Lucky Rabbit Reflex - Now on Sale!

It's been just shy of three years, but we got there eventually, eh? Please click the banner below to visit the website and check it out! I'll be posting hints and whatnot over at the forums if people need them, so feel free to sign up.

Also, trailer!

Thanks so much for the support you guys have given me over the past few years, and to my wonderful beta testers. I hope you enjoy the game!

And I'm spent.

After two and a half years, Lucky Rabbit Reflex is finally complete! ...It's about bloody time, to be honest. ;) Having spent the last week or so adding extras and ironing out the code, the game should hopefully be ready for beta testing at some point next week (signups below!).

Full game features:

• 19 endings
• 5+ romanceable gentlemen
• 75 unique CGs
• 150+ unique items of clothing and accessories
• CG / endings gallery
  
• 178,861 words

If you'd be interested in beta testing Lucky Rabbit Reflex, please apply using the following form. Testers will be included in the credits section of the game; thanks in advance to anyone applying (and to everyone who has expressed an interest so far)!

Please include any information you think might be relevant in the 'message' section (e.g. specific operating system, aspects of beta testing you think you might be good at (such as proofreading), experience with similar games, etc. (though no experience is actually necessary!)). Thank you!

Edit: You guys, thank you so much for all of the responses! Apparently the last form reached its quota, but you can still apply for the beta using the following form (this one's pretty unlikely to fill up, but if it does stop working for any reason feel free to comment below with the same information needed for the form).

Edit2: Thanks for the overwhelming response, guys! Applications for the beta are now closed, and I'll be sending out e-mails shortly. I should be holding round two of beta testing in a couple of weeks, so if anyone who applied this time around and didn't make it into the beta would still be willing to help out later in the month, that would be great. Watch this space~!

Obligatory image spam:

I honestly don't know how this game ended up so pink.

Still Alive - Valentine's Edition

...So I've decided I should probably stop mentioning every time I post that 'the game is almost complete!' and that 'it should be done within the next couple of months!', as I seem to have totally and completely missed the Christmas demo deadline I set for myself. Whoops!

As of yesterday, however, nearly 100% of the game minus endings, birthday events and a few CGs is now complete. The end is in sight. Honest! The game is still unlikely to see release for a few months yet, but it's nice to know it's getting there.

What I've been up to since the last update (like five years ago, sorry about that!):

• Tweaking the dating system: Originally you could only call up the male characters on Saturdays, but you can now call up your lady friends for (platonic) weekend hijinks. Befriending some of the female characters can lead to extra events with the guys, so it might be worth giving up a few dates to hang out with the girls...
• Adding holiday / seasonal events: I added the Christmas events a while back, but now we've got Halloween, Bonfire Night and Valentine's, too. So many backgrounds, aughh~ As Valentine's Day falls on a Saturday in-game, it's up to the heroine to pick a guy who likes her enough to give her a gift at the end of the date, one of which is that kitschy little bear / mug up there. Who could that be from...?
  
• Finishing up Shuppin's and Beck's paths: I have never drawn so many violins in my life.
• Possibly adding secret events: ...But you didn't hear it from me.
• Testing and testing and testing and...: Continually tweaking the difficulty - I don't want to make things too difficult and un-intuitive, though at the moment the game is pretty easy. Of course, I know all of the right responses and clothing choices to make, so I'm not exactly the best person to test these things out! If anyone has any opinions on dating sim / visual novel difficulty I'd love to hear them; I personally prefer slightly easier games over more difficult ones, but I do like some degree of challenge.

And that's about it! Hopefully it won't take me too long to finish up the remaining events, though the endings may take a while as they'll probably end up being pretty graphics-intensive. To be honest, though, it's the writing that takes the most time (once I code the most recent events into the game, the word count should be approaching 150,000), so I'm relieved the brunt of that's out of the way, at least!

Oh, and I also made an Indie DB account for the game, though there isn't a huge amount there at the moment. There may be a couple of screenshots I haven't posted here, though, so please check it out!

Image spam:



Happy Valentine's Day~!

Milestone Get!

...So clearly I'm completely incapable of updating this blog more than once every few months. :B Now that I'm working on Lucky Rabbit Reflex full time, however, I've been making far more progress than ever before, so huzzah! I've even managed to meet a couple of major milestones this month, so my dream of possibly maybe getting the game sort of release-able before Christmas might possibly come true. Maybe.

Firstly, the clothing system is now totally complete - above we have our heroine modelling a few of the items available in the game (though unfortunately, you won't be able to wear all of them at the same time - rest assured, though, the beach hat + rollerblades look is definitely possible :B), which come in at over 150 items of clothing and accessories spread over three different shops...


...like La Dauphine here, which sells cute dresses and sensible outfits (writing some of the boys' responses to the cuter outfits ended up being pretty fun, actually - suffice it to say some of the guys don't really appreciate the heroine dressing like a twelve-year old. But hey!). I won't spoil the other shops (though to be honest, all of the other clothes menu screenshots I've been posting are from one of them, but eh :B), but they each have their individual shopkeepers who may or may not be familiar with the main cast.


There are also a few new styles, bringing the grand total to seven. Some of these can be created by combining two different styles. If only real life fashion were so simple, hur hur :B

Finally, and most importantly, all of the date events with the boys are now complete! Though I'd only planned on spending a few weeks writing them, as usual I completely underestimated the amount of writing a dating sim actually needs and the dates ended up taking up around half of the 109,000 word count, aughh. But hey, what's done is done! I'd say at this point, around 80% or so of the game is totally complete and playable, so it really is getting there.

Choose from one of the five date spots...

Dress to impress...

...and hope your date's as passionate about Pac-Man as you are.

...So yeah, mucho progress. Of course, now that I no longer have drawing endless items of clothing to distract myself, I'll actually have to get cracking on the writing I've been putting off... :B writing some of the more story-ish events has been pretty fun, though, so we'll see how it goes!

Also, thank you guys so much for the positive responses to the previous post - it's been really amazing getting feedback from everyone. I really want to make Lucky Rabbit Reflex as polished as I possibly can, so if anyone has any comments or critique, feel free to tear this thing apart! (...which will hopefully be easier once I actually post a demo, hoho).

(...Sometime in the next couple of months, maybe? :3)

Brushing Away the Cobwebs

I like how after all this talk of inordinate amounts of free time, I abandon the blog for like, four months. Oops! I honestly apologise to anyone watching this place for the complete and utter lack of updates, but rest assured, I've actually been working far more on the game than ever before, and progress is going very smoothly. With the current word count in the vicinity of 90,000 words (and counting!) this is shaping up to be a pretty long game! I've also been reading up on my fashion mags, and have added a ton of new clothes and accessories to the game, along with new events, CGs and dates. Huzzah!

The down side to this, of course, is that working on Lucky Rabbit Reflex takes up most of my time, to the point where I can't really justify spending so much time on the game without charging for the finished product. I honestly do feel guilty and apprehensive about charging money for the game, which I had originally intended to be a free English alternative to the Tokimeki Memorial games, and for anyone following this blog in the hopes of getting a free game at the end of it all, I truly am sorry. That said, charging for the game would allow me to pay for music and fonts and all those other slick, professional things (and also food! Graduate life is hard D:), so I'd really appreciate comments from anyone reading this blog - would you be prepared to spend $20 or thereabouts on a Tokimeki-style dating sim? What do you expect from a $20 indie game, in terms of length, polish, extras and so on? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Image Time!


New clothes menu! ...Again. Fashions change from season to season, so you might have to hurry if you want that dress you've had your eye on...


...Don't hate the player, hate the game.


Let's all go to the movies... to buy ourselves some snacks!~

...So yeah. Hopefully I'll be able to release a demo with all of this new content at some point in the near future, so watch this space!

...Hopefully.

Here Comes the Sun

...And just in time for the end of my exams! Woo~ Have a Marius to celebrate actual blue skies over Edinburgh, and blossoms, which I can't draw but you get the idea, really.

Now that I have an inordinate amount of free time (for the next couple of weeks, at least - here's hoping I actually graduate, hoho) I'm trying to get back into the swing of working on LRR! as quickly as possible - since the last update, I've got a handful of CGs and a fair few new events written, though I've had a complete hiatus for about three weeks and I'm trying to figure out what I should be doing next besides drawing completely unrelated ice-cream pictures. But eh, I'm sure inspiration'll strike eventually. :B

I've also been reworking some of the characters' clothing and whatnot.

I've only actually edited one or two of the outfits, as each sprite has around two poses and drawing clothes seems to take forever for some reason, but hopefully they look okay. I broke out my Scott Pilgrims for research purposes (srsly though, those characters are snappy dressers - the author's a guy, too. I am ashamed ;_;) but as I have no fashion sense whatsoever it's pretty hard to design decent clothing, tbh. It's especially difficult with characters who are meant to be fashionable - I went through about three fully-drawn sprites for Lamb (top left) whose sprites I'd already completely overhauled once before that before setting on her current outfit.

I should probably get back to writing the script now, huh. *cough*

Still Alive!

...Wow. Where did February and March go, eh? I apologise for the blog hiatus - I've got about a week's breather and then it's right back into exam revision, but after that I'll hopefully graduate and have to go out into the real world have ample time to work on this baby, so yeah. Here's hoping!

I've actually made a fair bit of progress since January, though - the script so far comes in at slightly under 60,000 words, which isn't half bad, though as the game's a simulation you'll be seeing a fair bit less than that on a single playthrough. Still, replay value is always a good thing, right? I've also begun properly fleshing out all of the winnable boys, writing paths, working likes and dislikes into events, and all that good stuff. Rhett in particular seems like a far more well-rounded character than he was originally, so hopefully people will find him interesting!

Oh, and I completely redesigned Beck's sprites. He didn't look a great deal like a male model before - maybe he's a little closer now?

...I guess he filled out a little. :B

Not much else to report - playing through the game so far, I realise I'm going to have to do a lot of stat-balancing once the events are all complete and coded in; at the moment, I've pretty much been making things up as I've gone along, but I'll have to actually sit down with a calculator and work things out by the time the game is nearing completion. TV Tropes was right. And here I thought I'd never need to use maths again...

*Obligatory 'sorry for linking TV Tropes, hope you enjoy the next five hours' comment*

I've also been vaguely thinking about character accents, and how to get those across in text. At the moment, I just haven't bothered - pretty much all of LRR!'s cast has some kind of non-RP English / British accent (while the game's setting is fictional, it's meant to be somewhere vaguely in the north of England, as that's where I'm from and it excuses any Northernisms I may slip into the text accidentally, hurhur), but unless I want everyone sounding like Hagrid I don't think I'm going to be able to get their accents across in writing. Which is a shame, really, as Shuppin is meant to have a sexy Scottish twang, but you'd never know unless ah decided tae have him speakin' like this, mah wee bairnies. Oh, aye.

...Yeah, it's probably for the best.

Image time!

Just a Quickie~

Another day wasted, ho hum. :/ I do have some snazzy new gameplay videos showing off some of the new features I mentioned last time, though, so that's something. It's pretty encouraging how far these videos have come since the last one I uploaded, too! (Though that was around nine months ago... how time flies~)

So, without further ado...

Clothing System


Look familiar? Hurhur :B I'm hoping to have some more clothes in there before the game is done, but there are quite a few different combinations to be getting on with already, and the game only lasts a year, so there aren't going to be a huge number of chances to go shopping anyway (unless the player forfeits going on dates... which is slightly besides the point, really).

Dating Marius


Once your relationship values with him are high enough, Marius will finally stop being so damn lazy and date the player someplace other than the arcade where he works. Each boy has a place they dislike, though, so be careful! Films the player can watch at the cinema are randomised. (I remember these events taking forever to write - the video cuts off early, but the responses to each of the nine possible films are pretty long, actually. Bloody dialogue, eh).

Dating Per


Little Per's grown on me a fair bit since I created him, to be honest. It takes a fair while before you can actually date him, but to make up for it, he pretty much already likes you and will follow you practically anywhere. He'll still lose relationship points if you drag him to places he doesn't like, though.

So there you have it - not insanely interesting, but I didn't want to spoil any CGs/ special events, so it's dates or bust, I'm afraid! Sound effects are also left out, as apparently my PC has issues actually recording sound and video at the same time...

Back to not working I go!~

Busy, Busy, Busy~

Happy New Year!!~ Can't believe it's 2010 already, gawd. To celebrate, have a Shuppin new year wallpaper I drew up when I should've been working, hurhur.

[800x600 ~ 1024 x 768 ~ 1280 x 800]

In other news, I've managed to actually get a decent amount done for once, mainly things I wasn't actually planning on putting into the game in the first place, but hey. It's generally feeling far more like a 'game' than a cut-down visual novel now, so that's something.

New features:

• New shopping / clothing system - you can now actually earn money from each of the four in-game jobs (though not very much - life is hard in the Lucky Rabbit universe, it seems. Balanced gameplay is hard!), go shopping on weekends and put together outfits in four different styles.
• To go with this, Nkem, manager of the fashion boutique Tide, posts an online blog once a month showing which types of clothing and colours are in style at the moment. Boys will now comment on these things before each date, and each boy has a specific style they particularly like. So... yeah.
• New email system - characters can now send the player emails after various events. Isn't really very useful, but I liked that feature in other dating sims, and it saves me having to make an uninteresting event for every little bit of information I want to give the player, so it works out.

So yeah. Actually got a huge amount done for once! Unfortunately, I'll be out of commission for at least the next month or so - I'll be forcing myself to take a hiatus from development, as I have a crazy amount of work I should be doing for uni (translations and dissertations, oh god), and should probably, y'know, actually do some of it. Wish me luck~!

Image spaaaaam~ (sorry about that! I'll figure out how to post these things properly one of these days...)

~Proper Chrimbo~

Just a quickie this time - my computer's been out of commission for a few days with a broken power cord, and now the bloody touchpad isn't working properly. Oh, and I have about four assignments I should be working on over Christmas, hurhur. :B But here are the remaining character profiles:

While he's not exactly a hidden character, winning Beck shouldn't end up being as straightforward as it is with the other guys... but we shall see. He's a rather up-himself male model who works part-time at a trendy boutique in town, but could (read: will) end up doing a little something on the side...

Lamb totally isn't her real name, of course. Will you find it out over the course of the game? Probably not. I haven't thought of one yet.

One of the last characters I designed, I chucked Per in at the last minute to even up the number of guys and girls, and because the character roster apparently needed a shota. Even though I generally find the token jailbait boy in these games incredibly creepy. Eh, well. It's pretty refreshing writing a completely clueless character, though, so that's a plus...

And finally, Petime, one of the few characters I actually find relatively easy to write - mainly because her relatively eloquent manner of speech is rollicking good fun to write, eh wot! She'll probably end up having the most 'story' of all of the female characters, and most of her scenes are already written. Good show!

~~~

So yeah, that's the main cast done - there are a handful of side-characters too (mainly bosses / coworkers / fellow students at the various jobs and clubs the heroine can have), but these are the guys you'll need to impress - and palling up with your ladyfriends is often the only way to get to know certain boys, so there are a fair few girls in there for a reason!

I'd best be off before this faulty touchpad makes me throw my laptop out of the window, but lets just say there's a brand new (totally ripped off Tokimemo) system in the game now that I wasn't even really planning on sticking in there, so huzzah!

(...It's really not that interesting. D:)

(...Oh, and Merry Christmas!~)

More from the Roster

...*Chensterrain in two-posts-in-as-many-weeks shocker!*

Here are some more character profiles - figured I'd post four this time around, as I've already posted info on Shuppin and Dys elsewhere.

The obligatory school 'prince', and probably the default boy after Marius. Shuppin's Scottish, but I couldn't really make that obvious without putting a load of 'aye's and 'wee's into his dialogue, so you'll just have to imagine his lilting Scots brogue...

(Also, as with Marius, I've written most of this guy's events, so huzzah!)

Dys is meant to be the 'prettiest' of the female characters, but it doesn't really come across. Eh, well. I also meant to have more of the girls wear trousers as part of their uniform, but only Dys ended up with them, for whatever reason. Uh, I like how her hair came out, though!

One of the few characters I actually designed just for this game - Rhett was originally one of a nameless pair of redheaded twins in the story I created these characters for, and I figured I'd slap him in LRR! for want of any decent male characters... I like how the tallest guy(s) in the game is 6'2". The Lucky Rabbit cast are pygmies and loving it.

...Pygmies! ~ Lu is probably the most fun to write of all the female characters, so you'd think I'd have written more of her scenes, tbh.

~~~

In other news, I'm hard at work writing when I should be working, as always - hopefully, one of these days I'll be able to just force myself to sit down and write one of the routes, as each 'path' is only made up of a few events (not including dates), though each guy has multiple paths that can be played through simultaneously, so... yeah. :/ I've been pretty inspired lately, though - went to Glasgow the other day and managed to take some great pics of the fairground / Christmas market in-between dragging mates onto the carousel like the great womanchild I am, so hopefully they'll make decent references for the funfair scenes in the game.

Also, there are seasons now! Huzzah. No more standing in the park in short sleeves in the middle of winter!

More character profiles to come soon~

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*)

Netballa', Shot Calla'

They see me pivotin', they hatin'

As usual, I'm hard at work creating artwork for the game rather than actually working on the script, but eh - the above should eventually be part of the game's intro 'movie', if I decide to actually make one. If I can't manage it with 'pan's and 'move's, I don't think I'll bother, tbqh.

The netball player is Merle Piepo, one of the first characters the player meets in the game and the heroine's default BFF, albeit a fairly bitchy one who clearly has aspirations on one of the dateable boys, oh my. She's also the captain of the netball team, and will be found dossing about around the court once I've actually got her scenes written, hurr. Of course, netball scenes require new sprites (ugh) and an actual knowledge of netball (to Wikipedia!), so these kinds of things always end up taking longer than I expect them to. But hey. If I can somehow bring the joy of netball to the world (oh god, I hated netball so much, seriously, all that standing still and spinning on the spot nonsense did my head in, I swear to god), it'll all be worth it...

~~~

In other news, I did actually manage to get some scenes written, mainly for Shuppin's (the quiet, emo-looking musician) path. Again, though I can possibly just about handle an acoustic guitar (coincidentally, Shuppin's instrument of choice, those young'uns and their newfangled electronic guitars be damned), I don't really know anything about music and have pretty much had to trawl Wikipedia for the few scenes where someone actually has to look like they know what they're talking about. Will it end up making any sense? Probably not. But eh, I figure they can talk about Fenders and humbuckers and plectrums every now and again and then get back to the whole 'hey, quiet guys with guitars are cool' thing. Maybe.

...Maybe. I've also been trying to give every character at least one sprite in the game - Shuppin's dad up there has about four, because drawing instruments is fun (and a real time-sink, ugh), and I've just finished watching K-On!, which might have contributed to the whole musical thing just a tad (not that there's much actual music in it. To be honest, as an avid moe-hater I'm not entirely sure why I actually watched it, but eh. The slice-of-life parts were nice. But I digress). There's also Shuppin's boss, who is pretty much just another foil for Shuppin, as he's pretty quiet at first and loud, obnoxious characters are much easier for me to write, hurhur.

It's also that time of the year again, when the travelling funfairs come crawling out of the woodwork and there are fireworks and candyfloss and toffee apples and all that good stuff, so I figured I'd code some date events centred around that. They should end up being pretty much the same as the ones in Tokimeki Memorial: Girl's Side; you choose which ride to go on with a boy, and maybe get a little boost of affection depending on the ride you chose. I've got the most difficult part (choppy animations! Woo) done already, so I should probably get around to actually writing the events themselves... but eh. It can wait. It's nearly Bonfire Night! Happy Halloween while we're at it, too - I went as a gangsta with bling and everything, cheapest costume ever. Ahh, festivities...




Next up, Chrimbo! I've got stock Christmassy music, and all. That, and a ballroom background / various sprites in formal dress ready and waiting, though I'm not sure whether I should use them for a Christmas party (à la Tokimemo) or for some kind of Leavers' Ball / Prom... choices, choices.

*Sigh*... All this work, and I've barely made any noticeable progress. Dating Sims are hard!~

(Fun as hell playing back through it all, though. It's like, it's an actual, playable game already... *warm fuzzies* albeit one with no ending or point. But still!)