Our team has been working hard these past few weeks in order to finish the big Lucid9 demo for January 2016, so most of us will likely be taking a breather from development for the holidays. Today, however, I'd like to share a few things concerning the progress we've made so far.
Writing
Overall, most of the common route has been drafted thanks to Luna Chai—who's currently revising and implementing mystery plot points for Day 11, 12, and 13. The editors are also working on smoothing out the drafts and are now on Day 7, I believe. We've also recruited r-bit as a sort of "editorial manager" to assist in keeping our writing styles consistent.
One of the biggest changes to the common route script was Misaki's character rework—as I'm sure Dia had briefly mentioned before. To go more in-depth about that issue (as her route writer, I feel an explanation is needed) we realized that Misaki seemed pretty two-dimensional, underdeveloped, unrealistic. Sure, she had a reasonable backstory, but her actions, aspirations, quirks, dialogue, and progression didn't effectively reflect her "true nature"—the "true Misaki Kazehaya", so to say.
It took about a month or so to complete her new character outline, and with the help from the editors, I'm currently handling most of the revisions that involve her in common route. I should be finishing that sometime soon before deadlines.
As for the other heroines, Clestae and Player have written a good chunk of their routes' first act. Suna and I should also be writing our routes after our work with common route is finished. (Suna is handling the SFX and assisting with the video promo at the moment.)
Art
Speaking of the promo, we're also making a new and improved Lucid9 trailer. That should hopefully be finished by the time we release Demo 3.0.
One of the reasons the trailer is being revised is due to Elphaze's alterations of the male characters—to match the girls stylistically. She recently uploaded the final version of the sprites, so you can see a side by side comparison here.
Dizzy is around halfway done with the CGs in common route, and afterwords will be sketching up some new poses and expressions for the heroines.
Yuuko has also pumped out a few more backgrounds. One of them was Ryouta's office, as you may have seen on his speed painting video that was posted on our Youtube page.
Music
Music has also been progressing steadily. Breezee, Ziassan, and UltraKitsune have composed a few new tracks for Lucid9, which can now be heard on our group's Soundcloud page. (I've added them just recently, so please do take a listen when you can.)
Programming
Bonsey, Ian, and Zuka have been making strides with programming. So far, they've implemented up to Day 4 into the Ren'py engine, and are currently squashing any bugs that show up. They're also trying to work in the cellphone system into demo. Here's a draft created by Luna Chai of Yama's cell:
There's still so much I want to talk about, but I'll save those for future updates. As always, thanks for supporting us, and have a happy holiday! Until next year.
~ David