “out there” already, so it would do more harm than good to change anything but their attire. -The opposites thing would still need to factor in. The red/ blue contrast was an obvious thing that needed to stay. Their current clothing was supposed to reflect a formal vs casual mood, it’d be ideal to simply amplify that -There is a huge need to separate the two visually. Their current attire is pretty similar to each other, not unlike a school uniform. This doesn’t make sense given our setting. Mekki would be thrown in a severe formal direction while Caprice’s attire would look more casual. -Remaking art assets. These designs should be different enough to bring variety to either character, but should also be easy for our artists to “patch” into current art assets. It’d be a waste of time and resources if we had to redraw entire CGs for the sake of this.

A lot of orders to fill, so brainstorming started not long after. First off: Mekki.

The new attire of either girl had the goal of reflecting the character’s personality. We went after Mekki first as her old design already fit her pretty well, so only miniscule changes would be necessary. The original plan was to have Caprice and Mekki’s designs mirror each other again, so we stuck Caprice in a hood (more on Caprice below) and Mekki in a sweater. Another point came up not long after, though. Namely “if we’re redesigning them to look different, why are we trying to group them together again?” OKAY THEN. A waistcoat was suggested given the formal air they tend to give, so we tried that. Sorta kinda almost there. At this point, all that was left was to play with it a tiny bit to make it look a little more feminine. Waistcoat was shortened, added cufflinks FOR KICKS. At this point everyone seemed to be more or less happy with the result, and so her design was finalized.

SO, Caprice. Caprice wasn’t going to be nearly as simple. She’s active, jumpy, and has a light tomboyish air about her. In other words a dress vst probably wasn’t the best choice, let alone a skirt.

The first thing to go was the skirt; given how her personality evolved over development time, it just didn’t seem like a proper fit anymore. That being said, finding a suitable replacement was probably the easiest decision in this entire redesign fiasco: _ “Okay, so no more skirt.”_ _ “Yeah.”_ _ “So what, pants?”_ _ “Yeah.”_ _ “Okay then, what kind of pants?”_ _ “Capris.”_ _ “Because it sorta sounds like her name.”_ _ “Yeah.”_ _ “SHIP IT.”_

__ Giving her pants also served a second purpose. Everyone on the dev team loved Caprice’s mismatched socks. The problem with them is that it caused her design to be asymmetrical, so whenever her sprite was flipped one of her socks would magically fix itself. By giving her capris, we were able to find an excuse to shrink the socks a bit. They’re still uneven, they just won’t be visible in sprites anymore.

Her new top was a little more tricky. As stated before, these edits would have to be fairly minor to easily make changes to our existing assets. To ensure this would be the issue, any changes were drawn directly over an existing sprite to compare differences. What we came up with is the sleeveless hoodie design. It seems like a pretty major change, but what it essentially boils down to is replacing her collar with a hood and smoothing out the bottom into a straight line. This allows for a fairly significant looking redesign while keeping the amount of work needed in regards to sprites/ cg retouching very minimal. So that’s where we are now! Sorry for the HUGE WALL OF TEXT but hopefully you found it interesting, or at least a bit informative.

I-ITS NOT LIKE OUR ARTISTS WANTED TO DRAW SUGGESTIVE THINGS FOR YOU OR ANYTHING, B-BAKAS 

Okay, so admittedly this week’s post will be rather skimpy; just a small progress report about the minor things we got done over the past few days.

All-around it’s been an overall productive, if not quiet, week.  Our writers have been finalizing things that are loooooooong overdue and have been spending time writing up character practices to get a better grasp of how the characters react and play off each other before really getting too involved in the actual script.

On the art side of things we’ve gotten a good amount of work done in terms of nailing down some designs.  None of which we can show due to spoilers and secrets and whatnot.

Music has had a rough road.  Qwheeler’s had some internet troubles but has been uploading a good amount of music and has been taking team feedback.  He hopes to have his issues solved in a week or two, but from what he’s been able to upload thus far we’re very pleased with the effort and thought he’s been putting into his music.

Coding is a little bit of a mess.  We have a few small but very annoying bugs that refuse to be properly squashed, but past that there isn’t really much to report.

So yeah, sorry about this week being a little dull.  We’ve definitely made some progress this week, but nothing we can really show off yet.  Hopefully we’ll have something a little more interesting next Friday.