Look at it.

And so, with a compiled list in hand, our fearless hero (that’s me) sets out on a clear Saturday morning to attempt to immortalize the sounds of this world in a recording.

It did not fare well.

It really isn’t until you pay attention to your surroundings that you realize just how loud they are. It’s crazy. Next time you go outside, close your eyes and just listen. Only then can you appreciate the sheer amount of sounds and noises that your brain normally filters out.

I spent two hours walking around the city, ears perked up trying to find a suitable spot to record without unwanted interruptions. Those two hours also consisted of visiting ten cafés because Mah0gany wanted “eating noises”. It’s next to impossible to record in those kinds of place because music is almost always played in a café, and using them would violate copyright.

Hell, I didn’t even KNOW there were ten cafés close to where I lived.

Also, you’ve never known awkwardness until you spend 10 minutes standing in the middle of a food court, pointing a fuzzy, black dildo at your surroundings. My wind muffler looks like the tip of an erect penis mushroom.

The final one on my list was park ambience. Basically, rustling leaves, birds, crickets chirping…

Text message:

Tigershark: okay im at the foot of the mountain. cant do this too loud.
Mah0gany: whats wrong
Tigershark: im 300 meters away from street and i can still hear traffic noises and sirens. going home now ttyl
Mah0gany: climb up mountain dude
Tigershark: taking shelter under mountain. its winter and the wind is killing me and ruining recordings. the wind muffler. it does nothing.
Mah0gany: just get birds and insect sounds then come home
Tigershark: ITS WINTER. EVERYTHING IS DEAD

Death.

10 minutes later:

Tigershark: i found ducks next to the museum. you like ducks?
Mah0gany: lol no
Tigershark: good, because the children here are feeding them and i can’t record anything anyway

And three grueling hours later, I come home with barely any ambience sounds we can use. Currently, we’re still considering whether implementing them would make the VN better or would it just detract from the atmosphere of the soundtrack.

We have yet to reach a consensus, but you’ll see in the final game whether there’s ambience or not.

-Tigershark

Hey guys,

This is just a heads up to let you people know that we will be attending the Overload Convention on the 23^rd of July.

Here’s their lovely website: http://www.overload.co.nz/

You’ve probably never heard of it (hipsterkitty) but that’s only because Overload takes place in this obscure country called New Zealand.

Still no luck? It’s under Australia.*

No, not Antarctica. New Zealand.

Pictured: The Electrofish Team (there can only be one)

We will be selling A2 and A3 posters as well as physical copies of our demo.

What this basically means is that it’s CRUNCH TIME.

Mah0gany has been working non-stop, churning out posters and sprites as well as multiple CGs.

I’ve been testing, doing rewrites, buying all the necessary stuff for Overload and doing all the grunt work. The printing presses here charge an arm and a leg to print anything, so I’ve also been trying to gather some funds/cut costs where possible. Pretty sure we’ll be operating at a loss here, but that’s life for you.

kaoS is busy freezing his socks off in his sex dungeon frozen city of doom (he’d actually be writing this blog post if he could bear to take off his fuzzy gloves), while Gumaster is busy getting his wisdom teeth pulled out.

kaoS: s-s-so…co-co-cold…can’t…e-e-even…f-f-fap…

Well okay, it’s crunch time for MOST of us.

- Tigershark

*Where everything is out to kill you except Hugh Jackman. [citation needed]

I’ve just returned home from a hectic one week long road trip, it was an awesome experience with its fair share of ups and downs. But if I was given the chance to relive it all over again, I’d do it in a heart beat. Except for the skydiving though, I hated that.

Happy New Year and I hope you all enjoy your holiday as much as I did.

- kaoS

Best wishes from the Electrofish team!

kaoS: everyone on the team is on the naughty list. hurr hurr.

Have fun, be safe, and cherish your friends.

- Tigershark

Disclaimer: the images shown below are not representative of the final product and may be subject to change.

Oh and just a few words on my side of things, we actually did end up extending the demo a bit more, making it up to around about 100k words. Gumaster  should be happy now that his OCD is satisfied.

Anyway, back to more Duke Nukeming.

Well actually now that I think about, this blog post is kind of silly because we’re not even going to show legs in the demo. They will appear in the final version in the menu screens but, at this point in development, they’re not going to make an appearance.

You may then ask the question: then what’s the point of adding legs now?

‘Proportions’ would be my answer. It’s actually very easy to make mistakes when you’re drawing if you don’t have a clear idea of the whole body.

Let me give you an example:

At first glance, there’s nothing wrong with this sprite. Indeed, that’s what we all thought until Mah0gany decided it was a good idea to ignore the CGs I wanted and add legs to the characters. (ignoring my requests is something he does on a regular basis.)

So when we gave her legs, we realized that her arms were a bit too long. And not just for her either, after doing a few rough sketches, we realized that the problem is present in most of our character sprites.

You’ll find that we also Duke Nukem’d her clothes. It now has creases and generally looks better than before. We’ll also rework her sleeves a little later on.

kaoS: heh, duke nukem’d her clothes, I like the sound of that.

Why are you still here?

kaoS: because you haven’t fired me yet.

Fair enough.

Moving On:

Now what you see here is our first attempt. I have to admit I wasn’t quite sure about showing this version and I think you can see why.

<kaoS> good god what’s wrong with those legs
<Mah0gany> these are real life proportions
<kaoS> we’re not drawing real life
<Tigershark> might wanna make them standard anime length
<Mah0gany> but anime legs are so looooong
<kaoS> but these are like rubber pipes!

And the Second:

<kaoS> longer
<Gumaster> longer
<Tigershark> longer
<Mah0gany> damn you guys
<Tigershark> you’ve heard of the phrase
<Tigershark> ‘she had legs that went on forever’ right?
<Mah0gany> fine

Third Time Lucky?:

<Tigershark> you might wanna take a break
<Tigershark> think you’ve been staring at the art for so long
<Tigershark> you’ve gone a bit numb
<Mahogany> yeah okay
<Mah0gany> going to sleep
<Mah0gany> talk to you guys tomorrow

The next day:

<Mah0gany> I just checked what I drew yesterday
<Mah0gany> what the hell was I doing
<kaoS> drugs
<Tigershark> hookers
<Gumaster> at the same time

One More Try:

<kaoS> longer
<Gumaster> longer
<Tigershark> he’s gonna kill us
<Mah0gany> I’m gonna kill you guys

Let’s Have One More:

<Mah0gany> oh wait, that does look better

<kaoS> wait, her shoes…why so huge
<Tigershark> lol
<Mah0gany> goddamnit

And Finally!:

<kaoS> yeah there we go
<Tigershark> looks great, doesn’t it
<Mah0gany> finally
<kaoS> if it were up to me
<kaoS> and I’m just saying ‘if’
<Tigershark> lol
<kaoS> I’d make them just a little bit longer

- Tigershark

So I’m posting another outdated picture that won’t appear in the visual novel (we’re holding all the new goodies back so not to spoil anything) in hopes of clearing the water (we promise we won’t do what BP did) while Mah0gany continues to strive valiantly to finish the art for the demo.

kaoS: Psst. I haven’t seen Mah0gany for the past few days.

Well we don’t need to tell everyone that!

Now, if you look at the old sprite, you’ll find that the kimono is inaccurate in pretty much every way imaginable (not that the current version is any better, hohoho) and that the sleeves go on for way too long. The reason being, according to Mah0gany, is that he wasn’t really good at drawing hands back then.

His train of thought apparently went something like this:

ARGH -> STUPID HANDS -> SCREW THIS -> LONG SLEEVES -> MUAHAHAHAHA

Old version:

New version:

Ahhh…that’s much better. She now has hands!

kaoS: heh, she can now do “certain things”

Are you a registered sex offender yet?

kaoS: no

Shame.

Anyway, now’s also probably a good time to tally up the word count for the demo. Currently, it sits at a comfortable 96k words. Give or take 1k for last minute fixes before launch.

Which lead to this on IRC:

<Gumaster> make it 100k words
<Tigershark> why
<Gumaster> OCD
<Gumaster> I need it to be 100k
<Tigershark> well maybe if you didn’t take out the extras section
<Gumaster> that’s cause when people read it they’ll think we’re either crazy or stupid
<Tigershark> that’s different to the current situation…how?
<Gumaster> lol
<Tigershark> it’s fine, it’s more fun if we don’t take things too seriously
<Tigershark> thought that was your philosophy
<Gumaster> yeah
<Gumaster> just give me my 100k
<Tigershark> I’m gonna ignore you and go talk to kaoS

A few minutes later:

<kaoS> why does black ops crash every time I alt tab
<Tigershark> because you touch yourself at night
<Tigershark> or because you use vista
<Tigershark> and I don’t think it’s vista this time

- Tigershark

Not pictured: Pedobear

Please note that this was done at very early stages of development, before the script was even set, and Mah0gany has improved a lot over the year.

And here’s the conversation I had with kaoS shortly after:

<Tigershark> her head looks like an octopus
<kaoS> yeah looks like the back of her head is getting tentacle sexed
<Tigershark> I’m kicking you off IRC
<kaoS> you don’t even know how to
<kaoS> no wait
<kaoS> I got it!
<kaoS> those look like her own tentacles
<kaoS> so it’s tentacle MASTURBATION
<Tigershark> why do I talk to you

When presented with a concept CG of a person holding a sword a “certain” way:

<kaoS> do you see what I see
<Tigershark> that depends, do you see my fist

And regarding the new sleeping CG:

<kaoS> why are her hands like that
<Tigershark> that’s because she’s completely relaxed
<kaoS> you mean 100% defenseless
<Tigershark> I’m not talking to you if you’re gonna start talking about roofies again
<kaoS> it’s okay, I’ll be on MSN

- Tigershark

What’s this you ask?
F_cking rewrites that’s what.

Tigershark, our resident writer, is getting bogged down by rewrites. Again. Which is his way of saying “I want to try something new.” For me, it means more work. And eye pain. And tears.

The problem with scripting is that it’ll always look different in-game. The feel of it when you’re actually playing through the VN differs completely from a Word document, and often in catastrophic ways. So we pump out waves and waves of rewrites to try and fix that.

Tigershark: What the f*ck is this ‘we’ stuff, you lazy bastard.

A simple exposition “on paper” is just one paragraph long, but in-game it can become a colossal wall of text. A rewrite will then try to fix this by adding more character comments and transitional dialogue to a scene so it becomes easier to absorb and take in the plot crucial information, breaking the wall down into smaller sections so to speak. This works wonders in making scenes “user friendly” but I can’t shake the feeling that we’ll never be able to get out of this Write and Rewrite and Rewrite and Rewrite cycle, that something will always come up and call for yet another rewrite, and on and on and on. There are also other styling touches, like indentations during the speech and whatnot, that can be “touched” upon, but since we’re already a third way through the game, adding them now would just make it inconsistent not to mention Gumaster is too lazy to go back and redo everything.

In the end, it’s small problems like these that will infallibly break our pace and grind development to a metaphorical halt, like metaphorical pebbles on a metaphorical runway metaphorically causing a metaphorical plane to be grounded much to the chagrin of metaphorical passengers.

- kaoS

Essentially, we were talking about a certain important scene in the demo and we wanted to make sure the music was exactly right.

This is however, the beginning of where our views differ.

kaoS believes in having music for each and every character, according to their emotions, the scenes, the timing, so essentially every character would have multiple songs. Because of having trademarked styles for each character, you’d essentially know what the focus is on whenever the music plays, what the character feels, whether the scene is extremely serious and etc.

And that’s great.

The problem with his proposal…is that means we’ll need a bazillion heck of a lot of songs. And that’s simply not possible for us at this point.

On the other hand, I want to cater songs to specific scenarios. Fights have their own set of songs, along with sad scenes, funny scenes, and so themes for characters are thus usually left out or reduced to a minimum. Using this method, we can keep the song count low and thus with the extra time we have, we can go back over specific scenarios and assign more memorable and unique tracks to them.

Obviously, neither of us are wrong (or right). What most visual novels do is usually a mixture of both. Anyway, we eventually came to a conclusion after Mah0gany agreed with me and we sent kaoS back to the sex dungeon from whence he came snowy city where he lives. Which, according to him, is “to fucjign cold t tyypr pproperlhhy”. See, that’s the great thing about having a team – you get completely differing opinions. This way you can get feedback and then try to find the best way to get something done.

Sometimes I wish Gumaster would usually say something more than ‘meh’ though.

In his defence, he’s probably too fed up with fixing my tenses and the shit I sometimes accidently write to care. But don’t worry, he’s like a tsundere. He’ll warm up to us soon enough…hopefully…

Alternatively, if you bribe him with cookies (kaoS: porn) and a warm hug (kaoS: more porn), it might defrost his icy shell.

Might.

kaoS: these posts are getting boring dawg, post some goddamn pictures yo

Mah0gany is too occupied with procrastinating his projects to give a shit so shut up. Why don’t you try talking to him for a change.

And stop being Kanye West. It’s bad enough with one already.

- Tigershark

TADA!

Much better, and this one has much more to do with our storyline now. I like it, although Gumaster seems to think it might be a bit too dark.

Who knows, judge for yourself after the demo is out.

- Tigershark