Friday, December 13, 2013

Progress! Edition

Hello all, apologies for the time it's taken to release another progress update, we'd like to share with you what's been going on so far and why we’ve been quiet up until now. For those unaware, we didn’t disappear entirely, some information about the project was given via interview conducted on our IRC some weeks ago. You can find the log here.

The reason behind our silence is due to some analysis amongst the team about the premise of Amare in Bellum and why it stands out, which resulted in a change of details regarding the characters, tone, setting, and how we could utilize what those things to be interesting. After all, besides containing cute girls, our next best hook is the refugee life the characters find themselves in and the tension between civilians of two warring nations living together.

We felt that what we had wasn’t taking full advantage of those things, so we’ve been talking about how to do so; from the problems our characters might run across each day, to an almost ridiculous level of detail about how and why the economy works and how it may affect our characters in the long term.

It’s because of those story-changing debates that we’ve been reluctant to make any updates until we were all committed on a direction to follow. Now that we have, we can begin to move forward again and tell you what we’ve accomplished since deciding on those things.

In the writing department, one of the biggest challenges we’ve overcome is having a scene-by-scene outline of act one. The first act is a difficult beast to tackle for any kind of ren’ai since it’s one of the most important parts of the game. You need to consider a lot of things in act one: introductions, ways to present characters and their traits creatively, pace out the scenes between each heroine, identify the protagonist’s motivations and decide on the mechanics behind getting onto each route. This was especially difficult for Amare in Bellum since we also need to present background exposition on the setting and find a way to ease the player into the rules of and restrictions of the refugee lifestyle.

Refugee life isn’t quite as methodical as one set in school might be and the girl’s meetings should be more elaborate than being down to mere chance with little purpose. As a result, thinking of the protagonist’s motivations and events leading to the heroine’s scenes in such an open environment was pretty difficult. Amelia’s case was particularly annoying, since you don’t want to throw out the childhood friend too soon when trying to convey a foreign environment. Rant aside, due to the nature of the story act one ended up becoming quite a bit longer than we first thought it would be, but there’s plenty of scenes with cute girls so that should even things out.

To reflect our changes with the way we’re presenting the premise, Kiwi has been fiddling on the art side of things, both from a design standpoint and artistic one. Initially we were looking at a painted kind of look as opposed to a solid one since it took advantage of her use of colors:

But Kiwi got to experimenting again and came up with a nice middle ground between the two alongside outfit changes for a few girls to fit in with the new focus on the setting and give it a more distinct feel:

 
Lastly on the visuals, the UI, symbols and primary colors for Amare in Bellum has been thrown around between us recently. An overall representative look for “refugee” is hard to determine, Google results often turn up with sad-looking people and I’m not sure if that would make for an appropriate UI, so we settled upon the setting as a source of inspiration for how things will look. A coastal town with a fishing pier has lead us towards using wooden and sandy visuals, we're still testing designs though.

Once we’ve decided on what things we should use to present the UI we will begin to apply those onto the design for our website. The website itself is in a good spot too, we’ve come up with a good way to show our characters on it and we’ll hopefully get something up and running soon for you guys.

So with all this positive development, I’m afraid I must give some bad news for you guys. We have decided to scrap the previously mentioned semi-demo, meet the girls. It was designed to be a very short interactive experience with the heroines using the game’s engine with a story unrelated to the main game, but since the writing was finished a while back, we felt it no longer presented the project or our individual skills anymore after we finding a new direction for the visual novel. Rather than continue to work on it and update it to be more in line with the changes, we decided it would be best for everyone to focus on getting an act one demo out for you guys.

For those interested, the story would have involved the reader following amateur reporter Shiv Raker around the town of Marin as he interviews the main heroines for an article about refugee lives, it would have been a means to show the girl’s personalities since coming to Marin and a small look into how the engine works (although anybody reading this has probably played a visual novel before, so it was a little redundant.)

To end on a positive note, another musician has joined our ranks: Scroll_Up, or EQ as he sometimes goes by, is exceptional at what he does (and he does a lot) and we’re more than eager to have him on board on the team. You can check out some of his stuff on his Soundcloud here.
For some relevance, you can also find his current work on Vyra’s theme here.

Thanks for reading, we hope this makes up for the silence for the past few months. Have a good day.
-Outlander

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