Factum

Spent some time working on a more polished in-game GUI for Break Chance Memento. (click to enlarge) Not sure how effective this is yet, but now there’s a menu that appears when you mouseover the top of the screen. This decreases the number of buttons attached to the textbox. In the demo feedback survey, one person commented that all the buttons were kind of hard to use because it’s hard to, at a glance, remember what each one does. (the button name/use does appear upon hover) Now the only buttons down there are quick save/load, skip, and auto, which should be easy enough to remember. The other menus are accesible via the top menubar, which smoothly appears or disappears as needed. At least it’s making things a bit easier for me, so hopefully other people appreciate the design change, as well. I wish I’d discovered mouseover sooner! It’s going to change my coding a lot. >:D Next up on my coding to-do list is tinting the sprites, coding the remaining GUIs (CG gallery, etc), and various other sprite-related things.

Script-wise, I’m working on writing and finishing Shuuki’s chapter three in time for the first round of beta testing, which is supposed to start soon. I’ve had some terrible writer’s block due mostly to renovations going on in my house right now, but those should finally FINALLY be done this week, so hopefully I’m back up to speed soon. Auro’s working on finishing all of the sprites… She’s finished the secondary character sprites, so now she’s moving onto the tertiary characters (who all share a base) and whatnot. Then it’s back to BGs. BCM is moving along pretty smoothly despite my own personal setbacks, which is great. Auro and I even took some time to discuss our future projects for 2012 (and 2013?), some of which are free games, so rest assured, Cyanide Tea will be very busy for a while. For those interested, we’ve got our forums which are a little quiet right now (except in the hidden beta testing subforum) but we’re hoping things get more active after we release more things. Also we’ve got a dA group that Auro’s been updating with sprites and other WIP things.

That’s about it for now~ This’ll probably be the last update on this blog until 2012, but hopefully there’s a lot more (exciting!) content next time around. :D

So it’s now been about 5 days since the BCM demo was released. Here are some statistics related to that:

As of writing, there have been 176 downloads of the demo. Of course, the first 56 people downloaded the bugged version, so assuming that at least one of them went back and re-downloaded, this places the unique downloads between 120 – 175. Of these, there was only one Linux download, 19 Mac downloads, and the rest were Windows. Google Analytics says there’s been 350 unique visitors to the demo website, most of which have been from the United States. Strangely, BCM has a pretty large European following? Germany boasts the most visitors, followed by the UK.

Of the 120+ people who downloaded the demo, 7 were nice enough to fill out the survey at the end. (thanks to all 7 of you! your feedback has been very much appreciated and we are taking it very seriously) Other than that, the only feedback I’ve heard has been from people at LSF, so I’m not entirely sure what the other 100 people thought of the game. Could be bad, could be good. Most of the feedback we’ve gotten on the game has been quite positive, however. Mostly people seem to really like the UI and the character interactions. I’m really happy that some misconceptions about the characters were cleared up. More than one person commented that they didn’t think they’d like Shuuki, but now he’s one of the most popular characters based on our polls.

The demo did a lot better than I expected and reached quite a lot of people just based on word of mouth alone. This is Auro’s and my first VN we’ve made together as Cyanide Tea (the first of many, I hope!). That plus the facts that A) visual novels are very niché and B) BL games are even more niché made my expectations pretty low. The fact that 120+ people have given the demo a try despite all this makes me really happy. I hope that you silent players have enjoyed it. ;) I can promise that the demo is nothing more than a glimpse of what the real gameplay is going to be like, so I hope people enjoy the full game just as much when it’s done. Based on our current progress, Auro and I are expecting to release BCM in summer of 2012. It seems pretty far away, but I’m sure that time will creep up on me before I know it.

Right now I’m recuperating from all the sleep I lost working on the demo, doing some work on the Cyanide Tea website, and programming a German version of the BCM demo. I’m still floored that someone would offer to translate my script into German, but there you have it. Hopefully that’s out soon. It’s been really neat seeing the script in German even if I don’t really understand a word of it. (my experience with German culture is limited to my visits to Schlitterbahn and Addison Oktoberfest, haha…) I’m also finally catching up on some writing for Amber’s Magic Shop. @_@ It’s been tough working recently because my house is currently being renovated. There’s loud sounds and dust flying everywhere, and the electricity randomly gets shut off every so often… But they’re finally just doing some painting now, meaning I can get back to some regular work. I hope all you readers are doing well. <3 If you haven’t yet, be sure and vote in the BCM favorite character poll.