Monthly Archives: July 2014

Back in Gear

Visual Novel development moved back into gear these past two weeks. We’ve made some good progress.

Fred burned through the art for scenes where Largo gets his Cool Thing, Piro tries to buy tickets back home, the night spent in the park, the morning burning down the computer store, the scene where Tsubasa first appears, and Largo breaking his arm (again). It all looks good and works well in the VN format. Here are a couple of screenshots:

TicketAgent

HiTsubasa

We have mentioned before about how Fred is drawing far more expression and character image changes than is typical in a Visual Novel. It’s a lot of work, but it fits the needs of the MegaTokyo story much better. In that same vein, Fred has Shad0w and I adding a quick mouth close/open at dialogue advancement points where a speaking character’s image doesn’t otherwise change. It makes it feel a little more natural and less static. The Visual Novel isn’t the MegaTokyo Anime we’d all like to see, but it’s as close as we are likely to get.

DarkMorford has been improving the shopping game for Piro and Largo’s trip to Akihabara. It’s looking good.

TheShaggyFreak has been working on the background music and sounds. He’ll be creating as much as he can himself, and using creative commons stuff for the rest. A lot of the work is in just editing things so that the music loops well. Shaggy has been posting some examples in the beta tester section of the VN forum. If you are registered as a beta tester, go check them out.

This was a good couple of weeks overall for the VN. If we can manage to sustain this kind of pace, we’ll all feel a lot better and have a finished game that much sooner.

More Slowness

It has been another slow couple of weeks for work on the MegaTokyo Visual Novel. Fred’s mother continued to struggle with her health, and that understandably took time away from both the comic and visual novel.  It sounds like things are looking up, so we’re hopeful that VN work will be back in gear again soon.

One positive thing that did happen recently was that we have officially moved to Shad0w’s Renpedit tool for the visual novel script development. It provides a nice flowchart style organizer for the script, and makes managing the numerous story branches much easier.

Below you can see a short section of the Piro route when he and Largo are on the plane to Japan. The white blocks are sections of story script, the yellow diamond is a player decision, and the blue blocks are variables that will have effects later on in the story. You can see this section in action in the demo Fred posted to youtube: http://youtu.be/hAxZyyUJY60?t=9m10s

Renpedit

Shad0w is still actively improving Renpedit, but it is far enough along that we are using now for the MTVN development. If you are interested, you can find it here: https://bitbucket.org/theshad0w/renpedit