Current Status - 2018 - Hanako Games

hanako

Current Status - 2018

#1 by hanako - Feb 10 2018

Well, I'm old, but I'm not dead.

Haven't been working on the vampire thing at all in the past couple months. Have been doing Wolf Hall stuff. There may be a Kickstarter at some point in the future, in order to have a concrete target to focus interest and attention on. But not too soon. We want the dungeon experience to be more thoroughly prototyped before taking that public.

To that end, while the actual plot writing is only at the Student Council election right now (Which is over 70K words of script), we're starting to mess around with future dungeon exams. Which does make the bug list look much more interesting.

Dungeons are a little more developed in this game than they were in the last (you can see further, which adjusts strategy) but all the dungeon art is currently placeholders while we test puzzle designs, which is why I can't show anything for that part yet.

KitCat

Re: Current Status - 2018

#2 by KitCat - Feb 10 2018

hanako:
Well, I'm old, but I'm not dead.

Haven't been working on the vampire thing at all in the past couple months. Have been doing Wolf Hall stuff. There may be a Kickstarter at some point in the future, in order to have a concrete target to focus interest and attention on. But not too soon. We want the dungeon experience to be more thoroughly prototyped before taking that public.

To that end, while the actual plot writing is only at the Student Council election right now (Which is over 70K words of script), we're starting to mess around with future dungeon exams. Which does make the bug list look much more interesting.

Dungeons are a little more developed in this game than they were in the last (you can see further, which adjusts strategy) but all the dungeon art is currently placeholders while we test puzzle designs, which is why I can't show anything for that part yet.

Good at youre here Hanako!

FantasyFan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#3 by FantasyFan - Feb 14 2018

If there is a Kickstarter, I'll gladly contribute something. Super excited about both the vampire game and Wolf Hall!

My game reviewing blog.

Staldice

Re: Current Status - 2018

#4 by Staldice - Feb 17 2018

Glad to hear Wolf Hall's getting some love - any chance for some public testing later this year? I'd love to help squash some bugs

Keep up the good work, Hanako!

rincewind

Re: Current Status - 2018

#5 by rincewind - Feb 17 2018

Glad to see that you're still there Hanako!! And don't worry about the old part, we're all old.

Nice to hear that you're working in the vampire thingie!! It's one of the thingies that I have my hopes on!!

"It's good to be the president." - The President
"Oh humble dirt, if I could, I would carry you to freedom!" -The Lady and Saviour of all the dirt, mud and pebbles.
"Cake! Me!" -A VERY hungry Scullery Maid

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#6 by hanako - Mar 1 2018

Over 80k words. Haven't even reached the second exam yet...

FantasyFan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#7 by FantasyFan - Mar 1 2018

Hey, it's a big game. What's important is that you're progressing.

Now that I'm writing my own big VN that I'm hoping to market, I can better appreciate what you're going through.

My game reviewing blog.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#8 by hanako - Mar 1 2018

Having written about 40 "spell learning" scenes by this point does slow down the calendar progress

At some point I will run out of those!

Gamer

Re: Current Status - 2018

#9 by Gamer - Mar 2 2018

Any spoilers or things you're stuck on where you can use our friendly suggestions?

Hoosha

Re: Current Status - 2018

#10 by Hoosha - Mar 4 2018

i hope i get to play wolf hall before i die of old age..

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#11 by hanako - Mar 7 2018

90k words in my script file, just about to hit exam 2. Or at least, I've reached the week where it will happen! We continue to inch forward.

FantasyFan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#12 by FantasyFan - Mar 7 2018

My game reviewing blog.

EenPersoon

Re: Current Status - 2018

#13 by EenPersoon - Mar 12 2018

Will there be spell learning scene for every spell?

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#14 by hanako - Mar 13 2018

Yes.

The scenes aren't usually very long - many of them, the teacher will just describe the spell and suggest how you might use it. Sometimes things get a bit more involved, sometimes the spell is cast for demonstration purposes, etc.

But mostly, these scenes exist so that useful information like "Hey, Breeze can show you which direction the exit is!" is more readily available.

EenPersoon

Re: Current Status - 2018

#15 by EenPersoon - Mar 13 2018

Thank you for answering! Getting more information about the spells would be lovely, so I'll be looking forward to these scenes

Oki

Re: Current Status - 2018

#16 by Oki - Mar 15 2018

hanako:
90k words in my script file, just about to hit exam 2. Or at least, I've reached the week where it will happen! We continue to inch forward.

hooray~! Out of curiosity, how do you script out branches in dialogue or paths?

I've been here so long even Hanako is sick of me

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#17 by hanako - Mar 15 2018

Indenting. My script file is not that far different from a renpy file, except that I just fill in notes for tech effects ("stop music, make Grabiner appear on the left") and variable checks ("If we stole the pie on Saturday") for later implementation rather than worrying about getting the code right.

Horse Hall had three .txt files for all the script and design notes. The first file ends at Thanksgiving break (the file was getting big, it's a good break point, and I think that's where we started alpha-testing).

For this game, it's PROBABLY about time to split out into a second file, now that we've hit exam 2.

Oki

Re: Current Status - 2018

#18 by Oki - Mar 15 2018

Gosh dang, I find that impressive to a degree given how it can change. I'm tempted by Unity and the Fungus add on.

On that note, wow, excitement?

I've been here so long even Hanako is sick of me

KitCat

Re: Current Status - 2018

#19 by KitCat - Apr 16 2018

Any news?

Anyway... RenPy 7 cam... well... them promised that already near half year??

Mystic Ame

Re: Current Status - 2018

#20 by Mystic Ame - Apr 18 2018

The vampire game sounds very interesting, I hope to play it someday

_SE_

Re: Current Status - 2018

#21 by _SE_ - May 5 2018

I haven't been here for a while, but I wanted to say that I'm looking forward to both Wolf Hall and the vampire game.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#22 by hanako - May 24 2018

oops this scene accidentally swerved into Grabiner angst
well, the man's got a lot of it lying around

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#23 by hanako - May 30 2018

Wolf Hall calendar now rolling into December.

FantasyFan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#24 by FantasyFan - May 31 2018

Awesome.

My game reviewing blog.

Oki

Re: Current Status - 2018

#25 by Oki - Jun 2 2018

Hanako, you know good and well the Magical Diary fanfics will explode once you give Grabiner more angst.

We got issues.

Also wooo! December!

I've been here so long even Hanako is sick of me

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#26 by hanako - Jun 3 2018

Reading people talking about the difficulties of maintaining separate forums, I keep thinking 'one of these days I should close the forums and just run a patreon instead' but OTOH I'm too busy and distracted to go through all the hassle of setting up a new thing.

KitCat

Re: Current Status - 2018

#27 by KitCat - Jun 12 2018

Not good NOT good feeling or way... BUT it was them who was cam so so greedy!

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#28 by hanako - Jun 30 2018

Been more busy working than talking. Currently trying to get all the exams for the full school year sketched out so that we can hire a proper artist to redo all the tiles and such.

Hoosha

Re: Current Status - 2018

#29 by Hoosha - Jul 1 2018

when're we gonna get a peek at the wolf hall mc???????

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#30 by hanako - Jul 1 2018

It's a character creator, so how would you get a peek at him?

I mean, I could show you a random one, but they all look different!

Foelhe

Re: Current Status - 2018

#31 by Foelhe - Jul 1 2018

hanako:
It's a character creator, so how would you get a peek at him? I mean, I could show you a random one, but they all look different!

I mean... I try not to ask for stuff like this because I figure you'll let us know when it's ready, but hypothetically you could post a few random MCs to give us some idea of what we can do with the character creator when we get access to it. Hypothetically.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#32 by hanako - Jul 1 2018

I feel like with a character creator that takes away some of the fun of discovery. I feel like it's more fun to actually get to sit down with it and see the options that way.

Honestly can't remember if there's been an MC head visible in any of the screenshots I've put up, though probably not, since my test PCs tend to have fairly silly names. One of my Horse Hall test characters was 'Innocent Maiden'. And some of my current test characters have names like 'Larry Lazy' and 'Freddy Flirter'

Foelhe

Re: Current Status - 2018

#33 by Foelhe - Jul 2 2018

Makes sense. I'll try to be patient.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#34 by hanako - Aug 26 2018

Starting to fish around for artists to do the dungeons!

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#35 by hanako - Oct 4 2018

General Magical Diary news:

I currently have two different artists doing the dungeon tilesets. I am not sure, at this point, whether I will use one set for the tutorial areas and one set for the dungeon areas, or leave it as a switchable preference in options (which it is at the moment for testing), or something else.

A set of profiles (with chibis) has been made up for the main characters and is posted in the current main Wolf Hall thread. These show who the major datable characters are (people with full plotlines - there may be side romances as well) and our central professors. They also include some hints about the storyline that hadn't previously been announced. These are meant to go on the kickstarter, when I get around to doing it.

We've got a logo made, and the sprite artist is back in to add a couple of extra monsters and one secret character, who is really neat but I can't say much about yet!

I did end up posting the WIP character creator and some dungeon screenshots in that thread as well. So things are definitely happening.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#36 by hanako - Nov 12 2018

So, there's been a lot of juggling back and forth about exactly when to run the kickstarter. This is quite frustrating to me, as I really just want to get things over with, but if we're going to go to all the effort of doing this, it would be silly to screw it up. So, I have a HYPE MANAGER on board trying to organise things and figure out how to give us the best shot at getting attention and so on. Because the holiday sale season is almost upon us, the plan is now to hold the whole process until January.

In actual development news, one dungeon tileset is complete and the other is still trickling in but almost done. We've been spending some time polishing the preference menus so that when we put out a demo for the KS, the random options we never use but players are bound to poke at anyway will hopefully function as expected, and smoothing out the dungeon tutorial. Spiky is currently poking around at the online yearbook to make it able to hold Wolf Hall characters. Some CG art is being worked on.

Basically when people finally get to play it, it should (I hope!) look pretty complete on the front end, even though the game is actually only half written, because we've had to put so much of our time into the polish and visuals.

phoenixgirl

Re: Current Status - 2018

#37 by phoenixgirl - Nov 12 2018

Oh yeah, I totally agree that it's best to wait on the kickstarter launch until January, what with all the upcoming holiday sales and people will want to save up their money for them. Also, I'm totally looking forward to the demo.

Please help and support me here.

Tomo-chan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#38 by Tomo-chan - Nov 13 2018

Looking forward to the Kickstarter

Just wondering, are there going to be high-tier rewards like "design your character/dungeon/date/..." like most kickstarters seem to include ?

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#39 by hanako - Nov 13 2018

We do have a couple of interesting custom options planned. Nothing that would massively derail the plot (you cannot bid for Damien to suddenly become a fluffy kitten) but we're trying a range of possibilities, down from the cheap-and-simple 'write your own dungeon graffiti' to... some pretty big things that I don't know if anyone will be willing to go for but will certainly have a notable impact if they do. (Not telling yet!)

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#40 by hanako - Nov 16 2018

Been testing updates to the online yearbook, so you might see a couple of strange characters sneaking in there.

Pixelen

Re: Current Status - 2018

#41 by Pixelen - Nov 21 2018

hanako:
Been testing updates to the online yearbook, so you might see a couple of strange characters sneaking in there.

Like Larry Potter?

I was wondering where those characters were coming from! I thought you might have been beta testing. (Totally putting myself forward for beta testing by the way).

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#42 by hanako - Nov 24 2018

Trying to decide what character to commissions random Christmas art of this year.

Could be from any of my games really! Though there's a slight bonus towards doing Magical Diary stuff, considering.

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#43 by hanako - Dec 13 2018

We set up a twitter just to post Magical Diary news (since some people only want game stuff and not my babbling)

https://twitter.com/diary_magical

If you look there, you'll see the date announcement for when (I HOPE!) the Kickstarter will be

More information will be coming out there shortly. Most of it (character profiles etc) you have already seen on the forums, but there are still secrets to reveal!

FantasyFan

Re: Current Status - 2018

#44 by FantasyFan - Dec 13 2018

OMG, January! Can't wait - you can count on me to donate something.

My game reviewing blog.

StarViella

Re: Current Status - 2018

#45 by StarViella - Dec 21 2018

honestly, i wasn't excited for this game at first because i'm a weirdo who prefers to only play girl characters, but i almost always love your writing - so i'll definitely be giving this one a play anyway!

hanako

Re: Current Status - 2018

#46 by hanako - Jan 6 2019

Heh, not weird to prefer to play one gender, but that's also why we need to get a boy version out there so that THOSE players have a place.

Anyway! I have set up a Wolf Hall subforum because the kickstarter is due to start NEXT WEEK OMG PANIC

Which means there will soon be a PLAYABLE DEMO available and people potentially wanting to feedback on it, and therefore the game needs more space.

Although technically it's not 2018 any more so I guess I should shortly close up this thread!