Ladies and Gentlemen - Presenting Act One!

TL;DR - THE DOWNLOAD

New features:

• Five possible endings
• Complete overhaul of the text - should be more engaging and easier to understand
• 16,000 words and 18 choices to make.

Please enjoy and if you find any bugs, including spelling mistakes or things you don't understand - report them!

The download link.

A lot of hard work went into this, I'm very sorry it's a day late but 0.07 had a bug or two I needed to iron out. 0.07a is here, so enjoy it! Comment and share everywhere, we'd really appreciate it!

Wait, what?

Not long now!

Well folks, Act 1 of Magical Schoolgirl Love Tale is nearly complete. I need to add literally just a few more lines of story, then throw out version 0.07 to you guys! Release time should be sometime tomorrow, hold onto your hats!

Still with us?

Here's a nice quick status update for what's up with 0.07 now. I handed the work I'd been doing with RenPy back over to Barnox, so he can overhaul all the story to make it far more coherent, and generally give a better first impression than the last versions did. We want people to be captivated like they would be by a great book, and feedback we've received suggests that we're not getting that in our first draft - but that's exactly the kind of advice we need, and you should be giving us!

Absolutely no idea when the next version is coming, but drop us every complaint you have until then.
~RV

Version 0.06 is up for download!

You can actually finish the story now! In the same way a half made platformer will kill you when the content runs out. There is only one ending achievable, but over 12,000 words of story to read along the way!

This is pretty much all of Act 1 first draft, excluding the individual character paths. It's taken a while, but it's really coming together!

Download Magical Schoolgirl Love Tale v0.06 here.

Don't forget to give us that precious precious feedback - we need it!

We're not dead!

You thought we were, didn't you! You pessimists! How could you give up on us like that!?

All right, check-list:

• Words are now at about 10,000, sadly that's only about 800 more than 0.05a.
• Next musical piece is ready to produce, provided I can remember it until then.
• Art for a new character is nearly done, I just need to make her expressions.
• The introduction has been reworked to make it far more interesting that it was.

Version 0.06 will be released as soon as I code up to the next major plot point. Let's call it next week again, like I did last time.

Don't give up hope! It's far too early to die yet!

~RV

Version 0.05a is up for download!

We now have a public demo! Version 0.05a can be found here.

This is approximately half of the first act, and what we have here is still up for heavy revision. All sprites are placeholders and programmer art, and it should be expected that there may be bugs and/or typing errors. Please report anything you find and give us as much feedback as possible - we need it!

The first demo is not too far away!

Don't think I've been slacking off all this time! We're just about to reach nine thousand words in the story, which feels like an appropriate number to release the first public demo to me. I'm really pleased with what we have so far, and we even have a few screenshots now to prove ourselves:

Lastly, I'm just going to drop this track that'll also be included in one particularly dramatic moment in the demo:

Version 0.05 is due for release sometime next week! Brace for impact!

Going Dark

Progress is still being made and things are still being done. It will just be a little quieter. Roast and I have decided, due to the nature of the story, to stop publishing details about the plot or characters. So why have we done this?

The reason we are revealing less about the plot is more obvious. We are crafting a story about a person's journey into an unknown world. The journey wouldn't be very interesting if you knew what was going to happen.
You would also have expectations of the story from character descriptions. If a character were described as having a hard outer shell with a warm gooey inside, you know that they will warm to you as the story progresses. You would also know they are an egg. By avoiding describing the characters beforehand we can avoid spoiling the plot.

In terms of the project things are coming along nicely. We have the backgrounds we need for Act 1 placeholders, as well as characters, so screenshots are a possibility soon.
Sadly, working on writing and plotting, there isn't much to show, unlike with Roast's music and arts. Guess we'll have to wait for the demo!

Placeholders!

Quick, press play and carry on reading:

So while neither Barnox nor I are artists, I like to think I can edit a picture pretty well. Yesterday, once B (imma call him B, so much quicker) had located some free base sprites for us to use, which came from here, I used my amazing GIMP skillery to turn them into mockups of our characters. I'm not going to give away much more, but I will leave you with a super snazzy montage of all four girls!

Pretty radical, if I say so myself. I'm working on integrating them with the story so far, and then we'll grab some placeholder backgrounds and finish this story section.

The roadmap:

1. Do some emotions for these grills.
2. Code them into the game.
3. Finish the last couple of music tracks I have planned.
4. Code them in too.
5. Finish the storyline for act 1 (B is working so hard on this you wouldn't even believe it)
6. Code that up as well.
7. Distribute act 1 around and beg for better sprites (both characters and BGs).
8. Write and code acts 2 and onwards.
9. Become recognised as gods among men.

~RV

My discoveries so far

As Roast has said previously, our community has worked on a few projects together in our time. For one of these it was Roast and I taking up coding, although not much got done that time.
With Magical Schoolgirl Love Tale, I'm experiencing a completely different side to the creation of a project. Whereas previously my projects were producing something simple (a Dragon Quest-like RPG game, randomised loot generator) this is something much more complicated. For me, not in the coding (Roast is handling much of that at the minute), but in the plot.

We knew Act 1 was going to be the greatest challenge. Deciding how the protagonist is brought into this school, how they spend their time there while not on any particular route. Choosing how the actions the protagonist takes influences what they do after Act 1. Planning the triggers and calculations for events and routes.
That said, I believe that from here the planning will get easier. The individual routes are likely easier, due to us being able to decide upon the number of endings, rather than requiring an output corresponding to each of the routes.

The script is coming along nicely. I work full time but I normally try to get out at least 1000 words each day. We've passed the 5000 word mark in the design doc script and likely have more than that in the actual game file, due to Roast translating my prose into something more suitable for a Visual Novel.
Progress is being made. Neither of us have mentioned any form of ETA and it is going to stay that way, likely for a rather long time. We cannot give a final word count. We cannot give a final play time. We can only continue working on what we have, enjoying the journey.

The main tune!

The main tune!

Well, I did it. I came up with a theme so cheap and repetitive it has to be the theme for the main menu and credits. Go listen to it and learn it off by heart - you'll be hearing much more of it in the future!

Things I've been up to since last time.

Firstly, here's my latest track, listen to it while you read the rest of the post, neither are very long:

This one was actually written with a particular point in mind, which is what I'm going to talk about for the remainder. Our game begins, rather predictably, with a monologue by our protagonist, who presently has multiple placeholder names. It's designed to be an insight very early on to his mind, and what he thinks about. A big part of the story is going to be his transformation from the sad, depressive type he starts off as (there are some really big complications to this too, but don't want to give them away just yet) to the personality he becomes by the ending, which could be anything from complete reform to crippling insanity, it's still very open.

This typical opening to a story usually has a calm piece of music attached to it, and this is one I'd been fiddling with without writing down for a few weeks before I started on the project at all; no point letting a good tune go to waste, eh? When I laid out the first five pieces I would be producing, this one was quickly labelled with a "dat monologue" tag. It'll get repeated a couple more times in the story though, whenever the story demands it.

Coding wise, the first draft is being written by Barnox at a similar pace to me rewriting it into our engine, so once he's got to the end of act one I'll do my best to catch up with him and we can beg somebody for art. That's how I see it working out, anyway.

No idea if the timing for the music and the post worked out, if it did then you're probably a slow reader, I dunno.

Working for the chance to explain why the other person did better.

Oftentimes, you find that people of similar interests or abilities group together on the internet and off the internet. By and large, #LD, where Barnox and I got together on this project, is a place where coders hang out. It's not DESIGNED that way, it's just how it works. The best artist we had for a long while has terrible parents, and is away for great lengths while he finds other ways to hack into his own computer. We're still a creative bunch, and come up with plenty of wacky ideas. At one points we wanted to make an MMO, another time we wanted to overhaul a game we all played. Both projects were failures - we elected leaders too fast and tried to be too organised about the whole thing, so nobody ended up with any work to do and so nobody did any.

This idea came out of similar origins. Jokes in instant messaging clients have a fabulous tendency to run away with themselves, and Barnox had recently played a lot of the Steins;Gate VN and we'd both played quite a bit of Kanon (on his recommendation) and Katawa Shoujo. Up to this point he has been writing over a thousand words a day into our design doc, and I can barely keep up with the various appendixes he's been putting in (we're up to appendix F, and the section NOT called appendix makes up less than a seventh of the total).

The way it's worked out, as Barnox mentioned, is that he's written pretty much all of the story so far and I've messed about with the engine and written music. I'm not going to pretend writing in RenPy is a difficult task (it really isn't, it's easy as hell, go try it), but there is a tendency to run away with yourself when you use it. I've been re-transcribing our story document into the engine, mostly for practise but also because it could well be the basis for what we do later.

Music-wise, it's coming as and when I make each piece, and nothing is written for a specific moment in the story, since it's all still very fluid and I wouldn't want to write for a scene that disappears later on.

Here are the ones I've written so far:

The last thing I want to mention is the motivation Barnox and I have had to put the last week or two of effort into such an undeveloped idea, and this relates to the title. Every time we've come to compare our work so far, it seems to be a praise contest for what the other person has done in comparison. I quite like it, in a strange sort of way that on a reasonably regular basis we spend five minutes explaining why what the other has done is better.

I'll be posting here as and when I've done some things, which at the present rate is pretty often. I appreciate how few people we have here so far, but I want to put this here just in case we do well some day.
~RV

The beginning of a project

I've begun this blog to track the progress that me and the team are making on Magical Schoolgirl Love Tale (Temp.).

The project originally sprang to mind after playing a few VNs, and me and others being silly and poking fun at anime/otaku culture stereotypes.
In true LD fashion, this was done in all caps.

So, I began planning characters. The main characters all had personalities that are the inverse of their power. They were the Lazy Energymancer, the Unrestrained Chaingirl, the Cold Pyromancer. However, we felt we hadn't yet scraped the bottom of the barrel, so we did, and threw in a Catgirl. Someone else came up with the suggestion that we took and ran a thousand miles with: A shy protagonist with the power to attract women, regardless of if he wants it.
However, we then began thinking of what would happen if we actually made this. We took each of the characters and expanded on their personalities. We gave each one a backstory, and thought about what problems their personalities would bring to the protagonist. We tried to make each into a real person.

Currently, we are still planning the First Act. This is where all the characters feature to some degree or other, and where the player must choose which path to pursue.

We at this moment refers to me, who is doing most of the writing the planning, and the other team member, currently writing and producing music and moving the script onto the Ren'Py engine.

I hope to update this blog at least weekly, to keep track of where we are in this project.
At this point we have been working seriously on the project for about two weeks.