Weather Wizards Progress

NaNoWriMo has not only inspired many would be writers to actually write, but it's also inspired a lot of similar challenges.  In the VN community there's one called NanoReno, held in March.  The point of the challenge is to make an entire visual novel in that month.  You can use pre-made resources and be in a group.  I decided to give Weather Wizards a makeover for the challenge.  I didn't come close to finishing (the problem with working alone I suppose) but I did get much further along than my last attempt to write this story.

All of the art got a dramatic facelift.  I used the old art as a template and redrew from there.  I used the pen tool a lot and was quite happy with the results.  The character art has a lot of mirroring and reusing but I did try to use it to it's advantage and not as a crutch.  Figuring out how to render the sketchup models so that they looked right with my characters was interesting, but now I have it figured out and it doesn't look too bad in my opinion.  I used a rendering plug-in to get the shading then ran it through some photoshop filters to give the shading more obvious shading steps, then cleaned it up by hand.  It made the colors hard to control but I may end up using this method to help speed things up when drawing backgrounds for Twin Crowns.

Writing was the part that killed my momentum in the end, just like I knew it would.  I'm not a fast writer and I haven't finished anything longer than a few comic book scripts since my first attempt at NaNoWriMo.  I got one character's path scripted and playable but it still needs some work before I'll call it done.

The programing that I've done so far wasn't too hard, the worst part was trying to get the GUI to do what I wanted.  I'll probably end up making an imagemap now that I can take my time, and I have a few minigames I'd like to put in that think will fit the flow of the story very well.

Working on this game with such an intense focus for a month was good, but I've realized I don't really like working on it alone.  I am very tempted to find a writer, but I doubt there's a writer out there who'll live up to my standards and put up with the creative limitations that come with this project.