Since our last blog post we’ve been doing some talking about how we want to handle the future of WiP and what we want to do from here. Initially we promised that we’d be releasing a new version of the demo with some minor, easily adjusted fixes. We changed our mind. Instead, we’re opting to release a second demo altogether, this time encompassing the entirety of act 1 instead of just the first half of it.

We’ll be taking all of the feedback we’ve seen into consideration and we’ll be changing a lot of elements from the demo portion you’ve seen thus far in regards to writing, art, etc. Large scale feedback is important to the iterative process, and we figured the best way to get another round of that would be to work on improving the elements we already have as well as giving you another large chunk of the VN to read.

It’s going to take a while; we have a lot of feedback to work with and another half of an act to create. The bright side is that since we’ve already given you the demo, we don’t have to be as secretive with what we’re doing for the time being. Expect to see more frequent updates from us both here and on our Twitter account about what we’re doing, fixing, adjusting and so on. We’re also currently looking at moving away from Ren’Py for the second demo, and have been working on some means to this. We don’t have anything ready for production usage yet though. Expect some more information about this LATER.

Finally, we’ve gotten a lot of editor submissions after the release of the demo. We’ve gone through a ton of submissions and think we’ve found someone who is really capable of doing a great job. We don’t want to namedrop them until we can confirm it with them first, but we were really happy with their sample.

So in case you somehow missed it, the demo has been released and is available here. Go ahead and download it if you haven’t already! The soundtrack is also available for download, available here.

For those of you who did, thank you for the feedback. We’re definitely looking at everything and will use it to try and make the final VN shine. We plan to release an update soon-ish that’ll fix the (reported/ones we know about) typos, grammar errors and easily amended things in the art and directing. We obviously can’t quickly find solutions to the large-scale issues but we should be able to tidy up what we have a little bit in a short period.

On the release date of the demo, we said we’d be releasing the source code for the VN in three days. We’ve decided to push that up to today. Get it here.

The past couple of days have been exciting, busy and a little terrifying. Thank you for your numerous comments and criticisms, we’ll try our best to make the finished product the best that we can make it.

Our assets are complete, and we’re now officially in the final-final-final stretch. We’re going to be going over some assets once more, redo some of our UI to be a bit less blurry and outdated, run one final round of beta feedback and prepare for release. We had a bit of a hiccup in progress this month – we were unsure of how we wanted to present scene 20 in the demo so we brainstormed a lot of drafts and ideas and it took us a while to get a solution that worked. That’s out of the way now, so progress should be brisk and we should definitely be finished soon!

On the subject of an ETA, we aren’t keen on releasing any kind of solid date, simply because as soon as we put it out there we’re all but guaranteed to miss it. Rather, we’re holding off on committing to a date until we’re absolutely positive we’ll hit it. We’ll announce the release date on our Twitter account somewhere in the realm of “soon”, so we recommend following that!

Hopefully this’ll be the last blog post you see from us before the demo release. We’ll leave you with a couple things:

First - We’ll be releasing the demo’s soundtrack alongside the demo itself. It has 19 tracks and has over 40 minutes of music.

Second - Some statistics:

• As stated before, the demo contains a total of 19 music tracks.
• The demo contains 2,073 dialogue blocks, containing 31,858 words consisting of 168,310 characters, for an average of 15.4 words and 81 characters per block.
• The demo contains a total of 40 backgrounds.
• The demo contains a total of 13 CGs.
• The demo contains a total of 333 sprites.
• The demo consists of 6775 lines of code.

See you soon!

We’re wrapping up asset creation now. Scene 20 is going to take a bit of effort to get right since we are trying out some fancy directing stuff, so we’re working on finishing scenes 1-19 right now. We’re almost there! We’re at the point where we can count how many things are left to create on one hand, so that’s something. After we get to 100% all that’ll be left to do is general polish to make sure everything’s perfect and coloring some sprites/ cgs. We’ll go into more detail once we actually hit that milestone. It shouldn’t be too long now.

Time for our beta update! You’ll notice there’s no bar chart this week, and that’s because we’ve gotten a significant piece of feedback from numerous testers that we want to take some time to properly address, so the demo is officially on hold until we get it done.

So, what’s changing? A common problem we got in our feedback is that people found WiP’s setting (Salt Lake City) hard to settle into. Numerous testers stated that they either couldn’t wrap their head around some of the American customs, or that they were from different parts of the country and their experiences in America clashed with their own. This has proven really problematic to find a solution for, since just moving it to another city or state would just keep causing confusion.

After much deliberating, we’ve come to the following solution: We’ll be spending a few weeks going over the writing and changing the setting to a Japanese high school and updating the character names to match. We figured this would be the best way to maintain immersion, regardless of where the reader lives, due to the fact that our audience is most likely familiar with visual novels set in Japan from playing critically acclaimed VNs like Katawa Shoujo. We’re hoping this change drastically reduces the problems we’ve had with our American setting.

In the past few days, we’ve already established our school’s uniform and a few character names: Caprice is now Hatsu Shifuto and Mekki is now Marisu Kawai.

We hope you’re as excited as we are about this change, we’ll have more info about this soon! さようなら!