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Serra WIP 2 by SelLi on Sketchfab
Hello, everyone. I've chosen the video game direction, once again, and have been working on a 3D model of Serra for the last two days. The video game will probably use Unreal Engine 4, but may use Unity, Blender's game engine, or some other game engine. This complete game will quite likely not be free.
Thank you all, once again: I have problems with being decisive and have been producing this project for years. I thank all who've ever followed this blog or this project's development in general. Cheers. See y'all next time. :) Hello everybody and happy Easter. ^_^
I don't have much to share, but I thought I'd let you know some of my thoughts, how I am, what's been going on. When I was posting in March I was talking about making the story linear and changing the format to a very basic one of text on the left and character portraits on the right. I showed two portraits that I'd done and also talked about being less ambitious with the amount of song's I'll do, later. I still think that having the story be linear is a good idea. I have been writing it lately and things have been going well. As I write and grow I get better at writing in general and I understand more where I'm going with the story and what I'm doing, what's important to have, and what doesn't really need to be there. As I'm writing now, things are going in a slightly different direction than when I was writing in the past, but I do feel that I know more what I'm doing and where I'm going, presently. Lately I've been experimenting with painting, as you know, and there is something very pleasant about making art in a more tangible way. As you may have noticed, though, the two paintings I've shown you so far have been warped. I've heard from my mom who's a talented artist, that the paper I'm using is quite thin and will warp like that when I paint on it. She's given me new, thicker art paper and says that if I lay it flat and tape it to my art-table/art-board, my future paintings won't be warped once they dry. She also had a few 9"/12" canvases left over from one of the art-classes she taught, and she let me have them. Apparently they're each really cheap! She gave, like, 11! Lately I've been making a loose, abstract painting that's not connected to The Silent Column for fun and to enjoy and get used to the medium of paint. Also, lately I've been making a few sculptures: one as a commission for a friend and one for myself, the former being made out of Sculpey and the latter being made out of natural clay. It felt very nice making a sculpture out of something as natural as clay and it was also nice to do my best to make the entirety of the sculptures as one piece without breaking off and re-attaching pieces. Apparently when you make an entire sculpture out of nearly an entire 10-pound brick of clay, it takes quite a while to air-dry, and with some parts being different thicknesses there was some cracking and such, but still, it's nice sculpting like this, and I think after a week of drying, it's quite dry. I've mainly just been making art, writing, and wondering what I'm going to do with the art in The Silent Column. I can just continue making portraits as I have been, but in a way that doesn't warp. If I did so, I'd want to redo the two paintings I already have finished, which would take some time but I wouldn't mind doing. On the other hand, The Metal Angel only took about three hours when I was drawing with a timer, the speed of which is appealing to me. If I were to use the three hour method and try to produce somewhere between three and five pieces a week, I could perhaps just have the visual novel that only consist of CGs unique to each situation, which would be more interesting to look at than just a few character portraits, would help me build a nice portfolio of work, and would help me improve as an artist just due to the speed and repetition of creating art. Perhaps I can do the three hour, all CG idea with paintings, but I would have to keep in mind needing to pick up physical materials and the fact that things need to dry before I can paint over top of them and such, which takes time out of the three hours. Hmm... As for the music part of what I said, I haven't given it much thought. I think I should just focus on what's in front of me instead of speculating about stuff that might be on/over the horizon. Thanks for listening to my thoughts and being patient. I'll see you next time. :) Serra portrait. Physically painted with acrylic paint and drawn on with markers. Colours enhanced in Gimp. I like how it turned out and I hope you enjoy. :)
Hello, everyone. :) I'm going to have The Silent Column just be linear, now. Not really to lessen the workload on myself: I'm going to essentially be merging the individual routes into one, so the core things that happen in all the routes will still happen. In the cases where I have to chose between two options, I just choose the one I feel is the best and lose whatever's less important, or try to keep the best elements of both: If a route had a light go green on Wednesday and another route had a light go red on Tuesday, if I really liked the green light but really liked Tuesday, I would just merge things so that the green light would go off on Tuesday, instead, losing some less important things in the process. The reason I'm merging things like this is so that if I ever want to release The Silent Column as a novel(s) before or after the visual novel(s) release(s), I can just take all the text and make it a book without much trouble. Also, merging things helps me put everything together into one stronger and/or longer story rather than several weaker and/or shorter ones. I know that putting a bunch of elements into one pot doesn't automatically make things stronger and can make things less focused- and doing this may result in the story being less focused- but I think the good will outweigh the bad, and I think that merging things together will lead to interesting situations that I wouldn't get to write, otherwise. In addition to all this, something I am going to do to lessen the workload on myself because I like the style, it's less work, and I would like to realistically be able to show you a finished product eventually, is change from the traditional visual novel look of sprites that change emotions against a background that changes before the player gets to see an occasional CG, to a simple look of text being on the left of the screen, character portraits that don't change emotion being displayed one at a time on the right of the screen, and very occasional CGs that fill all of the screen when they come up. I've made a mockup for you all which includes a nicely sized writing snippet: I don't want the character portraits to feature extremely close-up pictures of the characters they're meant to depict- that picture of Amy is just the newest character piece I have, so that's what I used in the mockup. The length of the character portraits reminds me of Clow Cards from Cardcaptor Sakura: And of Art Nouveau pieces: I'm wanting each character portrait to look something akin to those while also having a style of their own, and I want the VN to have a "looking through an old book" sort of feel to it.
I'm only going to be doing 10 CGs for this act and I might not make character portraits for all of the characters, just the more important ones. As for the music part of the project, I'm thinking of just having between 3 and 5 songs for this- and perhaps the next- act. I know that switching things like this might not be for everyone but I feel that it lets the reader focus more on the text, lets the reader use their imagination more, lets me put my time into making a few beautiful pieces of art instead of worrying about how many pieces I have to do, creates a nice style that I and some others may like, and lets me focus on nothing but the writing and few songs after finishing the few art assets. I do empathize with people not playing The Silent Column because of this switch, though. :) I don't yet know how to code this change but people at Lemmasoft Forums are very kind, helpful, and have helped me with my coding troubles before, and I'll likely be able to find something in Ren'Py's documentation to help me out, as well. I'll see you later. :) Hello everybody. Sorry for the lack of updates lately: I've been sick recently and my mind has been all over the place. I wrote earlier today, though, so that's good. :) And I'm also better from my sickness, now. ^_^ I wanted to let everyone know that I'm alive and am still working on The Silent Column. I also wanted to let everyone who was wondering what happened to the OST I was uploading on my YouTube channel that I deleted them because I didn't see them as professional enough to end up in the game. I'm sorry for not letting you all know that, sooner... I should let you know what's happening to large pieces of content that just go missing. I was also thinking about changing act 1's structure from the complex: To the simple: A lot of the events that were being chosen between in the earlier structure can just happen one after the other without losing much, and everything can slide farther apart or closer together without any real issue, so I think I'll just go with this new, simple structure. It's just less of a headache and leads to less of a headache in part 1 act 2.
I'll see y'all later. :) Edit: Oh! It's time for Nano Reno, again! A great time to work on visual novels. :) I'm gonna work on The Silent Column extra, this month! ^_^ Hello, everyone. I've been writing more this week and have been looking at the structure of part 1, act 1. I've modified the structure a little bit and have planned the scenes out, more. I was fuzzy on some sections of the act, before, but now everything's taking shape. On a side note, I just noticed that this graphing program lets me store large amounts of text in cell descriptions. Being able to click on a cell in the graph and write everything in its description might help my writing process. Anyway, here's the structure. :) If everything goes according to this structure, part 1, act 1 will have 12 possible endings and part 1, act 2 will have 18 starting points. That's a lot of starting points, but I can just have extremely few choices from then on- in fact, I'm planning on just have 2 binary choices in the entire act.
And I'm only planning on part 2, act 1 only having 2-3 starting points, so that act won't spiral out of control, either. I'll see you next time. ^_^ Hello, everyone.
I've been telling more scenes of the story aloud, transcribing them, and editing them just as I said I would. After now doing a few more scenes like this, I can more surely say that writing this way is helping. I've been writing April's Group 2-2-2 routes, lately. I didn't quite know what to do with April for a while, but I got very inspired a few nights ago and things are progressing well. :) That's it for the update, really. I am noticing as I keep writing the story that a lot of the main characters have locations that speak about their personalities, though. I know that's obvious, but as I'm writing for April more and telling how she stands at the very edges of high cliffs as she looks out toward the rest of the city, it hit me just how fitting that is for her character and struggles. See you in the next update. :) Hello, everybody. I have some news.
I've finished Sal's rout (without its editing). I noticed when reading it over however, that the pacing is still too fast and unnatural. I thought that a nice way to potentially remedy this... would be to tell the story out loud and record it: telling the story scene by scene without looking at the actual text, keeping all the necessary plot points that each scene covers. Then, write it down and edit it. Hopefully that would result in everything being more true to life and characters seeming more human. I've only done this with one scene so far but I'd say it has improved it, so I'm planning on doing/redoing more scenes this way. In addition to this, I'm thinking about putting more time/days between important events. Not to draw things out to frustrating extents or anything, but to help immerse readers rather than rushing them from plot-point to plot-point. Lastly, I'd like to give you my current word count according to this act's Ren'Py lint, since I haven't done that for a while. The current word count at the time of this post is 73,829 words. It's a fairly high word count from what I understand, and it will of course go up as I keep working on and adding to it. Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you all. I'll see you next time. :) Hello, everyone. I've been away for a while, so let me say happy new year, again. :) I've been writing one of Sal's routes and making sprites for the game. I am switching art styles, again: hopefully you don't find that to be a discouraging announcement. I'm kind of returning to my routes, in a way, to drawing raster images with a stylus. I think I've gotten better as an artist over the years, thanks in great part to my time at school. Here are some sprites of Serra, so far: The style is rough, but I like the sprites I have so far. I might do some minor editing to them, though, like erasing the line under Serra's right cuff in her neutral pose, for instance.
I'm planning for Serra to have two more poses: An energized pose, and a back view. All the poses (except for the back view) will have different facial expressions on them. After all the poses and expressions are done and I'm done editing, I'll start on another one of the characters. There will be 22 characters with sprites in total, or maybe slightly more. Some characters will have less sprites than others, though, of course. I'm not trying to be unreasonable with the amount of sprited characters, I just have a lot of characters and I'd like to sprite some of the minor ones who still have presence in the story, too, so that it's not as immediately obvious who's more important to the story than who. Getting back to my writing for Sal, I've written quite a lot for her, so far, to the point where I'm nearing the completion of one of her two routes. It will still have to be edited, but it's still exciting. It's slightly complicated to talk about the structure of part 1 act 1. Not because of spoilers, but because its structure is kind of hard to put into words... I'll try to explain, though... Basically, it goes... Common rout, splitting into Group 1 or 2. Group 1, which the player may split into Group 1-2. Group 2, which the player may split into Group 2-2, which the player may split into Group 2-2-2. Inside Group 1, the player can focus on Serra, Nithi, Amy, or April. Group 1-2 is focused on Kina. Inside Group 2, the player can focus on Serra or Nithi, while Amy has a presence throughout the Group. Group 2-2 is focused on Sal. Group 2-2-2 is focused on April. Focusing on Serra or Nithi in Group 2 is slightly different from focusing on them in Group 1. Focusing on April in Group 2-2-2 is much different from focusing on her in Group 1. I'm currently writing inside Group 2-2, which contains Sal's two routes, and I'm nearing completion of one of those routes. As for the status on other parts of the game, I have quite a lot of writing sprinkled across the board, except for in Group 2-2-2, which still needs to be started. I'm nearing the completion of one of the routes in Group 2, and some scenes are shared between groups, so I'm getting fairly close to completing one of the routes in Group 1, as well. Happy 2017~ I'm looking forward to doing a lot of work on The Silent Column, this year. I don't think I'll update terribly frequently, but I'll see you in the next update, you guys. :) Bye bye~ Late merry Christmas and happy new year, everyone. I'm going to take time to figure out how I want to draw eyes... :)
Earlier, I said that The Silent Column would be released in three parts, but this is a huge project and I'm only one person. I'm going to split each of the three parts into two acts, and I'll be releasing the game one act at a time. So, I'm currently working on part 1, act 1, and the full visual novel will consist of six acts.
People will get to see The Silent Column faster, this way, and it'll make things easier on me. Also, the project is so big that people will probably find reading it one sixth at a time to be fine. :) I'm also not going to be working on any trailers or PVs until I'm very much near the end of part 1, act 1's production. Then I'll start working on a PV for the act. :) See y'all, next time. Hello. ^^ I've modified the structure of the first half of The Silent Column Part 1. I'm trying to put more of a focus on Kina, April, and their mental illnesses. I rewrote the scene where Tashen meets April, after the fall: having Tashen, Serra, and Nithi react more appropriately to April's breakdown, and having her breakdown be more real. With more focus being put on Kina, more focus is also being put onto Tashen, since they've grown up together and are brother and sister. I have parts for the second half written, already (having written a full route, earlier) and I'll try to blend the altered first half with what I already have written in the second half. With the first half being structured the way it is right now, things can go in 16 different directions. That's a bit crazy... so I might widdle it down, a bit, not have choices in the second half, or end up blending things into fewer paths during the second half. I do like most of the 16 directions, though. We'll see how it goes. As you've likely noticed, I put overlays over top of my artwork to add color and some noise. I've made a new kind of... overlay effect. It's pretty easy to make, and I've tested it out on a few pieces, already. I'm wanting to have images in the VN slowly fade from 1, 2, 3, and back to 1, with each cross-fade taking 10 seconds, or so. It gives an interesting dream-like effect, in my opinion. That's it, for now. I'll see you all, later. :)
Looking at all the art I've already done, I've developed an art-style and have made several pieces that look quite good. It seems foolish to throw them away to change to 3D development. Similarly, changing from a visual novel to a 3D game would lead me to compromise a lot of the writing, since the player would have more reign to wander around and talk with characters.
With a visual novel, the player always stays on a set path or paths, which makes telling a more intimate story- and a more structured story- much more doable. It was an appealing idea to have the player be able to walk around various scenes and look at things that tell them more about the setting and such, but... I feel like giving the player that freedom might actually be less immersive. The only points to them wandering around a 3D world would be to experience what it feels like to be in the environment, find bits of exposition, and to come across certain characters and events, and I can just keep The Silent Column a visual novel and have everything be revealed as I see fit. Wandering around to get extra snippets of information isn't important; I'm going to say most everything that needs to be said as the story is told, anyway. There's no need to collect Easter Eggs, and I love visual novels and find them very intimately immersive without wishing they were 3D. Additionally to all I just said, there's also the meta aspect; I just started getting the ball rolling with the 2D artwork and would love to continue toward The Silent Column's completion instead of uprooting it. So, I'm staying with 2D and having The Silent Column stay a visual novel. :) Hello, everyone.
I thought I'd let you know that I'm not in college, anymore. I decided to drop out, and I've been dropped-out since before I posted The Drowning. I felt lthat a lot of my courses were trying to turn me into a person I don't want to be, with many courses not relating to my 3D interrests and there being a large focus on presenting myself as a business-person instead of a person. At the end of the program, I would have had a paper required for some bigger 3D studios to maybe glance in my direction, and if I did get into one of those studios, I'd probably work stressful hours as I try to make photo-realistic 3D things to "keep up with industry standards", and I can't say that appeals to me in the slightest. School did help me improve on my 3D skills (in Maya and Zbrush which I'm not planning on using, but it still did help me), and gave me experience creating vector artwork, which I've clearly taken a liking to. Even though I didn't finish the program, I'm glad for the skills that they taught me. :) Enough of that news, though. I've got other things to talk about. :) I was thinking about which direction I wanted to take The Silent Column's trailer, and I thought it would be really cool to have some low-poly 3D models of the main characters in it to be like statues. I do know how to do 3D stuff better now, and even though I'd have to learn Blender, I wanted to do that from the beginning, anyway, and I do think the models would add a lot to the trailer. Then I thought... why stop with models for the trailer? I'm not that far in making art assets and I'm wanting to make the statues in a lower-poly style; maybe I could just make the entire game 3D and have it be somewhat similar to games like "Life is Strange" and "The Wolf Among Us". I looked up some Blender Game Engine tutorials on Youtube, and making a Blender game doesn't seem that hard, especially since I'm wanting to make a less complicated game that mainly consist of walking around, looking at things, and talking to people. I'll still need to learn some stuff, but this does seem quite doable... I don't think I've mentioned in this blog, but I also used to make custom maps for Unreal Tournament 2004, years ago, so making 3D environments for characters to walk around in isn't something I'm unfamiliar with. I just thought I'd share my thoughts with you guys. If I go through with this change, will The Silent Column even be considered a visual novel, anymore...? I guess that's okay, but it does seem like quite a change, when I put it that way. It'd still be The Silent Column, though... Well, regardless of what happens I'll see you next time, fam. :) |
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