Hiiii, everyone! Happy Valentine’s Day~! ♥（ﾉ´∀`）
It’s been a while! Today we’re going to talk about the ominous “Project #1” I’d mentioned in the last update, and of course I have a cute Valentine’s artwork for you as well~! So let’s jump right into it!
(Wait, actually… one other thing. I’ve increased the font size a little (basically from 10 pt to 11 pt) to make the page a little more readable. I was always wondering if the font and colors are okay like this because I got the impression that it might give some people trouble reading, but somehow I never thought about increasing the font size until now. Well ;;; I hope it looks okay.)
Project #1, or… Tenkei Tales I: Levellia
That’s right, I’ve actually picked up work on this again at the beginning of the year. It was supposed to be done for Christmas 2015, but I never managed to finish and now it’s already 2019… how the heck did that happen? ;;; In case you’re new here or need a refresher, let me tell you a bit about it and show you a little sneak peek of the newly finished key visual too!
Tenkei Tales I was meant to be Prismanga’s very first game project, a free RPG Maker VX Ace game about Tsukasa and Setsuya (the two on the left), traveling brothers who ended up staying with the Minagawa family for some time (the girl on the right is the youngest daughter, Kanami). It’s a very simple game – just a short story about family and wishes, and sprinkled with some festive cheer because it takes place during the Festival of Seven Blessings, which is a week-long holiday that’s basically Christmas and New Year’s in one big package. (That’s why it was supposed to have a Christmas release.)
Back in 2015, I got relatively far with development, but I was too bad at coding to tweak the menu like I wanted and I had a lot of trouble finding royalty-free music and sfx as well. Not because there was a shortage of good stuff, but because sound design is the part of gamedev I majorly suck at. After Christmas was over, I really lost steam and never finished. In 2016, I took another look at it, but my drawing style had changed considerably and the old artworks looked horrible to me, so I decided to overhaul all the sprites and CGs, which went reasonably well… but then I got distracted and stopped working on it again ;;;
Flash forward to 2018, where I considered trying to get it done for Christmas again, but decided against it because there was so much other stuff to take care of. So I postponed work on Tenkei Tales to 2019, and here we are. Right at the beginning of January, I started working on it again and I’ve been perfectly on track for a whole month. This time, I’m revising some of the designs and overhauling ALL the assets, including the maps, because even the 2016 art looks too awful for me to use… (Oh, and we’ve switched to RPG Maker MV!) Unfortunately, the beginning of February was very slow for some reason, so I still haven’t thrown my assets together like I’d planned to do before Valentine’s Day. But hopefully I’ll be able to do it in the next two weeks!
That being said, I won’t make any big announcements yet, since that just wouldn’t make a lot of sense right now. It would basically be me going “Hey, look at this sparkly ‘new’ game!! …too bad that NaNoRenO is starting and I won’t touch Tenkei Tales development for the forseeable future.” See? That’d be kind of stupid, so I’ll make the proper announcement after game jam time is over. (But I didn’t want to leave the ten people reading this blog hanging, so I figured I could at least inform you over here ww)
Honestly, sometimes I’m not sure why I still try to get this game done after so much time has passed. I have tons of other ideas and projects by now – the list of possibilities is basically endless. But somehow it feels like I won’t be able to properly move on until I finally get this out of my system. So I’d like to take one last shot at it and finish until Christmas 2019… but if it doesn’t work out AGAIN, I’ll probably call it quits for good. (With TTI, not with gamedev.) Let’s just hope it won’t come to that, right? (・・。)ゞ
Anyway, let’s move on to the next thing: Here’s the big version of this year’s Valentine’s artwork! Rena’s chocolate is safe to eat and probably tasty, but you should watch out for Misha’s chocolate… she might have put something into it to make you fall in love with her, so you will do her bidding for as long as the effect lasts ;;;
Misha isn’t the only person with potentially dangerous chocolate though, as you can see in the Gosatsu Valentine’s Day artwork…! (Sometimes I’m thinking that Misha and Mika could be sisters, with both of them being pretty mischievous, having a moe fang (that little tooth sticking out) and even their names being kind of similar. Shinya would probably move in with Senri if that happened though… one annoying little sister is already more than he can handle ww)
Alright, I think that’s it for now. Only two weeks until NaNoRenO…! I hope that things will work out better this time and that I’ll be able to present you something playable at the end of March. Until then, I’ll try to do my best to finish the White Day and April Fools’ special artworks early, and get some more TTI:L assets finished!
Thank you for reading everyone! Have a lovely and delicious Valentine’s Day~! <3