Monday 7 December 2009

Here We Go Again~

...So apparently I'm only going to post here every once a month. Hmm.

To try and change that, I figure I should post some character profiles and actually make use of the pile of sprites I have lying around - this is pretty much the first time I've ever had a backlog of artwork to post anywhere, feels pretty good, tbh!

So hey, here we have the 'main' boy and girl of Lucky Rabbit Reflex!:





Whoop. Not much info, but eh, there's not gonna be a huge amount of story here - it's pretty hard to keep a coherent story going when the player can access some events in any order, to be honest. But hey, stats!

Speaking of stats, while I'm not having to worry about them a huge amount at the moment, it's going to take a helluva lot of balancing to get this thing working in the end - I've just finished coding one of the exam events that plays out at the end of each term (animations, woo~), and managed to accidentally have the heroine fail or scrape a pass at every exam she took, despite spending the entire time up to that point avoiding boys and dates and all that good stuff. I'd like the game to be at least semi-challenging, but being able to actually pass things the MC tries her hand at would be pretty good too, I reckon.

...That said, I've had a hard time figuring out how these things have worked in similar games. And by similar games, I pretty much just mean Tokimemo. And even then, things seem to work out pretty differently in each one of those - the only one I had played a decent amount of until recently was Girl's Side 1st Love Plus, where I'd pretty much resigned myself to failing every exam horrifically and landing a boy who'd settle for a girl without two brain cells to rub together (don't ever change, Madoka!), but I've been having a go at the new Tokimeki Memorial 4 recently, and, well... it's pretty damn easy on the exam front. Granted, I was hardly top of the class, but I managed to pass everything, and even パッチリ a few of 'em, which is much further than I got with the female edition. Then again, there was more you had to do in those games - buying clothes, Christmas presents, choosing answers from a completely random selection... good times. Not really liking 4 so far, to be honest - aside from ogling the ladies, there isn't really much to do: no best friends (who actually matter, anyway - the two guys who deign to talk to you every once in a while have no friendship meters, as far as I can tell, and you never get to actually read the afterschool conversations you have with them), no shopping / clothes (though again, you can go shopping, but I'm not entirely sure what effect most of the stuff you can buy actually has...), no buying presents for the Secret Santa... the list goes on. I'll be waiting for my Girl's Side 3, thank you very much.

I did think it was pretty funny how characters react to you in the girls' and boys' versions, though. The main heroine in the Tokimemo 4 is the epitome of moe-moe - squeaky, energetic, and fairly kind to you for no apparent reason. And then there's the Girl's Side heroes... who are basically just dicks.

Them Japanese girls, eh...



...Oh, and I actually managed to write a fair amount of scenes for once! Not scenes with a huge amount of importance to the game overall, but scenes nonetheless. It's far easier to write non-repeating events, really. Bloody dates. I never thought thinking up three interesting things you could do in a bakery would be so hard, to be honest.

More character profiles coming soon!
(And I apologise if that image ends up incredibly huge in the feed again - it looks perfectly small from here, but seems to like expanding for no good reason... *learns to actually code someday*)

5 comments:

  1. I'm so envious at all the awesome stuff you can make :P
    Really looking forward to your game!

    And yeah, Girl's Side really is a fun game. I love how much you can do in it.

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  2. Awesome, you have a blog for this! You officially have another subscriber!

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  3. Hurr, I didn't realise I even had comments - thanks so much, guys!

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  4. Your cute little character bios on your thread inspired Amos Reid's Alternate Reality Game journal, by the way. :D

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  5. I'm, ah, not sure what that is, but I'm glad those things inspired something! :3

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