Day 1 is here, and what a way to start it! After last night’s completely normal night, I woke up with a massive headache, a bad throat, and a very bad stomach. Not how I wanted this to start, but better now than later I suppose~
Health complaints aside, let’s get into some progress! This’ll mostly be personal stuff because I’m the one doing the updates, but there’ll be details about the rest of the team in future posts~
To start with the least impressive stuff, we’ve got a base line-art done for the first Vivienne sprite! She has two poses (arms crossed and arms on hips) but I haven’t done any expressions yet. Kinda hard to focus on drawing with a headache~
Continuing on, we have a logo. I actually quickly got this out when the clock hit midnight, so it already feels like a long-ago task. Back in the age before the flu struck! Like all good logos, there’s a light version and a dark version. Unlike all good logos, it’s designed by someone who sucks at logo making! (me)
The weird triangle thing in the background is rather emblematic. In a literal sense, it is the emblem of the school, and in a more metaphorical sense, it represents the act of passing through the academy’s gates. At the very least, there’s some meaning to be had.
Onto the next thing… It’s a song! I wanted to make a track that felt a bit dreamy, like a flashback sequence almost. I also wanted it to be something that could fit in as an intro track. You’ll probably hear what I mean if you give it a listen…
Finally, we have an aesthetic test of what the game might look like. It makes use of a temp-background we created during February as part of our “make BG art without a BG artist” initiative. If you’re interested in that by the way, let me know~ I’d be happy to explain the process!
This aesthetic test also has a WIP UI that’s incredibly incomplete… But it’s a good enough representation to act as a source of inspiration for our many creatives.
That girl you see there is one of the heroines, Alyssa. Her sprite is still a bit incomplete and needs some tweaking (especially the uniform) but she already has one outfit, a bunch of expressions, and a couple different arm positions…
Compared to the outfit insanity I had to go through for last year’s project, this sprite was pretty comfortable to make. I was planning to stream the creation, but the coughing was too annoying. Hopefully I’ll wake up fully cured (as if!) and I’ll be able to stream the Vivienne sprite. Or maybe even a second set of Alyssa sprites~
Actually, while I’m sharing stuff, I may as well show some of the color configs I had for her. See, we concepted the design of a bunch of characters beforehand, however we did it all in black and white… So I just had to entertain my own favorite color combinations…
Ultimately, with the background style we have figured out, the earthy color palettes seemed like a better fit… And also the pink and blonde are totally out-of-character in my opinion. She’s the precious unnoticed normie-chan, she can’t have an eye-catching pink or bright blonde, y’know?
Matching the characters is probably the most important thing. Hmm… I’m starting to realize, the heroines are pretty unexplained right now. It’s early stages in this series of updates, but the heroines are the big draw, so at the very least I should give them some lip service…
To start with, there are three of them. Why three exactly?
A route-focused romance game needs multiple routes, and since we’re going with the typical heroine system we need heroines to match each route. Having 2 heroines is too little because the characters will end up being directly comparable as opposites. 3 is the perfect balancing tool, like rock paper scissors. By adding a single extra heroine you massively increase the amount of thought that an audience can put into the main cast. I call it the jan-ken approach~
Erinna Academy was a place of pride for the upper class—until the start of the VN—so it makes sense that at least one of the heroines is a stiff upper class kinda gal. Following from that obvious bit of logic, the following heroines should get progressively less upper class, to boost the diversity and make the girls starkly different from one another. The second girl is on the lower end of the upper class (and is rather casual in behavior) while the third girl has an outside perspective on it all.
That gives us our three personalities:
The OHOHOHO
The Normal
The Delinquent
The next important thing to do is to define their goals. Classic broadway scriptwriting, and therefore classic Disney writing, and therefore classic anime writing, and therefore classic VN writing (that’s a big chain) dictates that the first big explosion of story should be the heroine’s motivation speech. It’s the scene where the main girl of the story states her goals and ambitions. This means that the character’s goals become the core aspect of their narrative, and that means it’s the most important foundational element to establish.
The Ohohoho’s obvious goal would be to bring the school back to prosperity… But maybe the solution is to come to terms with the less than ideal state of reality. Maybe, in reality, she needs to open her eyes to the world beyond.
The Normal’s goal is usually one of two things: maintain the normalities, or lament the inadequacies seen when comparing herself to one of the richer girls. Whether they want the endless everyday or they want to be better than average, the Normal is normally the comfy option for a less conflict-involved romance.
The Delinquent’s goal is probably the most stereotypical in a VN space: escape the environment. This could be via destroying the environment, or by destroying herself. Or maybe she just wants to run away… Here’s where you could easily insert the “fix the bad boy/girl” trope, but I’m not a fan of that, so maybe it’d be fun to go a more engaging route. She could be a great avenue to explore the upper class from a perspective different from the other two girls’.
All that being said… These thoughts may not be what comes through in the final product. Although I came up with the main scenario and the types of characters involved, they have long since been in the hands of our three route writers. Each writer has taken a basic character outline and transformed them into unique and original heroines.
Both yesterday and today were long days of planning for our route writers. We’ve been working on a method of goal-posting the moment-to-moment in our individual routes while simultaneously tying everything together into a solid timeline of events. It’s still a work in progress, and the days of planning will continue for a bit, but I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about in regard to our process…
Until then, thanks for reading!
Kyacchi22 