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Valentines Update - State of Lucid9

2/14/2018

Hello folks, Diamonit writing, it’s been a while!
It has been a while since we last shared substantial news about the state of progress for Inciting Incident’s sequel, and an even longer time since I wrote a blogpost (the two are more or less related, to tell the truth). There’s a lot to say, so you can expect this post to be pretty long.

1 - Thank you
First of all, I wanted to thank you all for the amazing reception we got at the release of Inciting Incident. It couldn’t make us any happier to see people read and enjoy the story we’ve prepared for them. Still, to this day, we regularly receive messages from people telling us how they felt when reading Inciting Incident, and even though we are not always able to reply, we’re extremely grateful for your support! Of course, we do realize that Inciting Incident created (rather high) expectations for the sequel, and this is partly why things have been taking so long.

2 - What we’ve been up to for the past two years
Long story short; when we finished Inciting Incident, we more or less had a vague idea of the story’s direction. More precisely, I knew how the sequel would start and how it would conclude, but everything in between was still a work in progress. That’s when issues started to arise. We’ve had creative disagreements regarding how the rest of the story should be handled. Our Inciting Incident main writer, Luna, also left to pursue her own project (I really recommend you to check it out here if you haven’t heard of it already), which left me trying to find a new recruit to fill in her shoes for her route, something that would end up becoming quite the difficult task.

In the months following the release, we continued to discuss the continuation of the story. We continued to become more and more frustrated after discussions, especially since we were ambitious and wanted to create something that wouldn’t let the readers down, but proposed concepts were often debated over. We didn’t share the same ideologies in terms of story writing. Frankly, all of this was really getting to me, and I was getting really tired of it all (add the fact that I had worked nearly non stop for half a year in order to make sure Inciting Incident release would be a success), and I ended up losing motivation and becoming less and less active. It’s at around this time that I asked David to temporarily replace me since I needed a break from Lucid9. Truth be told, I sometimes considered to quit at that point. After all, the release of Inciting Incident was a success and left me really satisfied with what I had accomplished. But there was always the nagging feeling at the back of my mind that I couldn’t really let it all remain unfinished like this, and that a lot of people were actually waiting for the sequel. I couldn’t let them down.

Months passed, and a number of writers came and left. Elizabeth’s previous writer was replaced by Via. Nugget took over Suna’s role as Akira’s Route writer but was eventually replaced by Reddly. Clestae was also bogged down by real life commitments, and as a result, had to resign from her writer position to become an editor. DJ is currently filling in as Airi’s writer, who has done some very good work so far, and you can all expect him to do Airi’s route justice. Via joining the team is what motivated me to get involved in Lucid9 again, as he had a good head on his shoulders, shared (or at least understood) my thought process when creating or commenting on the content, and was always willing to work out all the details for his route and the world lore in general. Eventually, at the end of 2017, I was fully directing Lucid9 again, and here I am now writing this update. I’m also extremely grateful to David who held the fort while I was not motivated enough to work on Lucid9. Without him, the project would probably have died back then.

3 - What concrete progress has been made so far?
Here are how things stand currently for Lucid9’s sequel :

Quite a lot of background art has been completed. Expect to see Yama visit new places that were only mentioned previously in Inciting Incident.
The writing is finally showing progress. Of course, the amount of progress varies from writer to writer, but most of them have gotten a good grip on their characters and how to naturally write them so that dialogue and narration remain close to the one in Inciting Incident. The lore has been greatly expanded, and every route is planned out. So really, from now on, it’s a matter of writing regularly (and I’ll be here to make sure that progress is indeed done regularly).
Music hasn’t seen much progress at the moment, but we’ve been trying to remedy that. Expect more music in the future.
Most of the male characters have their first sprite done while the female cast is still mostly in development. Dizzy, the female characters artist, decided to improve her drawing style, so the female sprites might look a bit different than what you got used to in Inciting Incident. Here is a sneak peak of the current Airi’s design for the sequel :

Airi Hiraga, drawn by Dizzyworld2

4 - Content of the sequel (Slight spoilers)
It would be pretty unfair to give you a progress update without talking a bit about the content of the sequel, especially considering the abrupt and shocking way Inciting Incident ended.

A word about the structure of this sequel first. As some of you might (or might not) know, Inciting Incident is supposed to be a “Common Route”. In Visual Novels, a Common Route is often an introductory segment of the story that presents the universe and the characters until it eventually splits onto various paths called “Routes”. Each Route focuses on a different heroine. Inciting Incident ends right at the conclusion of the Common Route, which means the sequel will split into 4 Routes (one for each heroine), and the choice of that route is determined by the previous choices you’ve made in Inciting Incident. So basically, you can expect the sequel to be 4 distinct parallel stories following Yama and each respective heroine.

As for the content in itself, I won't reveal too much as I’d rather avoid spoilers. The only thing that I’ll say is that the story will resume 3 years after we left Yama at the end of Inciting Incident. That also explains why the new designs for the male and female characters look more mature, they are actually all older than in Inciting Incident.

Finally, at this point it’s very likely there will be a third part to Lucid9, which would correspond to a “True Route”; the final route of the VN which should happen in parallel to the heroine routes once again. The true route should tie everything up from Inciting Incident and the Heroine routes, and answer all the questions that have remained unanswered.

5 - Date of release for Part 2
We haven’t decided on a date yet. I won’t try to give any estimation as it’s very likely that it’ll end up being not respected, so I can only ask you for your patience and for you to wait until we have progressed enough for me to confidently set a release date. But we’ll take as much time as necessary to ensure that the sequel will live up to everyone’s expectations.

6 - Voice Acting for Inciting Incident
I know that voice acting was supposed to be implemented in 2017, and I’m very sorry for the people who are eagerly waiting for this update, but unfortunately, it will have to be postponed indefinitely. There are several reasons for this decision. On the VA side, we have had multiple cast changes and departures due to various reasons, and each time, we've had to scramble to fill in replacements. Furthermore, the work is unpaid, which makes it very difficult for the voice actors to set Lucid9 as a priority.

(At this point, some of you might wonder about crowdfunding, but we stand by our decision against a crowdfunding campaign for various reasons.)

On our side, we’ve been unable to provide the necessary support to the voice acting recording sessions, as we have our hands full with the development of the sequel. As a result, things have been really slow (there’s not even 3 in-game days worth of voice recording done at the moment), and it won’t be done anytime soon. I can only apologize again for this, as it was a feature we had promised, but we’re completely unable to deliver it at the moment. I hope it will not prevent the people planning to wait for the voice acting to play Inciting Incident.

7 - Other Lucid9 related mini-projects
In order to make up for the lack of Lucid9 related content for you all to enjoy while we work on the sequel, I’ve organized with Elphaze a new official “Lucid9 4-Koma” section on the blog where we’ll regularly post funny 4-komas for everyone to read an enjoy. For those who don’t know what 4-komas are, it’s a very short comical story told in the form of a manga page with 4 panels. You can also submit your own 4-koma ideas, and we’ll pick the most interesting / funniest ones to draw from time to time! Here is the first 4-koma made by Elphaze:

We'll also try to include more Gover Mecher in the sequel!

Anyway, that’s it for this long update. Sorry again for being so slow with the development of the sequel, and thank you all for bearing with us. 2018 will be an important year for the Lucid9 project as I fully intend to make as much progress as possible toward a release. And thanks again for your support, it really means a lot to us all and is one of our biggest motivations when working on Lucid9!

What? Are you saying it’s Valentines and usually we share an illustration on that day? Oh wait, talking about Valentines, it seems Yahiko’s overwhelming popularity earned him quite a lot of chocolate…

See you next time!
Diamonit

This is actually the post Inciting Incident design for Yahiko ;)

12 Comments

Trials and Tribulations of a FSS Writer (+ Update)

12/25/2017

2 Comments

One of my most frustrating recurring experiences as a writer consists in knowing exactly what a character would do or say in a specific situation, but suddenly becoming unable to put it into words.

There’s no logical reasoning behind it: the scene has been laid out, the characters all have distinct forms of speech, point-A and point-B are in clear sight… but somehow the page remains empty, as if refusing to let itself be stained by a single one of my words. Eventually I’m able to force something out, no matter how many days it takes, but it inevitably leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth: because I had to force it, and I’m not sure if it was good enough, if I didn’t just write words only for the sake of completing a scene, or even if I was being truthful to my characters. In fact, this same notion of having characters to call my own has been a tricky one to internalize during my time here at Fallen Snow Studios. The reasons are both obvious… and maybe not-so-obvious.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Daniel “Via” Cuturrufo, scenario writer for Elizabeth’s route, who joined this team several months after the release of Lucid9: Inciting Incident. The prospect of writing for a project that not only was in mid-production, but already had a published first half, intimidated me at first. Several bad experiences had left me quite wary of these humongous VN projects (people either lost interest after realizing how tough of a job it was, or the project died by itself, crushed by the weight of its own ideas) but a stubborn part of me decided to try it out regardless, after a friend from Sekai Project had asked if I’d be willing. I said yes, and proceeded to go through the majority of Inciting Incident before my pal David, another writer, could contact me with the details.

The initial months were rather… difficult. Again, joining a project under these specific circumstances put me, as a writer, in an awkward spot: I couldn’t go back to revise or make significant alterations to a character’s personality or background, as everything I wrote had to be a direct evolution of what readers had already experienced in the first part. Lucid9 is also a plot-heavy story, and “plot” isn’t something I excel at. I’m not great at keeping up with too many details at once, you see, and even now I always have our Master Document open (currently standing at 66 pages) to periodically check if I’m getting anything wrong.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t all pain and suffering. Fallen Snow Studios granted me a few surprises along the way. The first one was discovering just how organized everything was, and how frequent communication between writers and also other members of the team occurred. Part of my surprise may have been due to the aforementioned “bad experiences”: most groups I’d worked with in the past met either one of these two characteristics, but rarely both. One of them had their documents neatly sorted in different folders and everyone’s roles were clearly defined, but writers rarely ever talked to each other, and didn’t read scripts that weren’t their own. Another time I got the complete opposite: a group that discussed ideas all the time, but never committed enough to properly organize its time and resources. And being part of those very same teams, I wasn’t completely blameless about these issues.

Part of why everything works smoothly here at FSS (at least compared to these past experiences) is possibly the fact that we have a dedicated director, (who at most also plays the role of editor). Diamonit (or Dia, for short) has been a key figure in keeping us all working at a steady pace. While he doesn’t do any writing, he’s always checking everyone’s progress, telling us right away when something works, but mostly when it doesn’t. Having a director means that his decisions also carry more weight than anybody else’s, which is honestly for the best: it allows us to not get stuck in our work, to know what’s the right thing to do and what mistakes need fixing. It’s quite refreshing to feel like I’m not on my own for once. The role of director in the EVN studios I’ve been part of has always been taken by whoever is considered the lead writer. Working for a studio under someone whose sole job is to direct has been a novel experience. But of course, without our co-director David, who’s also been in charge of keeping up with the VA’s, promoting L9 and basically taking care of everything not related to the creative aspects of the project, we probably wouldn’t get to focus on our jobs without any worries, as we’ve been doing for a while.

But being able to focus doesn’t mean that everything would go smoothly for me. Following up on the issues I described before, my job FSS became somewhat of a struggle, and the hardest part was probably the writing itself. My task is to tell a story from the perspective of Yama, Elizabeth and the rest, characters that had been fleshed-out extensively during Inciting Incident by the amazing Luna Chai and the rest of the team. But they hadn’t been fleshed-out by me. That’s an important distinction to make: you can analyze the previous scenes, make a list of personality traits, simulate in your head how a conversation would proceed between two or more of these characters, but you’re still an outsider in their world, and you don’t know what’s really going on in their heads.

To make sure I could do it right, I started by writing a number of practice scenes, trying to simulate their personalities as I had seen them in Inciting Incident. Of course, thanks to the nature of the heroine routes, it was actually required of me to tweak their personalities a little to reflect the overhauled mood of the game, but I still felt it necessary to get the basics right.
Our director’s reception to the first practice scene was… politely negative. Elizabeth was too aggressive, Yama too jaded, their interactions way more hostile than necessary. I realized getting a hang of characters that weren’t mine was harder than it seemed.

But I kept trying. The second practice scene did a lot better than the first, and after the third one I finally gained enough confidence to start with the script proper. But yet again, progress became a rocky business, for the reasons explained at the beginning of this post. Even while knowing what would happen during the scene at hand, I just couldn’t get the dialogue or narration to come out naturally and often struggled with painting a right characterization for Yama and Elizabeth.

To reiterate, I was allowed to take some liberties with the characters and setting for the sake of making my route more distinct… but it was still a difficult affair.

Yet one day it clicked. After several months of struggle, my hands finally typed out a scene that felt right. It was a moment in which I not only knew what a character had to say in a specific moment, but rather how they would say it, and how they would feel as they said it. It came to my attention that I could not just churn out conversations and narration without feeling as trapped as before, and it didn’t take me long to realize the reason: it finally felt like these characters were mine. I don’t use this word to say that I own them, but rather, that they are a part of me, and that I can understand them even if they are technically completely different people. Getting to this point helped me a lot, not only with writing, but also with feeling more passionate about the project… and also have fun with it, a feeling I realized I’d been losing over time.

Progress might slow down still, and sometimes I won’t know what to do. But I’m glad I’ve reached this point. It makes me want to give it my all. And once everything is written, and the project has been published, I hope the rest of you will feel just as much as I’m feeling as I write this script.

Take this as a year’s end reflection of sorts, and also as your long-awaited project update. Everyone is working hard; words are being written; sprites and backgrounds are getting drawn. Despite life getting in the way and all of us encountering a different creative hurdle every week, we’re still working to make sure this is a product we can be proud of.

Oh, and Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Xmas Lizzy drawn by DizzyWorld2

~ Via

(PS David is an awesome dude)

2 Comments

September Update

9/21/2017

15 Comments

Hey everyone, some important news today.

After much deliberation, we came to the unfortunate decision of parting with Akira's writer, NuggetMelonSurpreme, along with two of our editors due to creative differences. We wish them all the best in their future endeavors.

Thankfully, we were fortunate enough to get into contact with ReddlyB, a marvelous writer who's very familiar with visual novel development. He'll be helping us with Akira's route, and we've recently filled him in on the direction of the project.

Speaking of the routes, we're nearing completion of the first arc for Airi and Elizabeth (hopefully by the beginning of October). Akira's would naturally need to be rewritten, and Misaki's a little less than half complete due to other factors. As usual, progress is varied, but that's to be expected in a project as large as this. Rest assured, we're making an effort to read each other's drafts no matter where we are to avoid inconsistencies.

Lately, Dizzy has been buried in school work, but should be done with Misaki and Elizabeth's designs some time this month. Elphaze has also been sharing draft designs in the art chat for some of the side characters. You may recognize this dashing man from Inciting Incident. He'll play a more prominent role in the next part.

Eufonie, our background artist, had to find a replacement for his six-year-old hard drive after it ended up kicking the bucket, so his progress was temporarily hampered as a result. He should be getting back into the swing of things soon, though.

Concerning the voice acting for Inciting Incident, we're still aiming to have it released by the middle of 2018. John and the others have been working hard to limit delays.

Some time ago, we had made a VA test build for Day 1. It came out fantastic, though Breezee is sorting out a few minor leveling and compression issues, which should be a cinch for him. The recordings for Day 2 are finished, and Day 3 is also nearing completion. The scripts for Days 4 & 5 have been fully edited for the voice actors and recording sessions for those days should start in two weeks or so. In summary: WE'RE GETTING THERE, FOLKS.

The composers have been mixing a few drafts for the soundtrack. I'll be sure to post some of them here for your ear holes once they're finalized.

Lizzy doodle - Eufonie

So sorry this post came out later than intended, but generally these progress updates should come out every two months at the latest. We'd like to assure those of you supporting Lucid9 that we haven't dropped the project—and even if that were the case, we'd make an announcement rather than disappearing into obscurity.

In other news, we're planning to record another podcast next month. We have some potential guests in mind, but if you'd like to see anyone in particular or would like us to discuss a certain topic, be sure to let us know!

Until next time!

~ David A. "CardioPen"

15 Comments

My Thoughts On Nightcore

7/5/2017

0 Comments

Well, it's certainly been a while!

I know I said last time that I'd talk about AMVs in my next post, but I've decided to toss that in the backburner for a while. I want to take my time with it, and make sure to word everything in such a way that cannot be misconstrued as easily, since it is a touchy topic after all.

Not to say that Nightcore isn't (in a sense), but I've only recently begun listening to this "genre" that's been associated with anime for some reason, and I found it fascinating enough to warrant a blog post. If this fascination of mine isn't indicative of my old age, I don't know what is. Anyway...

First of all, can this even be considered a genre? Most people would say no, but I'd argue that it can if we categorise it under general EDM, specifically plunderphonics, which already has its own plethora of genres like grindcore. We have DJs legitimately mixing and remixing songs all the time too, so I frankly don't see why not.

Is it harming the industry? There have been some cases of copyrighted songs being sold on various music sites, but for the most part Nightcore seems to be doing more good than evil. There are producers that support Nightcore channels and even release songs of their own, as well as labels releasing songs and compilations. And of course, there are countless not-for-profit artists on YouTube that entice people to check out the original tracks. Someone on this forum actually went into detail about this, if you're interested.

Okay cool, so...what's it got to do with anime then? Nothing, actually. People have merely noted the similarities between this type of music and the kinds of themes you'll hear on a show. Although to be perfectly honest, the observation is pretty outdated by this point. Sure, there are plenty of poppy tunes that have been recorded for anime in the past, but we're hearing much more variety now, and even then we've always been hearing all sorts of vocalists and their genres of music being credited for contributing to anime alongside the upbeat ones (albeit to a lesser degree). I only say this, because it seems like every time someone talks about a cheerful-sounding song sung by a high-pitched vocalist, they'll say it sounds "anime-ish," which I simply don't think can be used as a characteristic today.

But what do I think of Nightcore in general? Like many, I'm not particularly crazy about it - but I do think it has its uses. For one, I think Eurodance/pop songs suit it much better than what we're normally used to in North America. Not because I'm biased, but because I find that the more "festive" and "exotic"(?) vibes of these songs tend to be easily pairable with Nightcore's happy and energetic beat. That was the original idea, anyway.

I also think it's conducive to comedic moments in video production, especially in improv and situations where you're forced/feeling pressured to speed things up (think of Let's Plays). Nightcore can help play into the lighthearted and "screwball" atmosphere when you least expect it.

As for whether or not any actual talent or effort are needed to create this kind of music, I think the most important things to consider are the motivation to create it in the first place, as well as others' appreciation for it. At the end of the day, someone had an idea to recreate a song they like as something they believe will sound (even more) creative, cool, and interesting, and someone else listening in felt the same way about it. Talent and effort are definitely worthy of merit, make no mistake about that; I'm just saying that artistic value will mean different things to everyone. And perhaps the amount of work going into Nightcore is just enough to strike a chord with fans.

As the old saying goes, "It's the thought that counts."

~ Milica M. "Mimo"

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July Update

7/1/2017

3 Comments

Hey everyone, today's progress update is going to be short and sweet. We're currently in the midst of developing act 1, so there isn't a whole lot of exciting news as of yet.

Writing has been progressing the most lately, with a majority of the routes near the mid point of the first act (and one technically on the second act). The scripts did have to undergo a few revisions both content-wise and stylistically, but I would say that they're shaping up quite nicely compared to when we first started writing.

Art is also picking up again now that Elphaze and Dizzy are somewhat free from their personal obligations. Masato, Yahiko, Airi, and Akira all have their first outfit and pose completed and colored. Lucid9 has a large cast of characters—around 16 for the next part—so there's a lot of work involved concerning sprite creation. Consequently, CGs for the routes haven't been decided on quite yet, since we want to be methodical in choosing the best scenes to include them in. I'm especially excited for those.

ALSO! Here's a drawing of Yama that Elphaze had created. It's not an official asset, but it certainly gives off a certain vibe that'll be present in the next part of Lucid9. Hope you guys love him as much as I do!

That's all the interesting news for now! Apologies for the short update this time around. Again, we can't thank you guys enough for your patience and support. Please be sure to leave a review for Inciting Incident on our Steam page if you haven't yet, and feel free to drop a rating on our VNDB page when you can.

Until next time!

~ David A. "CardioPen"

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Valentines Update - State of Lucid9

Trials and Tribulations of a FSS Writer (+ Update)

September Update

My Thoughts On Nightcore

July Update

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