I finished the demo thingie. It's on Itch.io now. So now I guess I'll look into animation stuff when I can... Might not have a schedule much longer, but I'll be back some time soon, and eventually find a use for this website. See you soon enough...

I've gotten an idea of how much work there is left to do, and seeing as semester is truly over now and I can control my own time, I can say with utmost confidence that the little visual novel 'demo' scene will be finished and released on the 3rd of June! Just a week away! I mean, it might be the 2nd depending on your timezone but we'll see I guess, I've figured out the coding stuff I'll need to do to assemble the dialogue tree stuff and I've gotten music and sound effects to work, so things are looking up. Then I'll be bale to dedicate myself to learning animation! I'm honestly not sure what I'll do with this website after I release my demo, honestly, since my animmated videos will all just be on my youtube channel anyway. I don't want to abandon this site since I did put a good bit of work into it, so I think I'll start running a second blog like this one on another page on the site, with similar sort of formatting and text and the like. I'm not sure if I'll be holding it weekly like I have with this dev blog, maybe every two weeks or month would be better, but I'll figure it out once I actually begin. But for now... The demo's just a week away!

The other song I need for the demo is complete, meaning that basically all the assets I need for the demo are complete:

I've thought things over a little more in regards to the future of this project, and have decided that, seeing as I want to study and practice animation and make stuff with that, I'd like to realise Kerfuffle as an animated short film instead of a visual novel, which honestly might take even more work, but I just don't feel like visual novel stuff is for me. I'd prefer to make stories that are a little less game-like perhaps, it's hard to describe, but I plan to complete the demo and release it as a sort of teaser for the full story that I plan to make into an animation, probably ten to fifteen minutes long or so, so still a pretty big project. So, once the demo is out, I'm going to make some shorter animations to practice and get good at them, before starting work up again on Kerfuffle. This blog thing will probably conclude with the completion of this demo, although I'd like to continue with the weekly update stuff eventually, probably as a separate section on this website documenting progress on the Kerfuffle short film, I suppose we'll wait and see, but for now, I just have to code the demo together, not sure how long it'll take but we're probably looking at an early June release. Thanks for stopping by.

Well, a lot of work has been done on Uni junk, there's still much to do next week but this is the last week with a real intense amount of work, the one after that is the final week of semester. Wooh! So, how's work on music? Well, Deflemask takes some getting used to, but here I've cooked up a work-in-progress draft that needs revisiting, a track to play while interacting with the explosive curmedgeon groundhog, Harlan:

I'm honestly not so sure about it, I only hope it'll sound better with the later revisions, but I'll leave it like this for the demo. Speaking of... I've been re-evaluating how much I really want to complete the entire visual novel, or if I just want to release this demo and then maybe tell the story of Kerfuffle through a comic with an album soundtrack to accompany it. I'm kind of not sure why I decided to try making it a visual novel in the first place, but I'm going to see how I feel about things by the time I release the demo. Either way, I want to see this project 'finished' and the story told one way or another. If I do decide to make the whole game, the development should hopefully hasten with class finished and all, as well as the fact that I'll have gotten a taste of each aspect of development. I still need to write the music for the title screen before coding the demo together, but for now... Making music is pretty fun! Even if it's disheartening when it sounds like utter manure.

Well, what little progress I made last week won't be used anyway. All I managed to do was an opening jingle for the Cyber Vermin logo, and it sounds like crap. Let's get into the technical details... As the graphic style is based on the graphic capabilities of the Commodore Amiga, my initial plan with the music was to make something in a simmilar vain to the Amiga's sound capabilities, by using the most popular sound samples in Amiga music (the ST collection that came with the SoundTracker software) through a sampler in Reaper. The problem comes with my compositional style - I tend to make melodies that ascend very highly, very quickly, and when a sampler pitches up a sample, it simply speeds it up rather than just pitching it up. The consequence of this is that the sample loops faster and faster as it raises in pitch, and it inevitably sounds unpleasant and frankly not good enough. That's why I'm changing directions while I'm ahead, and now plan to make a Mega Drive style soundtrack, since FM synthesis, which the Amiga was incapable of, does not have these same problems. I've downloaded DefleMask and will have to become acquainted with writing in a tracker, the only experience I have with that was a couple of experimental tracks I did in Amiga SoundTracker, hopefully the more modern DefleMask is easier to use! The main and actual reason progress has been so slow is just university work, though, and I'll still have a very thick amount of it for two more weeks, now that I'm up to actually writing the hefty essays placed upon me. After that, it'll just be thesis work and no classes for my second semester, meaning I can handle things according to my own schedule. Unfortunately, the way things are looking, the demo's release will definitely have to be delayed to June. For now, I'll try and work on some music incrementally in DefleMask in between work sessions. It's a tough spot right now, but it won't last too long.

The art for the demo has been finished at last! Now all that's left is the music and programming! And even more university work. Unfortuantely, with the sheer magnitude of work there is in these last three or four weeks of semester, and the fact that my music composition is going to be pretty rusty, it's starting to look like I might not finish the demo in May, we could be looking to an early June release, although there's no guarantees of either or yet. I would definitely prefer to get it out earlier, but game dev has no due dates, unlike essays. Still, once semester is over, I will have much more time to work on the demo and the rest of the game, so I'm still confident I can get this finished before the year ends, since there's no real second semester this year, just work on my final thesis. Overall, the action plan seems to be getting uni work done, getting the demo out, and then balancing game work and thesis work up until the thesis due date in October, then a relentless push to finish the game by the end of the year or something. Even if I'll be busy these next few weeks, I'll do a little bit of music work anywya just to get my feet wet, and to provide something to chew on for these blog entries. Let's see what we can do!

Progress has been a bit slow, but I've created the CG image slides I need for the demo now. The next three weeks will be jam packed with university work, so it'll be very hard to get things done within my schedule, but I'll aim to draw up the portrait sprites for Harlan, since he's the only character in the demo besides our protagonist Jericho. Once the art stuff's hopefully finished by the end of this week, I'll be able to start writing some music, probably three separate tracks for the demo, and then I'll have all the assets I need before I code things together. Still a bit to go, but my main focus is on study for the time being. Let's keep pushing on!

The full dialogue scripts for the demo have been written! That's the easy part done. I wish I could have done more, but since it's the second half of semester, things are just really tight now - and there's still six weeks to go of it. What a fuck! Over this next week, I'll just aim to complete the art for the demo, there's only three CGs and a set of portraits for the character you interact with in the demo's span, so I think finishing them within a week is reasonable, so long as I make the time for it. I do sincerely hope I make that goal, but we'll just have to see what happens!

I've been bogged down in study, but that hasn't stopped me from making at least a little progress on this project. I'm aiming to complete a playable demo in May that covers the first set of interactions, that with the crunkly groundhog Harlan, and spread it around to see what people think of the direction. The past week hasn't seen nearly as much progress as I would've hoped due to real life schedulings, but I certainly have planned out the dialogue tree for Harlan, so now I'm going about writing the actual script, which will be followed by drawing some more graphics, implementing some sound effects and writing some music, and coding the thing up. For now all I have is that flow chart, but it should serve as an excellent skeleton!

A functioning prototype has been completed! This was mostly just me getting used to Ren'Py and creating a functioning title screen and in-game screen that isn't totally dysfunctional. I managed to reach my goal for the week, so you can see the completely silent 'proof-of-concept demo' here:

Now that I've confirmed that it's possible for a know-nothing such as myself to craft basic functionality, I can leave programming behind for now and start writing out the proper dialogue for the whole thing. This'll take quite a bit I imagine, having to work out each and every scene and how it can transpire, and noting down which moments should have CGs and which expressions the characters will show once I get around to the artwork again. I'm also handling quite a bit of uni work this week since it's mid-semester break, so this script writing will take a side seat for the time being. In subsequent updates, I might try giving more info about the game in general or the characters in it, but we'll see where things are this time next week. See you soon!

The major themes and story beats have been worked out, and the character profiles and backstories assembled. I can put a pin in that now, and return to actually writing the dialogue later on; next thing's next is programming up a prototype. Beyond coding this website, I have next to no knowledge in programming, which is why I've downloaded and started familiarising myself with Ren'Py (Everyone pronounces it 'Ren Pie' but I like calling it 'Ren Pee' because it's funnier). I'm sort of in the dark right now, but tinkering around with it has certainly been eye-opening. So far I've just configured the main title screen and will be on to fixing up the sub-menus, and after that, I'll go about setting up the in-game GUI. The best case scenario is to have a basic gameplay prototype up and coming by the end of the week - let's dig in!

Today is the first official day of Kerfuffle's development! The first task is plotting out the story, and that means the basic character attributes and story beats. I have a lot of ideas in my head already, but I'll need to write them down in order to embellish them with more detail afterwards. I'll be able to figure out the exact text choices and dialogue paths once this initial framework is complete, and I'll have a grip on the overall theme and trajectory of this tale. It is a time of much excitement, but very little to show, so expect future blog entries to be more detailed than this one. Onwards!