Author: IcedFairy

Thanks for all the words of support. It’s both encouraging (and a little terrifying) to see all the people still waiting on us. We’re doing our best to keep things moving along so that this will become a reality someday.

Anyways, since a lot of you fine people have offered us help with programming or money, I wanted to address that.

Programming wise we’re working in Ren’py, so 99% of our code is just Ren’py calls around text. The hardest part is keeping the labels straight and just getting all the info in. Mostly its just time consuming. Right now I think our programming side is well covered, but if life happens we’ll definitely reach out to you all in the community. Thanks.

Monetary support is a different matter. We’re really really humbled and thankful for the offers of financial support, but that’s something we can’t accept. ZUNs copyright rules specifically forbid us from asking for donations for this project, or making something like a kickstarter. He views (correctly in my mind) that crowdfunding isn’t really in the ‘doujin spirit.’ So we just can’t accept money for this project.

The other issue is money really wouldn’t help us finish faster. None of us are professional developers, so five, ten or even twenty thousand dollars wouldn’t really give us the kind of financial ability to just quit our jobs and work on this full time. I’m working on my own plans to be able to write full time, but if I become a published author before this is done I’ll be the luckiest man alive. LT is in a similar position.

Thank you again for all your support. If there is anything the community can do can get this game into your hands faster, we’ll be sure to let everyone know. For now simply knowing there are people still interested despite our failures at project management is heartening.

(LT Edit: To be perfectly clear, I’m not pursuing a career in writing.  Not yet, anyway.  Maybe if I’m struck by incredible inspiration someday.  Until then, I think my life of salaryman-ness continues.)

So we missed the deadline I set for us. Entirely my fault too. I assumed we could keep at breakneck speed, but reality is a little more harsh. For example LT got a real job, which is great for him, but slows down writing considerably. I’ve lost my drive twice, and found that editing a novel is infinitely more difficult then writing one, especially if your job goes into overdrive. We have however made a great deal of progress, and I wanted to share what’s happened on the writing side, and what we’re planning for the future.

First I should explain what we’ve completed. The Reimu and Alice paths are done. The Flandre path is almost done. And we’ve started in on the “secret” and Patchouli paths. All together we’ve probably completely 3/5ths of what we were aiming for since our last post, and we have much more solid outlines of what we want to finish. Graph has also made massive strides with the remaining artwork, which he’ll probably explain more in detail in his own post.

What do we have left to do? Well finishing those last routes, programming it all together, and then a lot of editing. How will we handle all that? That’s something we’re still discussing with ourselves, and we’ll probably end up asking those people who are still interested in the project as well. I have a few ideas, but making a big deal about them when we still need to finish the routes is kinda foolish.

We’ll continue to keep you informed as we polish off routes, and when our programming starts in earnest.

So! What have we done with the last year or so?

Mostly suffered at our various jobs. As the staff has expanded and (mostly) contracted our time to work on the project has suffered as anyone still following us probably knows. However, we haven’t been completely idle. After a long suffering, we completed the first route, the Alice route. It’s not 100%, since we have some fillers and a whole lot of editing to do, but the lines are done and the plot is something we’re happy with. And that’s honestly the hardest part when it comes to work.

Now were focusing on the other four routes. There’s a lot to go there, but with Alice filled in, we’ve got a lot to work with. In fact we’ve got enough to work with that I’m going to give an actual deadline. We’ll be done with the major path routes at the end of June.

What will that mean for the game itself? Sadly we’ll still have a lot of work to do then, just like we have a lot of work to do for Alice still. But it will be editing, coding and polishing work, not creative writing work. Stay tuned to hear from us then, because we’ll be looking into getting more outside help to get us through the final stretch.

Until then, we’ll keep pounding away at our keyboards. November’s probably going to be a wash, (oh hi NaNoWriMo) but LTalon and I will keep moving forward no matter what. I hope to be posting again here with good news as soon as I can.

This update is somewhat late, so the first thing I want to state is we haven’t given up on the project. It’s still moving along, and while we’ve had our problems with jobs and other real life events slowing things down, we’re still doing our best to finish things. So you don’t need to panic about us quitting.

When we started making ESR we had six writers and four artists. Most of us were in college. Now we have one artist and two writers, and all of us are doing various work. The change has slowed us a great deal. Now that we’re all settling into our lives we’re getting a lot more actual writing done. I personally am trying to get 15000 words a month into ESR and LT is keeping apace despite his schedule. Still we can’t keep up the same level of writing we used to, much less meet what we’d originally planned.

To be fair, our original plans were terribly unrealistic. We wanted six plots with ten endings, AND four subplots on top of that, in a open enviroment where players could interact with characters in any order. That didn’t work even with our original team, so we cut down the script and made it less open ended.

Now that we’re here near the end with so much more to go before our script pieces become a game, it’s obvious that our cuts just weren’t enough. So while it’s painful, we’re going to take a knife to a lot of our original ideas, including some of the ones that appeared in the demos.

So what’s on the cutting room floor? Probably the entire Youmu subplot. It just didn’t fit well, and honestly many other doujin writers have done it better. We also had a ridiculously complex finale for the Gensoukyo 5 planned out… and I’m sure Graph will be happy that we’re making it less insane. The Harem route is dead. Sorry. And I expect a lot of unneeded detail work is going to get sliced away.

On the other hand our drive to keep moving is also giving us some new ideas we’re looking forward to writing down. Getting events to chain nicely into each other is something of an art, and we’re putting what we learned on the project earlier to good use in that field.

Hopefully out of this massacre and rebirth of ideas we can get a set of good solid endings that we can use to transform our game from a lot of scripts into a game that you’ll all enjoy. When will that be? Given how far 15000 words goes in our endings, I’m not sure I can give a good estimate still. Especially since we’re still considering what should be cut for brevity and what we need to keep the game amusing and consistent. I know that’s not really inspiring, but it’s the best I can give.

Graph’s still going to be putting out Touhou Mecha, which you all should read, and we’re going to keep working away at this project. I admit to being tempted to quit, but the good friends I have on the dev team keep bringing me back. I’m sure all our staff feel the same way. We’re gonna keep scripting words, and hopefully someday soon we’ll have more upbeat news to give.

I’d like to thank everyone again who looked over our demo. With that we’ve got good feeling moving forward. We writers are pushing on, though with the routes branching we’ve hit the bulk of our workload. Still it’s a fun job, as we finally get to wrap up all those plots we tossed into the air.

Art and music wise most of the work for ESR has been done. Graph’s still putting the finishing touches on things of course, and there’s a few songs Mixtape still has in the works, but a lot of that work is all wrapped up.

What does that mean for you? It means we’ve got some things starting up alongside our ESR work. We’ll let you know more about it when things become a little more solid.

We’re proud to announce that the second demo for Eastern Starlight Romance is now available. We’d like to thank our beta testers, supporters and players for their presence and comments. Please wait warmly as it downloads, and we hope you enjoy it.

Windows download: here
Multiplatform download: here

Manual/Readme, with screenshots: here

Notable additions:
# Demo now goes up to the second festival.
# Marisa portrait added.
# All artwork reshaded, most artwork redone.
# Music looping reworked. Added several new tracks.
# Music Room added.
# VFX added for danmaku scenes.
# Title screen altered.
# Options menu edited.
# Several script segments edited for clarity and brevity.
# Koishi advice edited to be more useful.

We’ve spent a lot of time fixing things up after our first demo. Graph pretty much redid all of the artwork. Mixtape and Strato tweaked and added a bunch of songs. Kirby’s prettied up the UI. And of course us writers have been editing the script (in addition to pushing on towards the endings). Most of these started as soon as we got player feedback in.

Some ideas however just sort of popped up. One of them was LTs on and off idea of giving Marisa some screen time. Of course this was usually set aside, both because it wasn’t common practice, and because Graph had enough on his plate.

However some time opened up right as we started finishing up the 2nd demo artwork, and so we decided to try it out. And we all liked it. It helps us show Marisa’s personality, and opens up the stage for a little more comedy. So you can look forward to seeing Marisa in more then just a few CGs.

Sorry we keep falling behind on blog posts. Fortunately we got together something perfect for this first of April.

Many Touhou fan works have featured Marisa, but we’re trying to do something a little different. We’ve tried to stay true to Marisa’s character quirks, and personal oddities. We also have tried to bring up things that were mentioned in official works and usually forgotten by fans. Like her work on an immortality potion, her family situation and her interest in the outside world.

In addition we’ll be interpolating from some more distant things like Kotohime’s PoDD ending.

Thus enter agent 7. International woman of mystery.

Of course it would be boring to have Marisa acting as the mysterious agent 7 all by her lonesome. That might work for a Touhou ending, but not for a VN like our own. She’ll be teaming up with several superheroes from around Gensoukyo, all working together for a common goal. The overthrow of the corrupt elite, and the advancement of the oppressed classes of Gensoukyo.

And of course where would a bond parody be without a bond girl?

Who are the other stalwart heroes? We’ll leave you to find that out, but the rich shall tremble when they hear of the Gensoukyo 5!

Of course, Kotohime will make an appearance as well, to put down this populist wealth redistribution, though sadly that’s outside of the scope of the next demo. Still the actions of the Gensoukyo 5 should add a good dose of ACTION! to Marisa’s romantic endeavors.