What next….

My first visual novel was finally released a few days back. A lot of things could have been done better, but in general I’m happy about the result.

Shortly the “Cute, light and Fluffy” VN project will hopefully be released as well, where I have contributed with a short story.

But apart from these things, what is up next?

For one thing I would like to return to updating my webcomic, but I have just been commissioned to do art for yet another game, and also have a lot of other loose ends to take care of. So unfortunately it seems like AO will have to wait a little bit longer.

But I’m already preparing for my next game project after Broken Memories as well. A couple of ideas have been circling in my head, but recent discussions on a certain forum have made me decide on a final story that I will start working on.

Yes, my next visual novel is going to be an otome game. In spite of me once saying that I would probably never make one that wasn’t BxG!
I have a story that I’m happy about, and have begun writing a few drafts. Other than that, there isn’t much I can say about this project yet. It’s still in its planning stages, and it will take a long time before it gets finished (Broken Memories took me 2 years after all).

Alright, time to get back to work!

Angelic Orbs: Broken Memories released!

Angelic Orbs: Broken Memories has now been released!

Go to the website to download the game, or to Lemmasoft to read up on the release and leave a comment (Or you can do that here )

OP video:

Yes, I’m lazy….

Edit: The first version of the game had a buggy sound effect that made the game freeze on some computers during Tia’s path. Ver. 1.1 fixes this bug and download links have been updated with this version. Please re-download if your game didn’t work. Enjoy!

OTL

It’s the 1. September. That means summer is officially over, and I didn’t manage to get the AO game out during summer as I had planned ._.
I progress news, I just recently managed to fix Tia’s entire sprite set. Now check this out: Tia has a total of 33 sprites. 33! I nearly died, having to go through all of those @_@ Tia has the most expressions to begin with, and on top of that her sprite set has a couple of variations for some of those expressions. And since she was the first sprite set I made, it is also the most unorganised one. In comparison Yoko, the female lead with the fewest sprites, has only 9 expressions in total.

Oh, and today was my first day at my new work as well.

All together now...

Smile

Returning to the original purpose of this blog, here is a short progress update on the game.

All Yoko’s CGs are now coloured and done. In principle, the same can be said about any other character in the game – all images are now in a finished state! I could actually release this if I wanted to! But I don’t! Ha!
Two CGs still need to be rehashed, although I don’t believe a complete remake of them is necessary. Not if I’m lucky…. I may have to redraw an entire sprite set though. *Shot*

Also, even though the music for the game is also completed, I need to get a few of the tracks in their polished and final versions. Yay, another good excuse for being slow
I also want to have another look at the text, but at this rate the game will never be finished… so I may just want to ask for proofreaders soon.

I’m off!

Transforming Tia

Having some time between my last commission and another big project coming up, I’m working on getting some more CGs finished. Some of that work has consisted of fixing or redrawing a couple of old CGs. One of these are safe to show here, since it was one of the first screenshots I ever showed anyone from the game – here you can see the old and new versions of this picture:

The date of the old picture says “3.-10.-07″, almost a year ago. I guess that means that you can see almost a years improvement between those two images. I find it kind of strange myself to look at these pictures – it doesn’t feel like so much should have changed in that time, but that new picture is still a huge improvement. There is still so much left to learn though…

I hope that doesn’t mean that the images in the game will vary too much in quality ^^; I’ll try my best to avoid this. Fortunately that picture was one of the worst in the bunch.

Apart from that I can happily say that all linearts for the CGs are done at this point. I only need to colour 3 more, and get the last piece of music!

I’m such a slowpoke…

On the drawing table

Thought it was about time I made a post about something else than playing games. So here’s an update on the projects I’m working on right now!

Pretty~

I was surprised to see that Sixten of Heart’s Content posted a little mini-review of my Angelic Orbs project on his blog.

And there is fanart! Isn’t she just adorable?

It means a lot to me to get comments like that from a person like Sixten. Right! I better get back to work so I can start updating with part 3 soon! (And get the game done… ^^; )

Breakthrough!

…. I hope.

It’s about time I make another update about the AO game I guess. Lately I have been pretty stuck, so not much has happened – somehow I just couldn’t get any further with the remaining CG’s. At least all Tia’s CG’s are now finished, so I don’t have to worry about her anymore.

Today I managed to get another one of Yoko’s CG’s out of the way, though. I’m not all pleased with it, but the lineart itself was kind of bad to begin with, and there’s a limit to what colours can save…. In the end I found another technique for spiffing up CG colouring by complete coincidence, and with that I made the finished picture look a little more bearable. Now I have declared it as finished, and with that I hope to have broken through the wall that was standing in my way – next up is colouring another CG with an annoying amount of background in it, and then getting some lineart finished…….. *sigh*

I’m finding it really hard to live up to my own expectations with this. Looking back at the finished CG sets, there are a few that I would like to redo as well. At other times I just tell myself that I have to live with some crappy art here and there.

I want this game to look great, but at the same time I feel that the story is inferior, and then maybe it doesn’t even deserve for me to work so hard for the graphics.

Hmmm this is tough…. I’m still hoping to get this game released this summer though, so let’s hope I can get my act together.

#¤!@(/&!

Arrrgh I hate CSS @_@ It’s so confusing! It was so much simpler back in the days when I just had to write some simple HTML code! (almost)

I have been wasting most of the day trying to fix some things I wanted changed on my website, after updating the comic. In the end I finally managed to set up a horizontal menu in the top like I wanted to – it looks like crap, but at least it’s there now
Now I just need to figure out the other couple of things I wanted.

If I was just to use the page for my gallery, it would be fine the way it is now. But I want to make it easier for people to read my comic there.

In the end I should probably just have used Comicpress or something for that.

I wonder if it would be best to some day get a seperate domain name for Angelic Orbs? Looks like most webcomics benefit from having their own page like that.

Ah, it’s all so confusing…. I think I’ll try and watch Aria now instead.

Shades of Grey

I have earlier brought up the question of whether I should continue shading my comic pages, or just upload them as pure lineart.

To be honest: the one thing I dislike the most about drawing AO is the shading. Putting the story together and struggling with lineart and backgrounds can get annoying and frustrating, but in the end I still enjoy it. It’s the moment the page gets scanned, and I have to sit in front of the computer to finish up the page with shading and lettering that things start to really get on my nerves.

It’s a shame really, since I like how the page turns out with shading. Especially pages like this one really has a lot to gain with proper shading. As a result of the first blog post, I decided to keep shading the pages, and instead cut down on updating. Now the comic updates only once a week instead of twice, and I still miss an update sometimes, even though all pages for part 2 are actually drawn.

But after working with that schedule for a while, and a short discussion I had on Gaia online, I have decided that maybe I should change this after all. I am seriously considering that after part 2 of Angelic Orbs ends, I will begin updating with black and white pages. I will most likely also go back and repost a batch of pages from time to time with finished shading, but this will only happen when I feel like it and have the extra time.

If I do this I will most likely be able to speed up the updating schedule to twice a week again, and that results in me being able to do what I want most right now – get on with the story! Unfortunately it will also break consistency a bit. Besides, the shading helped bring up my lousy lineart by a notch

As a reward for reading through all this, here is a small preview of a page from part 3 that I have been working on:

Now back to the game…. and remember, next thursday a new character will finally be introduced in the comic! Hooray!