Organizing

Hey guys, sorry I've been quiet on the character creation front. I've been hammered with some nasty situations in my life, and I'm just too damn tired at the end of each day to put work into this.

Give me a few more days to get everything settled, though, and I'll be back to working. Once again, I apologize.

Thanks for taking the time to provide reasonable notice, Admin. We can't expect people to be here all the time for the project, but it's good to have an idea of what's going on with people.

Zeikier has finished drafts for Veronica and Randolph. Redrick is coming soon, but he wants to fix up the footwear first.





Everyone (the writers for the characters in particular of course), please present your feedback. On an unrelated note, Deed and I have almost finished writing our first song together specifically for the game. It's a lighthearted yet intimate piece primarily featuring an acoustic guitar and flutes. I intend to have it play in more personal and tranquil scenes, probably not generic seasonal or shop music.

I think that Veronica could use a more angular face and a slightly terse expression. She seems like she could be a bit hard-nosed at first glance, but otherwise approachable to non-idiots. Perhaps her hourglass figure could be a bit less exaggerated as well.

To me, Randolph looks pretty much spot on, but I'd maybe give him a fringe (bangs, to the Americans). You could probably give his face some imperfections, so that his boyishness is more pronounced by his slight lack of self grooming.

Still resolving problems, but I am able to provide feedback. I really like Veronica's style. I think the hourglass figure is spot on, but I agree with Deed that she should have a bit more hardness to her. I see her as being a stoic, a sort of calm at the center of any storm; and, at least to me, her facial expression seems like it's expressing doubt or uncertainty, but maybe I'm over-analyzing it.

Meanwhile, I think Randolph is spot on. No comments from me.

Very nice work, Zeikier. I'm definitely looking forward to looking at more of your stuff.

Concept art's lookin' spiffy. Keep up the back and forth with the writers, Zeikier, they're the ones with the most accurate mental image of each character. I'll try and get some quick sprite templates done, since I'm already tooling around in VX.


THE ROMANCE BAR

Operates very similarly to the FP meter. Total of 150 points this time around, romancin' won't last longer than 2 seasons tops.

Talking gets you 2RP per day, gifts system similar to that of FP.

Minor Events at 25, 75 125. Major Events at 50, 100, 150. Minors grant +5, Majors grant +10. Caps at these key points will stll be maintained as per the FP system. The pacing for raising the stat will stay the same, but the duration will be shorter.

You'll need to have pulled off the 3rd romantic Major Event (I'm assuming these will all be date type dealies) to get a 'yes' answer from the proposal action. You'll also need to have bought the large bed, as per HM tradition. (pretty cheeky of the guy to go out buying beds in anticipation of a girl saying yes, if ya ask me)


------


Here's a quick rundown of the basic type of lines a character would need.

1. Sunny Day*
2. Rainy Day**
3. At Home*
4. Outside**
5. Festival

*changes with increases in FP/RP. Each major event in either bar changes the NPC's lines.
**changes with the season

Festival Lines would depend on the Festival in question, of course.

'Outside' is a general term for lines the character would say if found wandering the village. BtN examples would be Karen's walk to the beach, Popuri hanging around the Goddess falls, Cliff being emo in the church, and the town housewives gathering in the square to gossip.

Be back with more in a few.

Hi everyone, I was told you guys need a spriter so I thought "eh let's give it a go".
And without further ado, here's what I came up with for a testing sprite for Veronica (i think that's veronica anyways).



Probably a little amateurish. The colours of her clothing are just a general concept and can gladly be changed if the artists have precise suggestions for it. I only followed the black-and-white concept art so far.

General suggestions?

(i also love these emoticons )

EDIT: I tried enlargening the head a bit and making the glasses more noticable, while adding reflections.



Tell me which version you find better. Also tell me if you think I should remove that ridiculous yellow highlight because I'm absolutely not sure about that one because it totally just looks like she's urinating from her forehead

Incidentally, he just did a side sprite too.



Bonus: walking animation

Oh cool people are spriting all of a sudden.

May as well throw up my interpretations of Zeikier's concept art, based loosely on Pokemon's overworld style.









Couldn't figure out if she was wearing a blazer or a lab coat, so I did colors for both.

Back to the maths...

[1:59:52 PM] Larto: His sprites don't seem bad
[2:00:21 PM] Larto: We just have to decide which style we want to go with
[2:00:42 PM] Jar: Yours is a fair bit more realistically proportioned and all too.
[2:01:28 PM] Jar: I'm pretty biased because I didn't ever really care much for Pokemon's sprites and I want to see you flourish.

Think we should vote on this? I'm torn because I don't want to overload soak and don't prefer the style but on the other hand, I can appreciate that it's more traditional for the genre.

You did a good job Soak, but in this case, I think Larto's fits better, because his sprite captures the hour glass figure.

Larto: Could you tweak the colors of her shirt to white, so that it looks like she's wearing a lab coat? I also think the streak in her hair is kind of pointless to be honest (and at an initial glance, I thought she was wearing a barrette or headband of some sort).

I was also informed that you were in need of a pixel artist. Here's what I made based on the above sprites. You can tell me how exactly to change the style. I can also do portraits, if need be.

Ooh, that's a good job on the glasses, Saiklo.

Just my two cents, of course, everybody needs to have their own say, but I think Veronica's model would be best by using Saiklo's head and Larto's body. Is that feasible?

I dunno. I kinda like Saiklo's sprite. If showing off her figure is that important, we can do it in the character art.

Anyway, assuming Molly passes inspection I think I'll get to work thinking up another character.

Oh God, hey Saiklo. Thanks for joining! That sprite looks cool as well. I like the glasses too. We need to assign you, Soak and Larto to different characters, for maxx efficiency. Hell, I used to mess around with sprites when I made awful sprite comics, so I'll have to see what I can do here.

RaspberryCommie wrote:I dunno. I kinda like Saiklo's sprite. If showing off her figure is that important, we can do it in the character art.

Anyway, assuming Molly passes inspection I think I'll get to work thinking up another character.

I give two thumbs up to Molly.

Deed wrote:I think that Veronica could use a more angular face and a slightly terse expression. She seems like she could be a bit hard-nosed at first glance, but otherwise approachable to non-idiots. Perhaps her hourglass figure could be a bit less exaggerated as well.

To me, Randolph looks pretty much spot on, but I'd maybe give him a fringe (bangs, to the Americans). You could probably give his face some imperfections, so that his boyishness is more pronounced by his slight lack of self grooming.

Here are some updated portraits of Veronica and Rannie. I was gonna make her face more angular initially, but I didn't want to make her seem too old.



Also, I found it kind of a pain to draw her with a stoic expression without just making her mouth really tiny. But, details.

soak314 wrote:Concept art's lookin' spiffy. Keep up the back and forth with the writers, Zeikier, they're the ones with the most accurate mental image of each character. I'll try and get some quick sprite templates done, since I'm already tooling around in VX.

I'm on Steam or Skype if anyone needs to keep in touch with me.


Here are Redrick and Matilda. I had a bit of a hard time getting Matilda right, since I'm kinda crappy at designing clothes, especially dresses. But hopefully we have a good base to work off of and suggestions always help!

Deed wrote:We need to assign you, Soak and Larto to different characters, for maxx efficiency.

The problem with that is we would likely end up with troubles with consistency in art even with everyone doing their best to maintain a similar style. It would be much better to try and spread the artists across the required art roles: tileset artist, concept artist, character spriter and the required roles for the portraits (sketch, ink, colour). Right now, we need to confirm what our artists are comfortable with and capable of doing. In addition to that, I think it would helpful for everyone to discuss why they're involved with this project for the sake of solidarity and motivation. For me, I take great pleasure in having full sets of music completed and having a solid project to focus on is quite encouraging.

Zeikier wrote:I had a bit of a hard time getting Matilda right, since I'm kinda crappy at designing clothes, especially dresses. But hopefully we have a good base to work off of and suggestions always help!

I think having a floral motif on her dress will help her seem a little more matronly.

If not characters, then they should certainly be assigned some kind of role, so that they can all be involved in their own way. I'm going to stick to music and critiquing, unless I get comfortable with using other tools. At the very least, I want Larto and Saiklo to say what they'd prefer to do. As Larto seemed to be more interested in doing animals first, it could be better if he had a go at those. Unless he does want to do characters. Saiklo is capable of spriting pretty much anything that's asked of him, so he could probably take care of characters and miscellaneous things.

On art: I'm most comfortable doing terrain, plants, and animals. Splitting up drawing characters would make the style wonky so I support either going for Larto or Saiklo characterways, and am voicing personal preference for Saiklo's style. Of course, my primary role will be design since I've pretty much hijacked that department already. I'll also study up on RPG makan once I finish basic systems.


-----


ANIMALS

This turned out a lot trickier than I thought.

I'm Setting maximum number of animals to 10 for now, with just cows to begin with so we can get some basic maths in.

Assumption: the player has 5 cows by the end of 1st season, 10 cows by the end of second season, and has shifted completely from crops to livestock. The capital spent in acquiring these cows has negated the profits he has made form any previous crop ventures, so he's starting out fresh at 0%. A bit of a stretch, but I need something to work off.

Third season in earns him a gross of 12% from just those 10 cows, and assuming he keeps it up until the end of the three year deadline, he'll make a grand total of 120% gross profits. To get a value for feed expenditures, we'll say 2% of that gross was spent on feeds, making his net an even 100%. Assuming he's made profits at 50% and 75% efficiency for season 1 and 2 respectively, we can add 5% and 7.5% to the totals as a rough estimate, totaling a net income of 112%, rounded down because we agriculturists are a pessimistic lot.

Maffin' this up (at the 120%/10 seasons gross) gets you 1.2% per cow per season total net. Cows give you a unit of milk per day, meaning that each unit of milk gets you 0.04% gross profit then and there. Assuming the 1,000,000 = 100% mark, that would mean that milk grosses 400 units of currency each. The 2% per season for feeds is translated into 20,000 currency per season,667 per day, or 67 per feed. As such, each unit of milk would net 333 currency, making for a rather stable source of income.

We assume that the 12% gross per season is what you'd make if cows give out medium level milk. High quality milk would improve by say, 25%, so a constant production of high level produce gets you 15% gross per season, or 500 cashmonies per milk. Low level milk grants 9% per season, or 300 goldz per liter o' milk. All at 67 bucks per unit of feed.

We could adjust our base design given these numbers. If we wanted to double animal population we'd just have to halve the unit price per product (feed prices would also be halved). Sheep are shorn weekly in HM, so a unit of wool would probably have to make 7x the price of milk plus a little extra for incentive towards product diversification.

Again, Post Harvest Production will not be factored in, as I plan on making it something entirely optional.

More to come, just gotta do some silly IRL stuff that is totally irrelevant. Psh, as if getting a job was more important than making video games.

I'm at work right now and I figured I'd draw some things while I'm here.

I'm guessing since this is a HM type game we'd shoot for a more anime-type style. Here's a mockup.

Saiklo, it's good to have you on the team. Das some good looking work. You can coordinate with Zeikier on who's doing which character.

I'll be throwing up more crunch later in the day, hopefully we can cover design basics by the end of the week.

Sweet stuff, Sai!

Is there a certain place I should put contact info? If it's fine to just say it here, then I'm on Steam at Zeikier, an Skype as... well, Zeikier again.

Zeikier wrote:Sweet stuff, Sai!

Is there a certain place I should put contact info? If it's fine to just say it here, then I'm on Steam at Zeikier, an Skype as... well, Zeikier again.

You can also edit it in the profile tab. I'll fit out mine now.

My contacts are saiklo(dot)net#gmail(dot)com / saiklo@live(dot)com

Steam and everything else is Saiklo, except for Skype, which is saikio (with an I instead of an L).

Oooh. Very nice Sai. You should get together with Zeik and figure out who's gonna draw what.

As for characters, we're up to two villagers, three marriage candidates (two bachelorettes and one bachelor) as well as four uncreated characters linked to the ones already made.

So that's 9 out of 20/25.

Also remember, there's #aggiegame on irc.synirc.net for more realtime discussion. Nobody's really been using it yet.