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Tag: otome

Blue Rose update

Posted on September 21, 2010 by LTB

Time to post an update on Blue Rose! The script is nearing its end, and I am nearing my limit… *_*

I have been writing on this story for a little over a year now, most intently the past couple of months, and it has now grown past 105.000 words which means the end result will be more than twice as long as Angelic Orbs. Of course this one also has 5 “capture-able” characters which increases the volume of story by quite a bit.

The first pieces of real, finished art have also started to trickle in! (Mostly because I’m not making it, hah.)

I got a real talented BG artist on the team, and he has made some pretty promising things so far. I’m looking forward to when the parts of script already inserted into renpy will evolve to more than just a black screen with text. I want to show it off… but I should probably wait… <_<;

Character lineart (which I am doing) has also begun taking shape now, you saw a short glimpse of Simon’s sprite in the last blog post. I have some ideas of how to use art in this game that I hope I can pull off.

Hmm making interesting blog posts about a game is hard when art is one of the last things to be produced – no shiny pictures to post…

So… all I really need to get sorted is music. (I’ll be looking for a colourist soon too, but that I’m not as worried about at the moment.)

There is no end to this! OTL

Blue Rose – Character development?

Posted on August 30, 2010 by LTB

During the writing of a story some characters can develop in very surprising ways. I’m sure other authors know this well. In the early stages of Blue Rose, I mapped out important characters and the roles they were going to play along with their personalities and stances on the main plot. But as is usually the case, things take sudden changes in direction when these characters jump off the drawing table and are actually let loose in the script.

It doesn’t matter how much preparation and planning is done, the real development happens in the actual writing.

One of these is Gavin, for who I first finished writing the final ending and epilogue. Gavin is the superficial skirt-chaser who would say a nice word to any lady walking past, without that necessarily having any deeper meaning to him. At least that’s what he was supposed to be. That part of him still exists, but he has taken on quite a life of his own and shown me sides of him that I never knew would come to be. When I yell “come on Gavin, you shouldn’t care about silly things like that!” he’ll reply with a defiant “but I DO!!”

It’s the same with the rest. Erin who was supposed to be the frail, sensitive girl has ended up kicking aside anyone who gets in her way (especially Gavin gets to feel this), determined to make it on her own. Due to that she sometimes borders on being somewhat of a troublemaker and pain in the ass, but I hope the readers will be able to see past her flaws and see her good intentions 😉

Simon has moved from passive non-caring role to someone who is serially confused about what to do with Lena. (Serially confused. I love that phrase. Guess where I stole it from and I’ll give you a cookie).

Especially Simon has changed so much and acted so opposite of what was originally planned that for a while I wasn’t even sure how he would shape up in his own route, where he finally gets the chance to step up front. The result has been… interesting. As usual he has a tendency to draw the short end of the stick, but I like what he has turned into – even his bad ending feels important to me, and really show what kind of person he is. For a short (insane) moment I even considered making it canon when thinking of what general consequences that ending has for Lena’s future life. (But that’s just too sad, isn’t it? Let’s hope for things to turn out better than that!)

Just like the other two characters I have written so far, Simon is now a hard competitor for being my favourite. Now it’s Tobias’ turn.

Which means I am done writing the first 3 out of 5 routes in Blue Rose. Hurray!

Names and origin of Blue Rose

Posted on August 1, 2010 by LTB

Time for a post with content about the development of one of my current games.

Before Blue Rose I originally intended to work on different project under the w.i.p. name “Academy”. I had done a lot of script planning and world building for this project, but when the writing of the script began in earnest, I ended up shifting over to something different – from the supernatural mystery taking place in a huge castle/academy and with a male lead, it turned into a story taking place in a distant corner of the same country, but with a completely different plot and cast (the main lead now being female). That is Blue Rose.

Some things carried over from the first project since Blue Rose was supposed to take place in the same world. One was the attitude towards magic and users thereof in the country of the main character, the other was usage of names. This country is called Tanves.

When creating the setting for Academy I decided to use names for the characters that are used where I live myself, since the place is very European in appearance anyway – names that are ordinary here in Denmark, but also acceptable in English (no pronunciation issues, hopefully!). Since Blue Rose takes place in the same country this rule also applies here, and that has taken part in deciding names for characters like Lena, Simon and Tobias.

Gavin is from the neighbouring country of Helen and thus has a very different name that you wouldn’t see often around here. The same with Aran, who is something completely different than everyone else in the story. The sisters Erin and Marie also come from the same place as Gavin, but! Useless trivia will tell you that these two are 2nd generation immigrants from Tanves, and as such they are named after the same rules as Lena.

I could keep talking about this by mentioning last names as well, but I’ll spare you…

“Academy” is still a project that I intend to work on as I think it has some very interesting characters and a premise that I like. Maybe it will become my next vn project when Blue Rose is finished.

Scripting chaos

Posted on September 6, 2009 by LTB

So, I guess I should make a post on the project that I’m working on now – the secret otome project.

Since all my free art-time is being spend on a race for the finish line for a few commissions before I leave the country, most of the work on this project is still focused on the script. Like with Angelic Orbs I prefer to write a good deal of the script before drawing any art assets for it anyway.

So, how is the script coming along?

One thing is for sure – since I have decided that this game is going to work differently than the somewhat “linear” paths with choices in AO, scripting can be really hard. Harder than I thought <_<;; Keeping track of what comes where when takes some work.

One good thing is that the map system is mostly finished. Coding really isn’t a strength of mine, so getting that out of the way is a relief. (Know that this isn’t some impressive walk-around map, it’s actually pretty simple “choose where to go” map :P)

Because of the way that I organize scripts at the moment, I don’t really have a clear number of how many words have been written yet, but most of the prologue has been written along with events for something like 6 days.

So yah. What is the story even about?

Unfinished costume-test-sketch-thing

Who knows! This is all for now 🙂