You might have noticed that we moved our previous tumblr posts to the old blog, in fact we decided to use again good ol' weebly blog, since it's somehow more convenient than tumblr. So now you can all comment again on our articles (or insult the writers), yay!
I guess you could say that there was a lack of big update since the previous demo release in April, and I apologize about that, things have been quite hectic during summer, but now everything is progressing smoothly once again. So let's summarize all the things that happened since April :
1. About the team :
The FSS team got quite a lot of change among it members, many people left (or were purged after inactivity), and many new people joined. First of all, I need to talk about Cloudnovel, since it is the engine we've been using to create demo 2.0, and since it is also the website where the demo is currently hosted (and that you can still play even now). It is unfortunate, but we had to split up in our partnership with Cloudnovel, and as a result we decided to discontinue development of Lucid9 on Cloudnovel. At the end of the day, we chose to go with the more traditional engine ren'py for our future demos.
Member wise, I have the regret to inform you all of the departure of Lizts (programmer for cloudnovel and composer), Sony (programmer for cloudnovel), Jaytea (composer), Bluehour (composer). But all those departures are balanced by new fresh blood joining the team since the end of August :
- Zuka as a GUI ren'py programmer
- Bonesy as a ren'py Narrative scripting programmer
- Suna as a route writer
- Breeze as a composer
- Ziassan as a composer
- UltraKitsune as a composer / SFX creator
- Yunyunsae as a composer
- Zander as a SFX creator
A warm welcome to them!
2. The Lucid9 trailer
3. Next demo release : Full common route in January 2016
It's finally here! Our next milestone! I'm sure you're all pretty excited about this, so let me give some details :
- First of all, we decided to release a new demo for January 2016. I can't give a precise day yet, not can I guarantee that it won't be delayed by several weeks, but we'll try our best to respect this deadline.
- This demo will include the entirety of common route. As a reminder, Common route spans over 13 days, and should pretty much last you for something between 5 hours (for the fastest readers) and 7-8 hours.
- Despite what you could have believed from our previous demo, the pace is not going to be a 13-days slice of life comedy without any plot progression. First 5 days are pretty much exposition, character introductions and comedy, days 5 to 8 get into the heart of the mystery and has a much more tensed ambiance, while days 9 to 13 will be the climax of common route.
- Interestingly enough, common route can be seen pretty much as a standalone story/arc in the greater scheme of the Lucid9 universe. Several reasons to that, mainly, it will allow us to release a demo that has a complete development story-wise, and give some sort of satisfaction to the reader. Kinda comparable to a reader finishing the first tome of a book series (not exactly the same, but you get my idea). Some people will like it and ask for more, some others won't and will question our choices, we're aware that we can't please everyone, but nevertheless this will be the story we wanted to tell.
- The days 1 to 4 of this demo have been reworked a bit, so there will be new and changed content compared to the previous demo (the most noteworthy being a rework on Misaki's personality).
- As already mentioned previously, the demo will be released on ren'py as a downloadable. For those who were wondering, the current demo you can find on cloudnovel won't be worked on anymore and will be discontinued in favor of the ren'py version. We're already working on implementing the script on ren'py, and most of the GUI has already been created and implemented (the first screencapture posted on this article will be the next main menu screen for the next demo).
4. Social medias, forums, blog posts
Since the next release is getting closer and closer, we decided to become more active on the PR side, and you'll probably see more and more content getting published through the different networks, for example : Speedpainting videos from our artists on youtube, a podcast involving FSS team members, polls, quizz, contests, and much more! We'll also try to write blog articles more frequently. We have one thing though that is already ready for you to use, it's our new Trello forums, give it a try! You'll be able to discuss with us members directly, and maybe you'll be able to get exclusive information, assets preview and the likes! You can also ask us questions about the project!
You can find it here, or by clicking on our "forums" tab in the navigation menu! while you can still see the content of the forums, just create a trello account if you want to comment on the different threads!
That was about all I wanted to say for today! Stay tuned, we are currently preparing the podcast, and we should be able to release it soon!
(PS : If you still haven't played demo 2.0, give it a try here)
Diamonit