We’d like to take a moment to mention a project hosted by OverCoat, Touhou Mecha’s main composer and the newest addition to the DSD team!
Touhou Tuesday is a radio show dedicated to Touhou Project music. It’s being hosted on areciboradio.com, airing on Tuesdays from 8-10 PM EST. If you’re interested, be sure to catch it tomorrow!
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.
So now that all of us have escaped our various obligations we’re working as fast as we can to get the demo together for testing. Which means in the near future we’ll need testers. In fact given the increase in size we’ll probably need a number of testers.
The upside of getting the beta will of course be that you get to see the demo early. The downside sadly is beta testing is a little more intensive then just a normal playthrough. We need people who can catch our internal contradictions, point out where we’re just wasting words, and clearly explain why they feel the way they do about our characters. In addition, since we’re working on the late game now, this is probably the best chance to change the direction of the scripts. Some things we’re doing by design (Flandre’s story is very strong early on, while we’re planning on Alice’s end to be very involved) but if characters are too much in the background we need to know now. Our playtesters will have the first shot at giving us that info.
So if you’re interested in being a beta tester please drop us a line at
beta@dsd.faceroll.net . Things to include in the e-mail:
– Your member name on the DSD forums if you’ve registered there.
– How much time you think you can spend testing.
– Any other reasons we should pick you.
If you get chosen we’ll send you info on how to acquire and comment on the demo as soon as we finish all the tweaks we’ve been working on.
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.
For all of you who wanted to ask questions of us (like I see a few of you have already in comments), we’ve created an Ask the Developers thread on the forums. So if you have anything that you would like to know, please come down to the forums and make a post there, and we’ll do our very best to address your concerns.
And happy holidays.
Okuu probably lost interest after finding out presents were supposed to ship out last night, so we’re safe this year.
Hello! I’m SleepKirby, and I’ve been working on the programming for Eastern Starlight Romance since this summer. Programming a visual novel might sound scary, but Ren’Py (the game engine we’re using) really has a lot of nice things that make it accessible, even for dedicated non-programmers. I recommend Ren’Py if you’re ever interested in making your own visual novel!
Anyway, as LTalon said, a big thank-you to everyone who tried out our first demo (released back in August). We’ll definitely take everyone’s comments into account to the best of our ability. Hopefully, we’ll have made a lot of improvements by the time of our second demo release!
One of the things people mentioned about our first demo was that the battle scenes were a little bland. Even though we’re not making a shooting game, naming magic spells and playing sounds just didn’t capture the feel of the danmaku battles that Touhou fans know and love. To remedy this, we’re going to add graphical spell animations to the battles. They don’t have to be particularly fancy, but we should be able to make the battle scenes more interesting. Here’s an example spell that we made. There are four screenshots, progressing from left to right:
It’s a simple rendition of Shoot the Moon, one of Marisa’s spells. As in the game Imperishable Night, there’s a wave of lasers shooting from the bottom to the top of the screen, aimed at slightly varying angles.
We won’t kid ourselves though – even simple animations like this are going to take some work. On that note, we’d like to extend another invitation to anyone interested in helping out our project. We mainly have two positions in mind now:
(1) Making spell animations, like the one described above. There are lots of ways to do this. For Shoot the Moon, there’s a single two-color image of a laser (drawn as an ellipse, and then Graph touched it up a bit), and then I made the animation entirely with Ren’Py code. So it’s possible to do this without much art involvement. You can certainly take a more art-oriented path, however, and you might come up with something much nicer with very little programming. Another alternative to programming is to use a flash-animation program like SWiSH miniMax, and then convert your animation to a series of images to be used like a slideshow in the game.
(2) We’re still looking for artists. We thank everyone who has applied for artist work thus far, though aside from Graph, most people have come and gone. Currently, Graph’s being a hero and is working very hard on the long list of character poses (cut-in images, to be placed on top of backgrounds). But on top of character poses, we also need stand-alone CG images for special events in the story, as well as background images. So there’s a lot of art-related work to do; an artist dedicated to CGs would be particularly helpful.
Please go here for details if you want to help out – we’d greatly appreciate your assistance.
Finally, happy holidays!
Well, first, I’d like to thank all the folks who contributed to it, the testers, and all the people who commented on it and tried it out. A narrative cannot exist without an audience, after all, so without you guys, this project wouldn’t be possible. Please wait warmly for the next release (although this is not an episodic adventure…).
After the demo, work continues. We’re working hard to produce something for you guys!
In other news, work on art poses has been resumed with all your comments in mind, and one of the first up is the lovely Yukari Yakumo (as the post title might suggest)! As y’all might have surmised from the demo, Yukari serves as Rinnousuke’s foil and um…partner in our story (probably the one stable relationship that’s readily visible thus far), and can be either helpful or antagonistic, depending on Marisa’s choices. Of course, there’s plenty of gap-based hijinks in it as well…
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and this post is pretty short, so…
