#anoldor

g If you follow the update, you know that from the past few months I am struggling with a bug with the english translation. I tried EVERYTHING, I asked help from several people we weren’t able to even identify the reason for the bug. 

So I am redoing the whole code from scratch to make sure to not replicate it.

I have progressed a lot since I started programming Anoldor, so I try to see this necessity as an opportunity to make a cleaner and more efficient code ! I thought it would be cool to make some day to day updates about my progress, so here we are !

19/12/2020

Today, I upload again all the background image with a few improvement :

- I changed the resolution of the project (1280*720 to 1920*1080) the bigger the better /DIE/

- I optimized the size of the file by going from .png to .webp (1 MO saved by image with no quality loss…)

- Before I had two images (one with the good size, and one twice the size for zooming and other effects.), now I use some code to resize the big image by default without losing quality when I zoom.

- Also I organized my files better >.>  

20/12/2020

Today I uploaded again the sprite, with a few improvement : 

- size optimisation (webp + layered image instead of exporting the full sprite every time)

- variation optimisation. Playing with the next release of renpy, I can now do all the sprite variation (so flipped, night, night flip), with ~10 lines of code per character instead of 24. It’s such a huge progress for me !

21/12/2020

Today, I get scoled by the graphist for not respecting proportion when exporting the sprite (oups), so I re-exported them the right way. (Also, I am blessed to have such a pro working on Anoldor, KEEP PRAISING HER INCREDIBLE ART she deserved it). 

Anoldor a free to play visual novel light RPG

Platforms: PC - Windows and Mac

@otomesweetheart​

Hello everyone, if you've been following Anoldor's news, you know that I recently announced the opening of my little "studio", and its first project Imperial Grace. Since Anoldor account is pretty quiet those day, I thought it may raise some concerns, so I wanted to come back with you, on what this announcement means concretely to Anoldor and on my motivations to do this second project and also why our social media are rather quiet those days.

Why Anoldor social Media is quite quiet those day : Simply because I don’t have anything more to tell/show for the moment. Most of the work I do is on the writing area (which perform very poorly in social media), and programmation (same, since the visual didn’t change I just code it for it to be easier for ME). Running social media account is really time consuming and I have more important things to do, if I want to actually deliver a game one day :p

I am not going to lie, the fact there is a global pandemic didn’t help the team, and we are all working at a slower pace, (and my motivation to work is obviously affected by the rest of the team motivation...) but it doesn’t mean we planned on abandonning Anoldor. NEVER.

Also, on a personal note, I believe we started too soon communication for Anoldor, we were very excited to share our baby to the world, and your support and advice was really helpful, but asking people to wait for several years between release is hard. Sometime, I feel like going on hibernation for a few years and come back only when we have enough content in advance to not make you wait too long but I don’t want anyone to believe Anoldor is dead. That’s tough. 

Just a reminder: we have a demo (French and English) available on itchio! Feel free to test it if you haven’t already!

Some key features of the game:

Game will be 100% free.

High customisation for the MC's behaviour.

Lots of political choices leading to a complex epilogue (no good or bad ending, but consequences for every aspect of your rule).

 And for your eyes only, here's the new introduction portrait of our love interest:

I had this very interesting question on twitter, and I wanted to give a developped answer so here it is !

Because VN is helped by the illustrations, CGs, character sprites, etc, is it correct that writing for VN easier than writing for books? Is there any difficulty for VN writing that is different from books specifically?

I actually think it’s harder to write for VN than for a book. 

More seriously here is why : 

Visual references

Having visual references help when you struggle with description, but it’s also a VERY BIG tie. Because you will have to work hard (or pay a lot) for all of those assets, they necessarily need to be limited. In a book you are completely free to just let your imagination go where you want, but in VN you have to think « dang this scene is so cool but I definitely can’t afford a new background just for this ». and tweak it or just completely drop it. Same goes with NPC (according to your level of perfectionism though, a lot of people don’t care if there is nothing or just shadows).

Also, I guess I am bias because I am writter and director, but I spend a lot of time gathering references and writting description for the art assets beforehand, so in the end drawn or not, I still have to think about them anyway, maybe even more since when I was writting for novel, I only thought about characters and stay vague about landscape lol.

Finally, I believe the style for VN is a bit different, since it often involves more dialogue  it’s not simpler or harder, but when you are used to one it can be difficult to change. I, for example, always feel the need to repeat what is on the screen. I show the character bow but I also said « he bows », some people think it’s redundant and I kinda agree, but I can’t help it. So it’s not even like if the visual aspect helps to cut some narration lol.

Linear VS choices

It depends if the VN is kinetic or not, and if not if there are a lot of choices or only a few. But creating meaningful choices (like I want to do in Anoldor) with a real impact on a game is also very hard. You have to write a lot of variations of the same scene, sometimes entire new scenes according to the choice you made. It can be tedious and a bit overwhelming sometimes to remember all the previous choices and their consequences to give them a real impact on the game. You also have to make sure that the important information is always said etc. when writing a book, you don’t have this kind of problem since the story is linear.