Tag: devlog

WYSAPOOMP 2024 Devlog #2

~ nothackeuropa ~ Leave a comment

In February, we had to split our attention between development for POOMP as well as planning for NaNoRenO 2024, where we plan to wrap up POOMP’s spin-off series featuring warlock hunter Emma Schmidt.

Next month, there will not be a devlog, since we fully expect to be busy with the jam.

Art

It’s always great when we can combine POOMP art with jam planning. In this case, we made a rough design of Artur’s second-in-command, Nina. She didn’t end up making the cut for the game, but it’s great to finally put a face to the name. On top of this, we’re still hard at work creating new CGs, complete with complementary trips to cafés to scout locations.

Audio

We’ve been working on a leitmotif for Rose, based on CC’s theme from POOMP spin-off “Aftermath Crumble”.

Scripting

We decided to fix our image tinting code since it didn’t work on composite sprites. While the game no longer crashes when our artist tries to insert them, we also no longer have tinting. We’ll have to figure out what went wrong there since we’ve been doing this for other games before.

Writing

Editing has been going especially slow this month with the team being busy outlining our NaNo game, but we still made some headway. And re-reading a scene where poor Julian gets destroyed in chess by Artur is always a blast.

Miscellaneous

We’ve also created a new concept for our main menu, after having upgraded the game’s resolution. It’s still a work in progress, though.

WYSAPOOMP 2024 Devlog #1

~ nothackeuropa ~ Leave a comment

Since development on WYSAPOOMP has gotten somewhat far in the last couple of years, we decided to do a sprint to the finish line, focusing more of our free time on it than previously. This also means that we have enough material to resume monthly devlogs!

This January, we picked up more serious development on the game again, resumed editing, and began what we hope will be the final run of scripting before a closed beta test of route 1.

Art

Our art department has been steadily chugging away at the game during the past year, but we decided to re-focus on POOMP, having any other projects take a step back.

This month, we got a cool image of Eren during a university lecture, as well as a CG showing him sitting on a bed, clearly upset and mentally aged by a good ten years. Poor Eren. Who could do something like that to him? Certainly not the reader, right?

Audio

We’ve been discussing the musical theme for the Sotalacha. Those who have played our other games may know that these are the people working directly below Agatha, the leader of the cult featured in our visual novels. These big, bad warlocks clearly need a badass theme that requires lots of planning!

Scripting

This month, we started seriously scripting the game, where before we only had sprites vaguely placed on backgrounds whenever they were supposed to be on screen. We haven’t gotten very far yet, mainly because we got caught up in trying to move in characters while fading them in at the same time, all nicely wrapped into its own transition. We’re still on that.

Writing

Our main focus currently lies on editing.

The current run is the last before the “English check” to make sure we didn’t sneak in any awkward phrasings from our native languages, and it’s currently at 15% of route 1.

Miscellaneous

When we started POOMP, we went with 720p resolution. Now, a couple of years later, we released several games at 1080p and we don’t want to go back. Thus, we not only upgraded the game to 1080p, but also migrated to Ren’Py 8 while we were at it, which so far hasn’t caused any major issues.

Poomp Devlog #1

~ nothackeuropa ~ Leave a comment

This week was a big one for us: We launched this website alongside our Twitter account, finalized the design for our logo, and finished an internal demo for new team members.

Art

Our artist was especially diligent this week – not only did he take our concept art and placeholder design for the logo and turned it into art, but he also finished the first pose for our first route’s heroine, Katrin.

You can find a short introduction of her artwork here. Since he already got started on our second heroine, Erdi, there’s a good chance he’ll finish her this Thursday during his art stream.

Editing

While our editor may not have worked on much of Poomp’s text this week, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t busy. With the new website and several tweets, he had his hands full correcting the garbled mess that I write when I’m left to my own devices. Maybe, one day, I can get him to write an article about the daily struggle that is my questionable spelling, especially when it comes to homophones, as well as the hardship of fighting off what he calls my ‘German commas’.

If it wasn’t for him, we’d be all be turning on our heals, our demos would be life, and cats always would have tales to tell instead of tails to wag.

Music

Oh snap, our editor is also our composer! As previously said, he was quite busy this week. We promise there will be snippets from our OST at some point.

Until then, feel free to check out this awesome OST that he wrote within 72 hours!

Meanwhile, a friend of our group offered to write us an anime opening. He already provided an amazing first idea, which sparked conversations within our team, entailing options for the structure and figuring out what mood we’re looking for. We are thrilled to see where he’ll take this.

Scripting

This week, I created and added some animated backgrounds. We’re quite happy with how they turned out and will post one of them on our twitter later this week. Besides that, I reworked scene transitions and added several placeholder sounds. Let’s hope our composer figures out how to produce better designed sounds than the ones I’m using!

Writing

This week was fairly boring, as far as writing goes. I spent several hours editing our demo. While it’s not yet ready to be released into the public, it’s now polished enough to at least be distributed to those that want to help us, but don’t know the story yet.

Besides that, I still managed to squeeze in 6.000 words, which is below my usual word goal for a week. This takes us to a total of 382.000 words.

I’m currently working on the third route, where I had one of our big antagonists bite the bucket earlier this week. However, that doesn’t mean dear Julian’s troubles are over. In fact, he just found himself in a fairly sticky situation.