What Next Year Will Bring

One calendar year has ended, and in a few hours for me, another will begin. 2011 was a pretty interesting ride for me personally, as well as a vn writer and enthusiast. Where Team BG is concerned, a lot happened behind the scenes, but this might actually be the only year since we started in earnest we didn’t have a vn release. vNovel did publish their iOS port of Songs of Araiah, but that wasn’t a new project (and that fact was the cause for a little buzz for a short while). I personally released The Position (http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10650), but didn’t deem it fit enough to bear the Team BG tag. It was mostly a personal project, and was also part of a request from a good friend, but outside of that, it really wasn’t a story that needed to be shared. It’s just that I can’t keep these things to myself.

The end of the year has gotten particularly exciting for me though, as I managed to wrap up the editing pass for our current project. I guess I can call it a second draft now? I only recently started work on making an alpha build for it to pass around to collect some opinions. There are parts to it that make me nervous. In fact, the other day I just proved how much more work needs to be done when I finally drew up a flowchart for the choices and found them to be pretty one-sided. Still, hopefully soon, I’ll have an alpha version built and can start working on the corrections that come in. This is all pretty well timed too, since our artist isn’t presently available but should be once we get responses from the alpha back. Hopefully we can see a release in the next few months, but there’s plenty of ground to cover.

Finally, I’ve been mulling over some ideas for a side project to take on while I slave over the non-writing parts of this alpha project, and there’s one I’ve been sitting on for a while that is really beginning to jump out at me. I certainly can’t make any promises, but hopefully I’ll take a crack at this one too in the next year. I’d love to try my hand at a mystery again, and getting to have an evil doll as one of the characters this time is just too much to pass up. But who knows… I guess even I will have to wait to see what the new year will bring.

Happy New Year!

View From the Peanut Gallery

Or, Yet Another Whiny Post About WIP Threads:
(Yes, another one… I thought I would’ve quit by now too…)

As you can see here, WIP threads are once again the topic of discussion this hour. There’s some interesting discussion about the posts made by WIP followers and why or why not people are afraid to offer more helpful advice or critiques. This is probably discussion a lot of the current developers in the scene are interested in hearing, but there’s a neglected perspective in this conversation.

That of the follower.

It dawned on me immediately after my own post in the discussion the other half of why I avoid WIP threads. I’ll admit that I’ve grown to be a harsher judge of these kinds of things as time went on. I’m less and less easily impressed these days. I take a second-long glance at the front page and almost immediately hit the Back button. And I realized it is because there’s no longer anything there for me anymore. Continue reading

Microgame Mania

While digging around the folders on our webspace, I came across a bunch of microgames on the server that I might have well forgot existed. I already replayed the outstanding “D, the Ultimate Survivor”, and will be digging through the rest of them later tonight, but I thought to share them all again while I’m in the spirit for the small. Even just going through the first one, I felt the want to make a micro, so I’ll probably dive into one this weekend. No idea what’ll be on though. We’ll all have to wait and see.

And now the micros themselves!

D, the Ultimate Survivor
This is a short project Enerccio wrote up, done to the style and even music of Kaiji season one, to describe just how piss poor my luck is at mahjong. I got quite the kick out of it the first time, and on my replay just minutes ago too.

The Road Ahead
This was an April Fool’s gag that fell completely flat. It’s pitched as the story of a man, recently married and more recently widowed, who’ll have to take care of his stepdaughter here on out. In truth, it’s actually a rewrite of a few pages out of Lolita, shortly after Charlotte dies and Humbert gains possession of Dolly. I don’t think a lot of people picked it up, but it wasn’t really that funny or a good gag in retrospect.

The Secret Ingredient
This is a piece Kik wrote Teacup’s 2010 VN Festival. It’s a fun little piece. He really needs to write more. Hear that, Kik? You really need to write more. No, I’m serious. Write. Right. Now.

The Position
I was tasked by a friend a few months ago to write something short, and it was a really welcome opportunity because I hadn’t written something in a while. This is what I came up with. I wouldn’t be surprised if the micro I wanna make is done in the same vein. It’s just what I’ve coming up with lately.

Yuki no Imouto
This was a really short piece done for a Halloween contest. Interestingly enough, both this and The Road Ahead are done in Kirikiri, which is an interesting engine to work with. There are parts of it I really like, but for microgames like this, it seems like too much work. Unlike Renpy, it really isn’t easy to do a simple but neat looking UI right out of the box… it takes an all-or-nothing approach about customization. It was a little much for something so small…

And hopefully in about a week’s time, I’ll have a new one to add to the list. I really need to do *something*… and why not just something small to hold me over a bit. Let’s see what I come up with, eh?

Platforms of Araiah

A number of additional platforms for the Songs of Araiah Remake have been made available since the last post.

In case I haven’t bothered you about it in some other form of social media or forum already, you can find links to all the available platforms on the vNovel Interactive website

A free-to-play browser version is available, so be sure to give it a spin.