Hi sweets!

Welcome to our dev log for May & June!

It’s been a super busy couple of months for all of us—especially Norika, who’s been working incredibly hard! Originally, we planned to release Demo 2.0 in early June and post the May dev log right after that. But things took longer than expected as they always do 😅, and by the time we were ready, it felt a bit silly to still call it a "May" update. So here we are, with a joint log for both months instead.

We know Demo 2.0 isn’t available in English just yet, but even so, it might still be worth downloading just to poke around and see what’s new 😉.

I’m handling the English translation on my own now, and since the script for Demo 2.0 is over twice the length of Demo 1.0, you can imagine it's gonna take quite a while… Sorry about that! 🥲 Whitefish's writing is beautiful, and I’ll do my best to bring you a translation that’s  accurate and beautiful as well.

In the meantime, here’s a quick summary of updates (copied from our previous post):

• A completed prologue 
• A ton of new art assets
• A redesigned UI layout 
• A carefully crafted battle scene
• A special gore content toggle 

For a more detailed breakdown, please check out the Demo 2.0 release post if you haven’t already! 

We’ve also participated in some online jams, conventions, and festivals, but all of us are more the "head-down-and-get-things-done" type—we don't even post about our progress lol. We tend to keep silent and just release once we’ve finished, without much interaction with others, so it hasn’t brought us much exposure. We’re so not good at networking or socializing, nor are we skilled at promotion and marketing... We simply want to develop games. That said, we’ll definitely keep trying to increase our visibility!

Script

Not much to say apart from Whitefish has been writing her heart out. She’s also been incredibly meticulous , which means a lot of subtle variations depending on the routes you take. That does add some extra workload but we all agree that this level of detail is necessary for  narrative consistency and flow. For example, the first choice you make in the prologue (in theater, which actually causes some differences) leads to the same events happening later, but in a different order. To reflect these variations in sequence, we’ve created different text and even new CGs.

Also fun fact: we originally expected the prologue to be around 40,000 Chinese characters (about 25,000 English words), but Whitefish has already written around 65,000 Chinese characters—and that count doesn’t include repeated text for the same events, so no cheating here… Hopefully she can keep things under control, but I think more likely, for the entire story, we’re probably going to exceed the planned 400,000 Chinese characters.

Art & UI

Norika has drawn so many new assets and I'm gonna list them here:

• 7 brand-new background illustrations (excluding variations), bringing our total to 19 backgrounds (again, excluding variations)
• 12 brand-new CGs (excluding variations, now totaling 28 CGs—just imagine how many there will be when the game is finished! 
• A new opening animation full of comic-style sketches
• Updated and newly added comic-style mini CGs
• Updated or newly added NPC sprites
• More facial expressions for all characters
• New and revamped UI elements
• Assets for animations
• Assets unused due to change of plans

I helped out as well, because when you start adding things into the game, you always notice some overlooked details. I try to fix them in Photoshop whenever I can, to help reduce Norika’s workload.

One area we’ve struggled with a bit is the gore CGs. Norika has drawn some very realistic internal organs, and because she is so good, I personally can appreciate the artistic beauty of those gore visuals. However, for players who might find it uncomfortable, we have to pixelate those parts, which unfortunately hurts the visual effect. So we’re trying to find a way to cover the gore without ruining the beauty of the CG itself, but it still feels a little awkward. Anyway, we’ll keep exploring the art of mosaic!

For the battle scene in Demo 2.0, we initially just wanted to use character sprites—and here’s an example of some unused assets. Norika drew several expressions for the new NPC sprite, but in the end, the sprite only appears once with no expression changes…Then jiwe decided to use paper-cutout-style characters throughout the battle scene to create an animation-like effect. It turned out great and proved to be a low-cost, high-reward solution. Although the style is minimalistic, seeing the characters move brought us a lot of satisfaction. The design of the scene layout was mainly inspired by magazine, incorporating elements with a literary vibe.

Besides the in-game assets, Norika is also planning to draw a new banner and redesign some press kit materials. Remember she promised not to redraw things before? Of course she’s breaking that promise. At least she’s not redrawing everything, but only improving the parts she’s particularly unsatisfied with, like a specific scene, some CGs and NPC sprites.

👇 A little CG spoiler

Programming

Most of my programming time goes into animations. Adding the new UI took me about two days, which was reasonable. 

The opening animation (OP) took over two days. Since I created it purely using Ren'Py instead of video editing software, it was absolute torture trying to sync the animation perfectly to the music’s rhythm. I don’t really want to complain as I don’t even think about it again… but it was a good experiment to use Ren'Py for this kind of animation. It would be more fun and I’d be more motivated to dive into complex animation effects, if I didn’t have to worry about matching the music beat.

Then it's just orinary process of importing the script, adding backgrounds, CGs, character sprites and expressions, sound and music, animations etc. etc. Here I must express my gratitude to developer of Ren'Py tools and assets, which make things much better and easier. One tool we used this time is the Ren'py Wave Shader to add more dynamic to visuals, and it's quite amazing!

Another tool we used is LayeredImage Expression Picker in Ren'Py, which has greatly improved our efficiency. We use layered images where characters’ eyebrows, eyes, and mouths are all separated, resulting in way too many possible combinations. Before, Norika and I would hold online meetings to go through the entire game adjusting character facial expressions, trying out different combinations directly in Ren'Py to pick the best ones. This was extremely time-consuming and exhausting—we probably spent over 10 hours doing this for Demo 1.0. But with this tool, we were able to create a separate Ren'Py project specifically for visualizing character expressions and simply note down the relevant code in the script. This has made importing and double-checking expressions much, much faster!

👇 Made with the expression picker—this is not happening in the game though

The battle scene was another long journey. Norika and I spent 10+ hours solely on confirming and double-checking how each sprite move (I can't remember how long we took so this is according to her). For coding I think I spent around two days, including implementing the special UI for the choice.

We didn't plan to add the gore toggle feature, as we're all exhausted by the end of Demo 2.0’s development. At first we said just use the pixelated CGs and be done with it, but after consideration I decided to give it a try and give up if it's too complex, and to my surprise, it was much quicker and easier than expected. I'm glad I made the wise choice.

Future Plans

Yes there is gonna be a Demo 3.0, and here’s what we’re planning to include:

• The beginning of both the Troupe Route and the Family Route
  • The choice made at the end of the prologue determines which route you go into
  • The Troupe Route will later branch into the Kazuya Route and Hatsuyuki Route
  • The Family Route will later branch into the Sarina Route and Minoru Route

• New features including Gallery and Journal
  • The Journal will include an inventory, possibly achievements and more

Demo 3.0 will be the final demo version, and after that, we’ll be moving toward the full release of the game.

As for next month, we’ll mostly be preparing for Demo 3.0. Whitefish is working on a more detailed outline, Norika will have things to draw (or redraw) as always, and I’ll be focusing on the English translation. It’ll likely be a short dev log next time, since there probably won’t be anything too exciting to report.

Thank you for reading, and we’ll wrap things up here for now. 💗 

All the best,

SweetSome