30 September 2024
After a hectic two weeks of both filming my other major projects for uni as well as a 5-day cybersecurity work conference, we have emerged on the other side and are rearing and ready to get back into development! However, this does not mean that things have been completely stagnent - shortly after the last entry, I had a few meetings with team members that bore some very new exciting concept art, and have been working on getting the devlogs on the website up and looking nice with Luna. I plan to also hold a team meeting soon to get people back up to speed, as well as (potentially) look a downsizing the team a bit as I'm finding management a little laborious, especially with some departments that are not yet fully coming play at this planning stage (they can potentially be re-engaged later on in the dev cycle, I think).
- Met with Skye (Concept Artist) for new art direction - Very excited to see where she takes these, as it's almost exactly (particularly the first one) what I imagined it would be (plus a bit more colour to separate from the backgrounds). She's now working on a few waist-up versions of MC, once she gets back from Melbourne. In the meantime, I'm playing around with position and placement on the VN screen to start considering how the UI will be arranged.
- Helping Luna with the wonders of CSS - (She chose this hell ;), conflicting stylesheets and devious missing "/"s for the website, and porting over all of my previous devlogs to there. Props to her for the persistence here.
- Playing Narcissu & Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni - two notable visual novel games that have been on my list for a while. I took this period to start both of them, and am having two very different experiences...! Narcissu (1) is very slow and almost tedious in parts, but this pacing thematically fits the story very well, communicating the simultaneous listlessness, waiting, and anxiety of two terminally-ill patients on a last ditch roadtrip to die anywhere but in the hospital walls that confined them. Higurashi, on the other hand, is also somewhat slow but in this case, stuffed with filler and the classic Japanese rom-com & anime high school cliches. However, I'm sticking it out both due to its reputation for being a staple psychological horror entry for any VN fan, as well as the fact that it's starting to drop in the fabled subtle horrific undertones as the previously overly idyllic countryside life is further broken down. Look forward to continuing both of these, especially Narcissu.
