{Development Diary #1: Story and Art Direction}

I've grown fond of development diaries over the years and so I thought I'd make one. Heck if I know on how regular they'll be tho.

I have three rules that I am living by when it comes to both the story and the art direction: Keep it fun, original, and simple. I feel that if I were to go for complexity, then I'd end up making a bunch of jargon and have the story become this boring and bloated monster. Similarly, I feel like if I were to go for something familiar, then it would be somewhat boring, hence there being a blue sun and a setting that is like Earth, but not Earth, because that's simple to roll with as well as allowing a lot of room for originality.

In a nutshell, the story is about a mercenary who is trying to retrieve her stolen sword. I like this idea because it is simple, but yet, it allows exploration of the world. Who needs another "save the world" type of story, am I right? So, we've got this woman that wants her sword back and then we've got this man who took the sword from her with his own goals with which he intends to use her sword for. Oh, did I mention that the sellsword is famous and her sword unique in design? That's a thing. Though, ironically enough, the uniqueness of the sword doesn't have anything to do with magic or anything tangible, rather, it's all in the head of the one who wields it. The uniqueness of it to Ikari is the sentimental value, while to the thief who thinks he's getting all this power from it, it's actually his own confidence and abilities that he's had all along. The story went from complex to simple back in a flash, eh?

Twists are important and there will be a couple of that nature, but nothing that really takes a rocket scientist to see coming or to predict. If I do my job as a writer well enough then it should all be hinted at in advance and won't be or look like an asspull. All the twists are going to rely on human nature (or rather what I perceive it to be). I don't really want to get more into the story at this point -because only 4,800 words of it exists outside of my head- for the sake of not wanting to promise things and then have it be wildly different, so let's cover the art a bit.

This is all I have at the moment:





But I basically have nothing, because I suspect the character art will look different from that. I'm going to buy a Wacom Drawing Tool and use that to draw and color the artwork and backgrounds on my computer with GIMP. It'll either turn out better or worse, but either way, that's the plan for the art.

Thank you for reading this miniature "developer diary". That's where things stand right now and how things are planned.

Sweet. You're going to hook us all up with free copies right? :3 (j/k)

Art is so hard. I tried drawing Claude Triello from Sunrider today and came up with some girl with a massive derp face that I couldn't fix no matter how much I redid the eyes. The above picture is what I tried drawing. Drawing is something I did out of the blue and ended up evaluating myself as somewhat decent at. I'm afraid if I don't practice often that I might lose it. I don't remember where I was going with this, lol.

I'm going to need a decent amount of sprites and backgrounds myself. I am really worried about cobbling together a trailer for it because of the animation, but baby steps.

Not telling you what to do, but if you haven't worked on it in a long time, then you might try writing another story. There are a lot of things I've started writing and was really passionate about only to abandon for something else and never go back to. There are also a couple of things that I was able to come back to with renewed interest and finish. It has always worked out well in my opinion. That could help you get out of any binds that you are stuck in (if you are stuck).

Thank you for the support.

Thank you, I'll keep that in mind and ask you if I decide that I need them For the time being this will be a solo project because I don't have a source of income and I don't want anyone working on it for free because I can't guarantee that this won't go up for sale (at the same time, I can't guarantee that I'll even be able to find a distributor). In some odd and twisted sort of way, I seem to put out my best when I work alone, but we shall see what the future holds.

I'd want to support it anyways for the effort out in. Plus for 7 bucks you can't really go wrong

Just make it so the main character stutters a ton and count every stutter as a separate word :3

I'm behind where I want to be after having taken a few breaks for various reasons, but I have picked up the pace of my writing and am now back on track. I've reached 50 pages Forward march~

After dealing with depression and life drama, I have kicked things into gear. Ikari itself is at around 60 pages now, but I decided to start two other VNs alongside it (it helps to take breaks and focus on other things, plus Ikari is going to be rather costly and I could use the experience/word of mouth for it. I'm working on Ikari once a week, don't worry). The two VN's have been in production since the very start of March. One is about a Space Spy and the other is about a girl with social anxiety and a rather... unique friend. The Space Spy VN is something I work on once every other week and it sits at 5 pages currently (not bad for two short sessions, really) and the Social Anxiety VN sits at 22 Pages. To be fair, the Social Anxiety VN is basically cheating because I am drawing rather heavily from what I feel/myself.

Just figured I'd stop by and leave that bit of information since I haven't given any updates in 3 months :3