After completing II:Prologue, we realized that the scope of the project was just too massive for a couple of guys to complete. It was a cool endeavor and we learned a great deal. But making people wait 4-5 years between installments would be just a wee bit ridiculous. So what to do?
Well, we wanted to continue to produce animation. We figured we’d go with something simpler for a follow-up project. Something that was basically just a one-off. And that took the form of Mehka.
Studded amongst many of our blog posts, you’ll find a common phrase that we use to describe some of the choices we’ve made for Errant Heart. And that phrase will typically start with: “Because of our background in animation and comics…”.
The “comics” part of that phrase is simple enough to corroborate. All one has to do is take a look at the Van Von Hunter webcomic, or the print books (although, I think most of the remaining copies have been since shredded and used as filler in cheap cereal bars). Or a more succinct option would simply be to browse the VVH Wikipedia entry.
I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on an incredibly simple trick that I just implemented in Errant Heart, which I find endlessly amusing.
At the outset of this whole visual novel endeavor we wanted to leverage our experience in animation and comics. And that is to say, we really wanted Errant Heart to be a visually stimulating experience. Of course, that’s easier said than done and has the potential to end up at either end of the extremes—too boring or too distracting/gimmicky.
Hey folks!
It’s been forever since I did a blog; I really tend to be the kind of person who likes to wait until I’m done with something before showing off what I’ve created, but today I suppose I can give you another peek behind the scenes. This time around, I’ll show you a bit of the process we’re using for event images.
Event images have been one of the last big hurdles for us to get through in completing Errant Heart. Unlike the sprites and backgrounds that get a lot of use throughout the visual novel, event images only show up briefly to punch up important moments in the story. They’re a lot of work for something that will only be on screen for a moment or two, but the effect they have is worth it.
In order to get through the creation of all these images, I’ve been trying to streamline the process a little with with a new coloring method. Continue reading
So, something that occurred to me is that I don’t think that we’ve really given potential fans, or donors a good sense of the Errant Heart universe. Sure, we’ve provided basic information about the setting and the general focus of the story. But I don’t believe that, at any point, do we impart a very good impression of how the Errant Heart universe operates or how it’s constructed, what are its rules, etc.
To that end, I wanted to make a post that might help flesh that out for anyone who is interested.
In my last post, I talked a bit about how we decided to give visual novels a try since the more text-heavy approach provided us with a chance to tell more story than we’d be able to in other media. But even with the focus on more written story, we still want to make the visual part of the visual novel as interesting as possible.
Something I noticed in a lot of the visual novels I’ve seen, is that they tend to stick with a very specific layout for their entirety. It’s usually something along the lines of this:
A background that fits the screen, a medium shot of a character (or two) in the center, the text box and…well, that’s pretty much it. This approach struck me as a little boring, and given the flexibility provided by the RenPy engine, completely unnecessary.
With the Errant Heart Kickstarter going on right now, I figured I was overdue on making my first post for this development blog of ours. I was struggling for a bit, trying to think of what to contribute to this, and while I’m in a good position to talk about a lot of the art and technical aspects of Errant Heart, I thought it might make sense to delve a little bit into just why we’re making a visual novel in the first place.
So, If any of you read through the comments on my previous blog entry, you may have noticed that I’ve thrown caution to the wind and spawned a new forum, for the sake of creating a community for the more serious, more advanced EVN creators out there.
Before digging in to the meat of this post, allow me to provide you with some background information, in the event that you aren’t well acquainted with the various aspects I intend to address.
Well, put simply, Errant Heart is a Visual Novel. It’s being constructed with Ren’Py, which is a very flexible program designed to help creators make their own Visual Novel game. If you’d like to read a synopsis of the story and of character bios, as well as get a chance to glance over some artwork and screen shots, then please continue reading.
Errant Heart Dev Blog 