Significant progress has been made this month regarding story development. After that whole snafu we faced a while back, I say we're finally regaining our footing. The writers have been meeting almost on a daily bases, and we've recently come up with a solidified outline for the plot (I say solidified but we still need Diamonit's—the plot supervisor's—seal of approval). Once he's done that, we'll then be focusing most of our efforts on character progression and the themes in each route. Basically, our plan of attack will sort of play out like this:

- General plot outline > main external conflict > main theme (CHECKARONI)
- Route outlines > interweaving conflicts > character progressions > "sub" themes
- Quality check > WRITINGGGGGGGGG

I'm really oversimplifying the process here, but that's essentially what it boils down to. Not to mention we also have the art to direct in the meanwhile—finding references for clothing, poses, expressions, BGs, and so forth.

Speaking of which, all of the artists currently have their hands full with Lucid9 work. Dizzy and Elphaze have been working closely to match their art styles, and have recently made sprite drafts for Airi, Misaki, Masato, and Yahiko. Yuuko has also been hard at work creating a brand spanking new BG that'll be showcased in the second part. I believe he's in the process of coloring it.

In other news, John and the voice actors should be getting back to recording soon after a short hiatus. I'll be sure to give an update on that at a later date.

So it seems these posts are likely going to be a monthly thing rather than weekly. At least, until we aren't as occupied with L9 work and personal obligations... I'm not much of a blogger, so if there's anything you would like to see besides these updates be sure to leave a comment!

On a final note, we're still planning on releasing Lucid9: Inciting Incident's OST in mp3 format. That'll be released sometime in the near future. In the meantime, here's a draft Dizzy made for the cover!

~ David A. "CardioPen"

I wanted to write this post sooner, but was too preoccupied watching the latest Gover Mecher episode. (I'm sorry)

Anywho, as you may have heard, us writers had hit a rough patch with planning. It wasn't anything too serious though. The complexity of the plot just got too... well... complicated for our liking.

To be perfectly honest, it gave us a bit of stress. Every time we managed to solve one thing, nine more issues popped up. We didn't get far in our meetings, and we eventually had to step back and reconsider our approach. 

The main problem was that we wanted to implement far too many concepts into the story, and some of them hardly contributed to the overall plot. It made things extremely confusing, and not everyone was on the same page on how to go about the execution. Rather than completely revising everything we had planned, we decided to chuck out a portion of things we didn't actually need, which made things a whole lot easier to work with. 

I know I'm being really vague here, but I can't go too much into detail without giving away spoilers for the second part of Lucid9. Hopefully, this at least gives you an idea of what we've been working on lately. 

After that issue was resolved, our female sprite artist, DizzyWorld2, recently discussed with us about new sprite designs. After giving her a few references, she's currently drafting up some sketches of the characters. 

We're also planning on reorganizing our Trello boards and Google Docs soon. Spring cleaning—or rather, summer cleaning—is always fun to do.

I think that's all the news for now. I wanted to post a picture to go along with this post, so I figured President Jay Graves would be suitable considering Independence Day was just a few days ago. (I know, I'm late) Happy belated birthday, Acirema!

Until next time!

​
~ David A. "CardioPen"