oelvn project Lucid9 (available for free on Steam)

[Diamon]

So this is what happens in Lucid9 - you don't really have to pay attention to the question at hand if you know what kind of answer it demands/exclude the most obvious options etc. Not a deal breaker by any means - on the contrary, it adds another layer of internal logic to the choice system and a player can use either of them. But if you WANT to avoid this effect, you may want to give choices without an internal logic to them. For example, presenting a statement to the player and asking whether the statement is true or false.

 

We never found this to be a problem, even if ideally it'd be better for the reader to think about the question itself, testing each answer is a completely fine method of resolution as well!

 

-------

 

On another topic, it's probably time for an update about the current progress.

Concerning the writing, even though you can't really see it yet, the whole common route has been finally drafted (it will require a lot of rewriting and editing before it is final though). The wordcount of common route can be estimated to 150 000 words (there might be more when the common route gets finalized).

I don't have any estimate for the release of the whole common route as a demo, so don't ask me!^^

 

Other than that, we've been working a lot on lore building, and heroine routes. And I've been realizing lately that common route is merely only a pebble in the grand scheme of things. Maybe we should rename this common route to "prologue"? Anyway, I think it would definitely fit. I'm more considering common route as an introductory story on its own. And even if the 4/5 first days might currently make you feel that this common route is your typical comedy oriented / non plot focused common route, it is actually not the case. But I'll let you discover that in time!

 

Concerning the art department, things have been somehow reaching a stalemate lately, mostly because of exams. Things should go back to normal during summer, I hope.

I do have to admit that we're having a lot of problems with composers. It's not always an easy thing to convince people to participate in your project for free, and it's natural that people end up leaving or stop involving themselves because they are not that interested. Some of you might have noticed that the music in Lucid9 is not exactly very consistent. The reason being that the whole current OST have been produced by 4 different composers so far (some of them left, so they had to be replaced, but their replacement left again...). So it has been (and it still is) a real headache for me. (//end of ranting time)

 

The area that made the most progress those last few weeks is unmistakably the engine.  The cloudnovel engine is constantly being improved! For example, you can now finally save and load your progress through the use of a link (built-in save function is planned as well, but not in the works currently). you can also find a skip and previous button while playing the demo. Or maybe you've noticed those new animations that I've been progressively adding on the demo, that use easing, making the movement animations of the camera and the sprites much, much smoother (No more "linear only" animations). There are also tons of new features from the creator side that have been added, and that make working and creating our demo on cloudnovel such a breeze, but it probably won't interest you (and I will talk about those in a cloudnovel dedicated topic that I will create in the near future I believe).

 

Concerning the day 5 segment of the demo that will be released (let's call this demo 2.1), I hope to be able to implement it and release it during July. No promises though, as usual. Day 5 is mostly the climax / peak of the "enjoyable school life" part of the demo, having the whole cast interact as a group between each other (which creates some very interesting and sometimes rather... hilarious combinations and situations). For those who are wanting the pace to pick up, our apologies in advance, it will not be for demo 2.1. But don't worry, the rest of common route should meet your expectations!

 

TL;DR : It depends on the area, but overall, progress is being made! Stay tuned, and don't hesitate to comment on this thread! (And for those who haven't yet, make sure to play the demo 2.0!)

[Diamon]

Well, it's been a while since I last posted here...

 

I guess I'll make a quick summary of what happened since last time I posted something :

 

- Writing is progressing well, we're moving onto heroine routes, and common route is in editing phase. There are quite a lot of additions to be made on common route, so it's nowhere near to completion (but we are actively working on it as well).

 

- Art is progressing well, not really much to say about that, we are working on new sprites and on CG for common route currently.

 

- Music is stalling, mostly because we have no composer available to work on the Lucid9 tracks. Fortunately, a good portion of the tracks we need for common route is already composed. If you're a composer and you'd like to offer your services as a composer, feel free to pm me!

 

- Programming is... Well, I guess we are operating a change of direction here. Even though our current demo on cloudnovel is working, we ultimately had issues with the creators, we are probably going to make Lucid9 on ren'py since it's probably the safest and most reliable way.

 

 

As a result, I have no idea when we'll be able to release a demo... The good thing is that the next demo will be an downloadable one!

 

I guess I'll share some of the art that has been created lately as an apology for the lack of updates lately :

An awesome background, courtesy of yuuko our BG artist!

 

You'll order some more Elizabeth, won't you?

 

I'm very tempted to make some Love Live reference...

 

Is that Akira? YES IT IS AKIRA!

[Helvetica Standard]

oh yes! ren'py!
If you need anything ren'py, don't hesitate to contact me! ;P
HYPE IS REAL, YO. 
*Plays Gover Mecher music*

[Diamon]

oh yes! ren'py!

If you need anything ren'py, don't hesitate to contact me! ;P

HYPE IS REAL, YO. 

*Plays Gover Mecher music*

Thanks for the offer!

 

Ah, also I forgot to add this in my update, but here is a video trailer for Lucid9! (I guess you could consider this as some kind of opening?) Everything is not perfect in it, and it will probably be rev later, but it should serve as a temporary video!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIdng31TUs

[Mr Poltroon]

Thanks for the offer!

 

Ah, also I forgot to add this in my update, but here is a video trailer for Lucid9! (I guess you could consider this as some kind of opening?) Everything is not perfect in it, and it will probably be rev later, but it should serve as a temporary video!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmIdng31TUs

That bloody thing is screaming 'Hype' at me.

[kingdomcome]

First time seeing this VN. What is the progress status?

[Diamon]

First time seeing this VN. What is the progress status?

Well that's a good thing, I was about to post a status update about our recent progress!

So, last time I posted here, I was talking about how we were having issues in programming and composing. Well, good news for both, those issues have been solved! We've recruited a lot of fresh blood, and we gained a lot of dynamic and made quite a lot of progress, thanks to :

- Zuka, who joined the team as a programmer and who is taking care of the GUI

- jbonesy, who also joined as a programmer, and who is taking care of Narrative scripting

- breeze, Ultrakitsune, Yunyunsae and Ziassan who all joined as composers for the project (damn, I was complaining about not findig any composer one month ago, and now we have four).

- Zander, who will produce SFX for us.

- Suna who joined our ranks as a writer

It's probably a legitimate question to wonder if having so many composers won't be counter-productive. Well, I can't deny that there is a risk, but at the same time, putting all the workload on only one composer would be way too unreasonable, and having more hands allow us to create more tracks to fit specific situations, instead of having to content ourselves with generic OST that try to fit everywhere. Musical consistency might suffer a bit, but it's a risk we're willing to take to tell the truth.

I'm pretty sure everyone would want some more concrete news though, so here we go :

- First of all, we decided to release a new demo for January 2016. I can't give a precise day yet, not can I guarantee that it won't be delayed by several weeks, but we'll try our best to respect this deadline.

- This demo will include the entirety of common route. As a reminder, Common route spans over 13 days, and should pretty much last you for something between 5 hours (for the fastest readers) and 7-8 hours.

- Despite what you could have believed from our previous demo, the pace is not going to be a 13-days slice of life comedy without any plot progression. First 5 days are pretty much exposition, character introductions and comedy, days 5 to 8 get into the heart of the mystery and has a much more tensed ambiance, while days 9 to 13 will be the climax of common route.

- Interestingly enough, common route can be seen pretty much as a standalone story/arc in the greater scheme of the Lucid9 universe. Several reasons to that, mainly, it will allow us to release a demo that has a complete development story-wise, and give some sort of satisfaction to the reader. Kinda comparable to a reader finishing the first tome of a book series (not exactly the same, but you get my idea). Some people will like it and ask for more, some others won't and will question our choices, we're aware that we can't please everyone, but nevertheless this will be the story we wanted to tell.

- The days 1 to 4 of this demo have been reworked a bit, so there will be new and changed content compared to the previous demo (the most noteworthy being a rework on Misaki's personality).

- The demo will be released on ren'py as a downloadable. For those who were wondering, the current demo you can find on cloudnovel won't be worked on anymore and will be discontinued in favor of the ren'py version. We're already working on implementing the script on ren'py, and most of the GUI has already been created and implemented (as you can see here :

Well that's about it! I'll try to give more updates as things progress!

Since it was a pretty long post, here is a potato a drawing as a reward :

Akira, drawn by Yuuko, our BG artist.

[Helvetica Standard]

- Suna who joined our ranks as a writer

 

Wow, grats on scoring another one. You sure have a lot of writers XD

 

-Musical consistency might suffer a bit, but it's a risk we're willing to take to tell the truth.

 

 

i'd be more worried about having multiple writers than multiple composers, that's just IMO tho.

 

- we decided to release a new demo for January 2015.

 

Uuuuuh, wait does that mean you already released this demo last january? I think you meant "January 2016" XDDDD

[Diamon]

Ooops, thanks, that's corrected!
Well, I do believe so many writers is a real concern as well, but it's more a contraint for projects where everyone works as volunteer : I'm not sure I'd ever be able to find someone skilled enough with enough motivation and free time to work on 5 routes of 150k words on a reasonable timeframe (else it'd take years for us to finish). Well we'll still try our best to harmonize writing, but I'm afraid there will still be differences between routes.

[Mr Poltroon]

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. This gets me excited! Oh yes it does!

[Mikado069]

Watching creative works is always inspiring. Good luck with your project!

[Diamon]

Haven't posted here in quite a while...
We're still working hard on the common route! A lot of assets are being produced, thanks to the effort of everyone on the team! Guess I'll just post some assets, since sharing is caring

First : our podcast episode 1 video! 

Cover art : Dizzyworld2,
OST : Hustle & Bustle by Jason Walsh
Participants : AnotherPlayer, Mac
(Tips : do actually watch the video, you won't be disappointed!  )

 

So usually, I often put a background update here with an asset, but this time, I'll do even better : a background speedpainting from Yuuko!

 

And lastly, of course, some fanart, because you all deserved it after waiting for so long without any news :

A bit late, but look at all the candy Akira got!  (Drawn by Yuuko)

That's all for the moment!
Stay tuned for some further updates soon-ish! (And follow the thread if you haven't been yet!  )

[Diamon]

A happy new year to everyone from us!

Since I'm feeling a bit lazy today, I'll simply content myself with posting the two blog posts we recently made :

- http://lucid9.weebly.com/blog/holiday-update

- http://lucid9.weebly.com/blog/happy-new-year

 

Some of you might have noticed that I have finally updated the front page, with new screenshots and info about the upcoming release, that we decided to call "Inciting Incident". We're getting on greenlight soon through Sekai, so I'm probably going to post something again relatively soon!

[Diamon]

We're now on steam greenlight!!
Please support us by voting and sharing the page with others!

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=604416507

[DarkZedge]

I like the artstyle and the story seems good aswell, i wish you the best of luck and seems you got something good in your hands aswell as putting in the effort. Looks great

Can't wait to try it out, hype begining

[Forgetful Frank]

This looks great! Thanks for all your hard work, everyone on the team.

I'll be checking this out for sure.

[Diamon]

Time for some Valentine's promo art!

You can find our latest update here : http://lucid9.weebly.com/blog/february-updaate-a-lot-of-exciting-news

We're really excited with the upcoming voice acting, and the auditions we've received for the VA we've picked are all stunning, we hope you will all love it as well!

[Diamon]

As promised in the blog post, here are the first two voiced trailers!

 

[spademan]

game is all ages or there are h-scenes too?

[Diamon]

14 hours ago, spademan said:

game is all ages or there are h-scenes too?

There will be no H-scenes in Lucid9 

[Diamon]

The two next trailers in line: Jirou Ryouta and Masato Kurogane!

 

 

[Diamon]

I guess I'm a bit late about it (haven't been paying much attention to this thread lately, an apology to the people who follow our updates through this thread solely), but Inciting Incident is now available to play for free on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/439940/

We hope you'll enjoy reading through this release!

[Mr Poltroon]

It is notable that the "suppose" may be a typo:

Spoiler

Also of note is my innate cluelessness: Where would I go about reporting this sort of thing, should I come across it?

[Diamon]

11 minutes ago, Tiagofvarela said:

It is notable that the "suppose" may be a typo:

  Hide contents

Also of note is my innate cluelessness: Where would I go about reporting this sort of thing, should I come across it?

Either here, the discussion thread (http://forums.fuwanovel.net/topic/13902-lucid9inciting-incident-discussion-thread/), our forums https://trello.com/b/qNbWfsJB/lucid9-forum, or our discord channels if you happen to use discord (https://discord.gg/0tTkktQasTkSOtzt). Basically: anywhere^^

 

[Mr Poltroon]

This particular wording, or should I say, lack thereof, leaves me positively nonplussed.

Spoiler

I am, of course, alluding to the use of "I've also some things to do", as opposed to a more customary alternative: "I've also got some things to do".

Due to a definite paucity of knowledge in the English syntax department, this is a mere supposition. It is entirely possible that the average reader would present no qualms with the current phrasing.

 

In other news, I adore this VN, I relish Miss Shigure Enomoto, and grass is viridescent.