Monday, January 21, 2008

Developer's Diaries 14 : Electric Boogaloo

It's been a while since the last 'official' DD. But what's happened apart from the large influx of preliminary art? A few things. Firstly, we've got a new background artist, Climatic (if you'd like to give him a hand, give us a shout). Also, we've gone over the 150k words mark, and we're still going on strong. As we are right now, we have finished Act 1 of the game, and we're just awaiting the art. Our character artist is working diligently and silently to fix this. As is our new background artist. The last piece of Act 1 was in my opinion, the best ever written BAD END in VN history. It is about 2k words, and is full of awesomeness. Also, Kenji's ravings in this BAD END makes him probably one of the most interesting male VN side characters.

Now to the other part of the DD. Take a look at these statistics of 2000 machine-run paths through the game.

Looking at this, you may be thinking "HEY, THIS GAME LOOKS TOO DAMN HARD". Actually, this is done by machine so it's just making random choices so I wouldn't be surprised that there would be so many BAD ENDs. This game is set up such that if you keep hitting the right "buttons" for one character, then you should be able to get on that character's path. If you stray too far towards other characters, you'll get the BAD END. We've done this because the original image said that gigolo play is not allowed.

One more thing, if you're interested in making fanart for the game, it might actually make it into the game in the form of extras, act headers, etc. Go to the forums to post your fanart!