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
