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OTL

Posted on September 1, 2008 by LTB

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.

Heart no Kuni

Posted on August 25, 2008 by LTB

So, after finishing Princess Nightmare, I decided to pick up and try the other neat-looking otome game that I had lying around, which is Heart no Kuni no Alice. After all an anime is coming up for this game soon, so I thought I better try play it first.

As the title suggests, the game is based on Alice in Wonderland and borrows a lot of concepts and characters from that story. Except that here, Alice does not follow the rabbit but gets kidnapped by him, and everyone in Wonderland is at war against each other. The hat maker is a mafia boss even….

Instead of being a plain visual novel where you read along and makes choices from time to time, you ca move around the map in this game, and choose who you want to visit. You can even change the time of day a few times to try and better your chances of getting certain events with characters.

The art in the game isn’t the most shiny and impressive of all the newer games out there, but to make up for that there is a ton of CG’s in this game. The kind of flat and very strong colours also fit this strange world well. I guess that maybe one could learn something by this – you don’t have to make a game with stellar Ef quality CG’s for it to be good and interesting. I will have forgotten all about this next time I take a look at my own CG’s though, I’m sure….
I can recognise a lot of the voices in the game, there are a few there that I like a lot (Julius! I got really surprised there). That’s a plus. The music isn’t terrible either.

After messing around, going for a guy you couldn’t get yet (bleh), I decided to try and get Ace’s route. He’s the knight of the Heart castle, and seems a nice and dependable guy. Until you find out that he’s not, but instead a bit of an airhead. And kind of creepy sometimes, but so are they all 😛

I have been going at it for a couple of days now, and it seems I’m doing good progress. Apart from the mysterious event here and there, the story is nice and uneventful…. until today, where jealousy hell suddenly breaks loose. Just seeing the characters talking to each other and being all “nice” and “friendly”, I knew this couldn’t go well.

And what do you know! Before long bullets are flying through the air! And the conversation they had in the meantime just had me cracking up several times. Man, this is awesome…. although I get worried too xD The game has this strange double-edged atmosphere going on all the time.

Now I just hope Alice will be able to run for cover.

Really, I wonder if they will have fights like this in the upcoming Alice OVA. I hope so…. hehe.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IoQf0-S3qU]

Smile

Posted on August 24, 2008 by LTB

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!

Sparkly eyes

Posted on August 19, 2008 by LTB

I recieved my Princess Nightmare artbook today! And it looks great! It’s a collection of pictures from a magazine called B’s Log, along with character guides and CG’s. I have never seen B’s Log, but seeing how many artbooks are collected from that magazine, I’m guessing it has a lot of pretty pictures.

Prepare for lame photo’s of book…..:

Character pages:

Prince in a suit!

Also, is it just me, or is this a picture of Yama together with Jin from Yo-Jin-Bo?

Neat.

I better get back to looking at the pretty pictures…. I mean, work on my projects…. 😛 And don’t worry, the avalanche of Princess Nightmare posts here should be over now.

Princess Nightmare – Final Impressions

Posted on August 18, 2008 by LTB

I finally finished the last route in Princess Nightmare the other day. I had finished most of the game a while ago, but kept delaying playing through Franken’s route – it didn’t really interest me that much. He’s a decent character though, and gives a different kind of ending than the other characters.

So, here’s some of my lame, final impressions on the game. Let’s start with the characters: Continue reading “Princess Nightmare – Final Impressions”

Dissidia

Posted on August 16, 2008 by LTB

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27U6KAOXFYs&hl=en&fs=1]

Whoa, awesome. For once I really regret not having a PSP. Annoys me that I may have to get one just for this too, though.

Yay for Squall and Ultimecia! Would be nice with some more female characters though…. *thinks back on Dead Fantasy*.
It’s also pretty cool to see characters from the very first couple of games, even if those characters didn’t have much of a personality to begin with.

Transforming Tia

Posted on July 31, 2008 by LTB

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…

The charge of the otomes!

Posted on July 27, 2008 by LTB

Yeah, the title is lame….

Anyway, it looks like otome games are charging forward recently. Not only is a lot of BxG companies in Japan creating new otome game branches (making stuff like Circus’ new Da Capo for girls), but a lot of visual novel-style games for girls are popping up in english as well.

There was the indie game Fatal Hearts by Hanako Games, then Idea factory began a survey with interest in localising their otome games, I just read about a german “dating game” with a female lead yesterday, and then right afterwards I heard that “Dragon Academy” was finally released on Go! Comi‘s website…..

Dragon Academy looks like it could be interesting. So far there is a free prologue and the first episode up for download on their site. The episode costs $7.99, but I heard that it’s very short.
The art looks pretty good so far (I only tried the free, very short prologue), although I do feel like they didn’t make as much of an effort on the drawing the main character as they did on the male characters.
One of the features in the VN is that when you get to make choices, you have to choose the feelings that she responds with (Sad, angry, and so on). But when you hover your mouse over the expressions, you can read the corresponding sentences that she will say, so in general it’s not very different from how you usually play these kind of games.
I can’t say much about the story yet, though I do hope that there will be more to this game than just an excuse to hunt after hawt boys. We didn’t really get to see any of these boys in the prologue either, except for in the short movie clip in the end. On my computer that flash movie was very much out of synch, which kind of ruined it, by the way.
Looking on the Team page, you can see the three girls working on the game. Hmm, I wonder how they got into that business…..

As for the german game, Dating Day…. I heard about that about a year or so ago, but then forgot again. Looking at the website, it’s not something that appeals to me very much. Generally seems like a plain dating sim with minigames, and the art really puts me off. I’m not a very big fan of that kind of cartoon style.

On the other hand, if you’re not into otome games, there’s not much else than hentai games to go for on the visual novel front…..

And now, I’ll get back to the drawing board…. working on my BxG game…. 😉

Dr. Horrible

Posted on July 19, 2008 by LTB

Watch it. It’s awesome. And it’s only available for free until midnight July 20.

www.drhorrible.com

It’s just…. way too short xD

On the drawing table

Posted on July 17, 2008 by LTB

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! Continue reading “On the drawing table”