♥ NaNoRenO Week 1 ♥

(This is a post originally from Patreon, that I'm now mirroring over onto the project for anyone interested in the process!) 

Hi Everyone! ♥

We're now through the first week of NaNoRenO! The week's been a strong one for me, I'm making good progress!

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- Off to a strong start - 

Day 1 was mostly in sketching everything out in a way that I had SOMETHING to work with, as well as borrowing the concept art I'd done of them a couple weeks back to use as placeholders:

Mostly working out the layout + thick border design!

(Despite drawing several pictures of the characters, I still really like the original poses, so you'll see that I keep it quite similiar with their more refined iterations later on.)

Everything came together pretty quickly! I'm very happy with how cohesive everything looks.

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- Theatre of the mind, or something - 

After the placeholders, I focused on getting the little cut-in bgs a little more useable. I managed to sketch out them all,  to varying degrees of quality. My favourite is the church bg!! I like the angle.

Something I'm wanting to feel out better is like. what happens if I lean a little heavier on words/descriptions instead of thinking about VNs as a sort of puppet stage play? The reader's imagination is a powerful thing! In the same way it's good to imply things with words, I'll see if I can do that a little in allowing myself bgs that don't show everything.

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- Character sprites! -

All the sprites have been sketched out too! (As well as some of their expressions, though none have been implimented yet).

The additional time spent drawing them in febrary really paid off!! I didn't feel like i had to think too hard, and I'm happy with how they've turned out.

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- Questioning speech bubbles a little - 

The first of the cgs, as well as the one I'd like to use as the thumbnail over on itch was drawn too! I was excited to get to this one.

However, I am starting to question if speech bubbles are right for this project. I kinda feel even in this scene, the regular text box fits just fine. I guess we'll see how I feel once all the other cgs are drawn first. Either way, right now I'm not too worried about it.

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- BG pass #2 - 

Towards the end of the week, I was cleaning up th backgrounds some more-- The basement and the church are now a lot more useable!

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- Writing Progress -

The rest of the  week was on writing-- That was more my focus this week, and as mentioned earlier, I wanted something to give Yuluco! I managed to end the week with a playable version with most of the assets scribbled in, as well as a relatively cohesive flow of the story's events.

I'm currently sitting at 5.6k words!! 

I'm very happy with that for my first week. It's about 3/4 written, so I guess I'll end up with something maybe around the 8k mark?  I guess we'll see!

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- Things are going well!! Why am I panicking?! - 

I don't know why, but as I end the week, I feel a little anxious about how much I'll be able to complete this month.

Usually I feel very confident and stay that way!! But the gut feeling is sticking around. I think it's dawning on me just how much watercolor I'll have to do to get everything finished-- it's a lot!

If needed, I'll pivot slightly get everything clean digitally (which I'll be doing before the watercolor step anyways) then watercolor all the the bgs in their entirety FIRST, before touching on anything else.

At worst, I'll upload with digital sprites and cool watercolor backgrounds, and then do a release shortly after where I swap everything out.

With all that being said, I'm going at a good pace right now!! Considering I might be done with the script this time next week, I might have the whole last half to put towards the art and not need to worry at all.

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PLANS FOR WEEK 2!

Aiming to get everything but the art finished!! The more time for watercoloring, the better.

• - Cleaner pass on the Bgs all finished, aiming for the lineart for watercoloring
• - Sprite expressions finished and implimented, at least for what I have right now
• - ...Finish the script maybe?? (big maybe)

And that's about it for now! See you next week-- hopefully I have as good a week as this one was! ♥