Visual Novel Status Update

Not really the best at this kind of thing, but I wanted to at least give an update on the progress of my visual novel. As of now, I am working with three other talented people on developing this project. Our current team being:

Zazierotten - Story

PowerOfSin - Programming

FIZ-ROT - Art / Creative lead

And our musical producer would like to remain anonymous.

It's honestly crazy nice being able to find such talented people willing to help out in creating this in their own free time.

Now for what people really care about, actual progress haha. So far we are about 20% done in about a year, which sounds bad, but there is some reasoning behind it.

The first part being just how many times we have had to completely start over from having too grand of a scope or just a concept we ended up not liking over time. We are currently on the fourth rewrite of the story, but luckily this seems to be the one we are all happy with conceptually.

I thought it would be fun to share just some random tidbits of the early concept art from these phases:

One part that has been more of a challenge is just who our main cast will be. Here was our very first iteration of concepting on this:

Most of these initial characters have remained in our current iteration of the game, but they have seen some fairly large changes in design.

But the effort is definitely worth the time, which can be seen in the following mockup:But the effort is definitely worth the time, which can be seen in the following mockup:

I have been trying to not overcommit too early, as the actual refined sprite process is very time-consuming. That being the need to have consistent faces, proportions at multiple poses, etc. And then we need to precisely chop them up for the game engine to allow for the swapping of faces and outfits, along with some other cool features.

But the effort is definitely worth the time, which can be seen in the following mockup:

And just some more sprites for fun—these are still rough and have already changed quite a bit, but they give you a general idea of a more refined sprite:

Honestly, one of the most annoying characters to design has 100% been our main character who will be interacting with all of our very wholesome girls. Here are some initial concepts and where that character currently is:

There is so much to share character-wise still, but here is one more teaser of a small part of our cast:

Backgrounds and character CGs are one of the more daunting tasks, but I have fun with background stuff, so it's oddly relaxing. Here is a small sample of some rough backgrounds/concepts we have for those:

One thing I am very excited about is that we will have a completely original soundtrack from one of my close friends who is a long-term music producer. Due to the taboo nature of the game's themes, they have wanted to remain anonymous. Here is a small arrangement of a song done for the game.

mood-3

Anyways, I'm keeping things somewhat vague for now. We have a ton more to share, but just wanted to give a quick sneak peek into the world we're crafting for those who are looking forward to it. Until the next update!