After a discussion with one of our readers on Discord last week, I realized that we never went into much detail about the amount of progress that has been done for the heroine routes. At this point in development, I feel now is as good a time as any to throw some numbers your way to give you all a good idea of the scope of the project. 

Currently there are four routes planned for the upcoming release: Airi's, Misaki's, Akira's, and Elizabeth's. While the length of each of these will vary somewhat, they are all estimated to be a little less than the script for Inciting Incident, which clocked in at roughly 230,318 words and 12 hours of reading time. Of course, these numbers are estimations. There are several factors that contribute to the total that wouldn't reflect a normal playthrough, such as the coding commands unseen by the readers. Below is an example of the way we format the scripts. 

Current Route Progress
Hopefully these estimates provide a sense of how large the heroine routes are in relation to the common route a.k.a. Inciting Incident, which has already been released. 

​Inciting Incident
Total: 230,318 words
Reading estimate: 12 hours

Airi's Route
Total: 106,549 words
Reading estimate: 6 hours

Akira's Route
Total: 37,327 words
Reading estimate: 2 hours

Elizabeth's Route
Total: 146,635 words
Reading estimate: 8 hours

Misaki's Route
Total: 35,329 words
Reading estimate: 2 hours

All Heroine Routes
Total: 325,840 words
Reading estimate: 18 hours

As you can see, the current total word count for all of the routes have already surpassed Inciting Incident, and will continue to grow as Misaki and Akira's routes make further progress. 

Given Inciting Incident was released in 2016, the artists' styles have changed significantly, and so many of the sprites and backgrounds for the heroine routes are completely new. ​

Each character has their own list of expressions, 2-3 poses, and 2-3 sets of clothing, as well as different shades of lighting to reflect the time of day; morning, sunset, and night.

In the photo above, Masato is wearing his 'default clothes', with an 'intense expression', and has his hand raised in a fist, which we call his 'active pose'. All of these combinations make one "sprite". In Inciting Incident alone, Masato had 12 total sprites. In level of difficulty, expressions are the easiest to draw, with poses and clothing being more time consuming. And so references are chosen carefully to reflect the characters' personalities and significance in the story. 

All of the designs for the main cast have been completed, with the exception of a few other characters that need to be drawn. Currently, this is where progress stands, some of the art already being present in the heroine prologues that were released just recently. 

Yama (1 base sprite)
Airi (1 base sprite + casual outfit + 7 expressions)
Akira (1 base sprite + casual outfit + 2 poses)
Elizabeth (1 base sprite + casual outfit)
Misaki (1 base sprite + casual outfit)
Yahiko (1 default pose + 13 expressions, 1 vulnerable pose + 6 expressions, 1 active pose + 3 expressions)
Masato (1 default pose + 8 expressions, 1 active pose + 4 expressions)
Katsu (3 outfits, 1 default pose + 9 expressions)
Natsuki (1 default pose)
Izumi (1 default pose + 10 expressions, 1 active pose + 8 expressions)
Hisao (1 default pose + 8 expressions, 1 active pose + 8 expressions, glasses on and off)
Shigure (1 base sprite)

The background art also has its share of variations, as seen above. Like the character sprites, there are morning, sunset, and night versions. In Inciting Incident, there were a total of 22 backgrounds. While the old ones won't be redrawn from scratch, there will be 35 new backgrounds that will show up in the heroine routes. 25 of which have been completed. 

While there will be CGs and other special backgrounds, these are currently lower on the priority list and will be drawn when the writing has been finished, since they are heavily reliant on the length and importance of a scene. 

All of the 36 music tracks that appeared in Inciting Incident will also remain, however, there will be roughly 20+ new tracks slated to be released for the routes, with some having different versions to match the mood of a scene. For example, above you can listen to two tracks that have the same title but different descriptors: Lemniscate (soft) and Lemniscate (medium). This was done to combat some of the whiplash in tone that was present in the first part of Lucid9.

All of the completed tracks with the exception of 1 or 2 can be found at our Soundcloud. 

While significant progress has been made these past few years, we are still some ways from completion. One of the main reasons development has taken so long was mostly due to the constant changing of writers. With the story in a state of flux, the other departments had difficulty making progress.

Thankfully, this is no longer an issue. Elizabeth and Airi's routes are very close to completion, with the latter only needing about 3 or 4 remaining scenes left—each being 2,000 words on average. As mentioned in a previous post, we will be releasing these two routes as soon as they are finished, with Akira and Misaki's coming at a later date. 

Our current list of objectives are as follow (in order of importance): 
​
Writing
1. Complete scripts for heroine routes
2. Revision process
3. Editing phase

Art
4. Complete character sprites
5. Complete remaining backgrounds
6. Complete CGs

Music
7. Complete music tracks
8. Find SFX

Hopefully this update was enough to give you a sense of the current state of the project. If you have any further questions, feel free to write us here or on our Discord server. As always, thank you all so much for sticking with us!

​- David A. "CardioPen" 

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen."
- Vladimir Lenin

2020 has been a pretty crazy year so far. With COVID-19 running rampant across the globe, everyone is stuck indoors for the time being. I hope you're all staying safe and practicing social distancing to help slow the spread.  

These are scary times we're living in. Even so, we're fortunate enough to be able to connect with each other through the web, and service providers are offering two months of free internet to those who've been struggling financially. While it's important to read the news and stay informed, it's also important to take a break from it once in a while. If you haven't read the recently released heroine prologues, now is as good as time as any. If you did play it, please let us know what you thought! 

Since the release, we've been focused on finishing the scripts for the routes. Assets would come later once those are edited. It's much more efficient for us to manage one thing at a time, and in hindsight, it's something we really should have done sooner. Admittedly our progress with writing has been a little inconsistent, but a majority of the scripts are already uploaded to the drive, so we really just need one more big push to reach the top of the hill. There's currently no release date for that yet, and one probably won't come until we test and retest the engine so that we don't have a repeat of the prologue release. Big thanks to Via and Ian for sorting out that issue. Things could've been a lot worse if I were the one handling it. 

Since my state is one of the many now on lockdown, I've used this time to catch up on some maintenance work. I've updated some info on our FAQ page, fixed the formatting for Elphaze's 4-Koma so it should be easier to see, and added an "Extra" section to the site. Along with the 4-Koma's, I'm hoping to start up some pet projects like writing side stories (spin-offs?) that are set in the Lucid9 universe. I'm currently in the process of writing one and will hopefully post that here soon. We'll also see whether we can schedule another podcast or Twitch stream. If anyone has any suggestions for the content they'd like to see from us, do let us know. 

As always, thanks for sticking with us. Stay safe, play games. 

- David A. "CardioPen"

​Hello, everyone! Today marks the first release since Inciting Incident, and I’d like to take this opportunity to reflect a little on our experiences during the past year.

I’ll be frank: they weren't great. Development throughout 2019 was plagued with setbacks that we couldn’t predict and that we still haven’t fully resolved. A lot of them were development setbacks, but several other involved some real life issues that unfortunately took a toll on our staff members. As a result, we couldn’t get much progress done, at least not as much as we were expecting. These are the obvious problems that come with a volunteer project such as ours. But knowing they are obvious doesn’t make the past year any less disheartening.

Which is why this release is so important. In the process of writing, or of creating any sort of art really, it’s always refreshing to finally put something out there, anything at all. It allows other people to appreciate what we’re doing, to give us the drive to keep working despite the odds. In the process of preparing these Heroine Prologues, us members who weren’t present for Inciting Incident’s release got a chance to get more used to Lucid9’s engine and programming quirks, something that will prove to be a big help for the game’s development process later down the line. But above all, the sole thought of letting you people read even just a fragment of what we’ve been preparing for the past few years is uplifting, and will surely give us the strength to keep on working towards a full release.

For now, we simply hope this release, which tells the beginning of our characters’ new journey, is enjoyable to you all. And if it can also get you more excited for the remainder of the game, then we couldn’t be happier. 

- Daniel “Via” Cuturrufo, Fallen Snow Studios

​Last week, we briefly pushed this update, only to find out that people were having trouble loading their old saves since an error would pop up before returning them to the beginning of the game. Sadly, we couldn't find an easy fix to this problem without undoing months of work in the game's code.

Which is why we eventually came up with an alternative solution: older saves made in Lucid9: Inciting Incident prior to this update will automatically go through a "compatibility fix". If you load one of these saves, you won't be loaded into the exact spot as you were before, but rather the beginning of the Day / Chapter in which the save was made. This will only happen once, after which you'll be able to save and load normally. We apologize for the inconvenience. 

After a long wait, the heroine prologues release is now finished and ready to be released on Steam this very December 15th!

As we previously described, the Heroine Prologues contain the first chapter for each of the four heroine routes in Lucid9, plus a little bit of additional content written solely for this release! Be advised that these chapters serve only as introductory pieces to the remainder of our game, narrated from the POV of each one of the heroines. Rest assured, however, that Yama will return as the overall protagonist and narrator in future releases.

We're extremely excited to finally share a portion of the content we'd been working on. It's certainly a milestone for us, and we hope that it sparks interest for the heroine routes that is still yet to come.

To give you some insight of what to expect from the prologues, here's a quick list:

- Dope, new music tracks.
- Bad writing from a prominent political figure. 
- (ง •̀_•́)ง ​
- Lemonade drink drunk by a lemonade boy. 
- Good Dads & Shady Moms. 
- A crotch rocket.

In order to access this new content, you need to first have reached the ending of Lucid9: Inciting Incident. Once you do, you will notice that the main menu theme has changed, along with something else. Simply find this new option to see what we have in store!

It's been about three years since Inciting Incident was released, and we're more than aware of the growing anticipation for the second part. When we first started this project, we never imagined we would spend such a considerable amount of time on it. Still, we trudged on, and we're now seeing the results of all our years of blood, sweat, and tears. We're finally nearing the homestretch. 

Prologue Scenes
In October, we mentioned that we would release the prologues for the heroine routes. Currently, they are all scripted and just need a bit of editing and small revisions. We're already implementing some of the assets into the engine, and will release them on Steam this month or in July. We'll ask some of our regulars in our Discord server to beta test them when the time comes. 

Heroine Routes
Since the writing for Airi's and Elizabeth’s routes are nearly finished, we've come to a  decision to release them first, with Akira's and Misaki’s coming at a later date. While some of you may have been looking forward to the latter routes, we've felt it was necessary given the amount of time this project has been in development. For those who were excited about Airi and Elizabeth, we are hoping to release their routes this year if all goes well.

To summarize: things are going to be released very soon. And we'll continue to work hard to finish the entirety of Lucid9 until the very end. Again, thank you all for your patience. 

If you're ever wondering about our progress but the blog hasn't been updated in a while, you can follow us on Twitter and Facebook. You can also join our Discord server and speak with us directly. There, you can also get early access to some of the stuff we've been working on. 

- David A. "CardioPen"