So hey, if you’re reading this then that means you found your way over here successfully! Neat. Given the woes we’ve had with Blogspot, coupled with the fact that it didn’t give us enough freedom to do the stuff we wanted to do, we ended up buying a domain name on Monday night. We’ve moved all of our old posts (comments included!) over here, so from this point on we will not be updating our Blogspot; please bookmark this page if you’re interested in following this project. Exciting! In terms of stuff that got done this week we got Doomish up to speed, finalized a few more characters, finalized some code and started remapping out some of our content given the change in writers. That coupled with the blog, I’d call it an overall productive week.

Oh, right. Since we spent 15 dollars on a domain name, we figure we may as well use it the best we can, so we’re also building a site. It’s more than a bit empty right now, but it’s definitely a thing that’s coming in the (perhaps nearby) future.

We’re slowly getting into the swing of things and are excited about recent events.  This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but our posting schedule is the same here as it was back on Blogspot: we’ll be posting stuff late Thursday nights/Friday evenings, just like we always have. WordPress also allows us to automatically update our Twitter when a post hits, so there’s always that if it suits you better.

See you next week!

As mentioned in our second post, Salty Tears had a very unusual start up.  After some careless comments and a joke taken a bit too seriously we went from nothing to an idea coupled with a full team in the course of 24 hours.  Given the horror stories I’ve heard about team development, I’m not only amazed but really thankful that we have the talented team we have and most have been able to stick with it given the head-spinning start we had.

THAT BEING SAID, it’s not hard to understand that people may have bitten off more than they could chew.  Due to this, it’s a shame to say that Mountaineer has left the team.  He’s a great guy and writer, but due to his schedule he had decided that he wouldn’t feasibly be able to put in enough time that was necessary to make ST the vn we want it to be.

With that out of the way, we went ahead and approached Doomish to be on the team to fill in Mount’s shoes.  He accepted, so we’ll be spending a bit of time bringing him up to speed and work should resume fairly quickly.  Naturally, he’ll be in charge of the Mekki route.

This sounds like a huge thing, and it really is, but in all honesty the delays this could (potentially) cause should be negligible at worst but most likely non-existent.  As usual, we’ll have another blog post up on Friday.

So, rather than make a simple list of things we got done this week, I figure it’d be easier all around if I just wrote this out like…an actual blog post.

So, first things first:  a couple team members were off getting ready for some other thing and another two were off at a couple of anime conventions.  As a result we ended up spending this week doing a little bit of busywork, including taking feedback from last week’s post into consideration to try and “fix” our CG style.

When making the jump to a new coloring style, our intention wasn’t BROWN AND BLOOM but rather to give them a hand-painted, watercolor-y feel.  It turns out that trying to do that with our vivid color palette made it look a bit too gaudy, so we threw some brown into the mix.  Too much brown, from the sounds of it.

So here’s our current version.  The brown has been toned down a bit and the colors have been made a bit more vivid.  In addition we lowered the opacity of the background colors (people, window, etc) so Mekki and Caprice wouldn’t have to compete with it to be the center of attention.  Let us know what you think of it!

Refer to the previous blog post for older versions

Past that?  Nothing much, really.  Thankfully the team is more or less back together now, so maybe next week we’ll have something for you!  Or not.  I don’t like making promises.

Oh right, we did get some background work done.

This has been one of our better weeks in recent memory.

-Act 1 schedule has been set in stone -Caprice outline drafted -Spritework has been done -Background work has made progress -We’ve been recoloring CGs in a new style that better reflects the art style.  We’re almost caught up with what we have done so far.

So tonight we’re going to cover two things:  the first retreading some old ground to make sure we’re on the same page, the second being some actual development progress.

First off:  we have a new page up.  Take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to read over it.

Right, so despite the fact that our art style was originally developed as a way to save time on production, I think I can clearly speak for everyone on our team that we all really enjoy the way it’s evolved.  There’s always been a small problem with our CGs, though:  All-Maker has a unique style that looks nice, but has problems fitting into the hand-made papercraft look we were going for.  After a good deal of trial and error, we decided the best way to address this was to make our cgs look like they had been water colored instead.  After some trial and error we got a result we were happy with.

->

This week’s post is going to be short and sweet.  Over the past week, all we’ve done is

-Finalized a sprite

-Set some deadlines

It’s been a busy week for a good chunk of the team, so we didn’t get all that much work done in regards to ST this week.  As a result, we decided to just show off our current UI for this week’s blog.  Some things have changed since the April Fools release, and we’re all-around very happy with the direction it’s taken.