Hello everyone!
Welcome back to our regular update. We want to talk about music and programming. Are you interested? Then enjoy reading!
We got a lot of feedback from the players during our campaign, saying that they really enjoyed the tracks from the demo. Our freelance composer, Shiro Takahashi, felt so grateful and confident to deliver his best for One Last Crane! We've also uploaded one of his works here. Let us know what you think about it.
https://soundcloud.com/onelastcrane/night-talk-one-last-crane-ost
Talking about the procedure on how we request the music from scratch is actually quite simple. From the text scenario, we mapped the general atmosphere of each scene, such as whether it feels fun, happy, sad, and so on. Next, we described these in more detail, searching for more references, and finally sent our analysis to the composer to be produced. In some cases, there are tracks that are really unique and can only be used for certain scenes. We must be careful before we make requests so that we don't run over budget.
Moving onto the programming side, the most fundamental thing is to use the proper engine. At first, we considered using Ren'Py, which we're already familiar with. But then a brand new engine called Visual Novel Maker (VNMaker) came out right before the pre-production of OLC started. As a developer, we were super curious and wanted to give it a try. We were hooked by the ease in which we were able to make scenes and customizations, not to mention its integration with Live2D, an animation software. Then, we decided to use it for the entire project.
However, nothing is perfect. As a new engine, we have to say that the VNMaker system isn't stable yet, and we faced quite a lot of bugs during the testing phase, although we got a great amount of support from the developers themselves. Thus, after releasing the demo, we chose to go back to our original plan. So, we changed back to Ren'Py as the main engine.
In order to ensure that our efforts were not wasted, we managed to create a program to convert our work from VNMaker to Ren'Py. Yay! And the funny thing is, we are still using VNMaker to make the scenes up to now, because we already love how VNMaker's scene editor works, and somehow it makes our work get done more quickly.
And that's some of what happens behind the scenes during the development process. Hope you like this update, and have a nice day!
Useful links:
Pledge One Last Crane with PayPal: https://digitalez.cc/olc/
DigitalEZ's Twitter: https://twitter.com/digitalezstudio
DigitalEZ's facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Digitalez.game.studio/
Indiegogo campaign
One Last Crane on Kickstarter