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Harmful Heaven, End of the World Visual Novel

A topic by Maidelen created Mar 29, 2023 Views: 2,515 Replies: 63
Viewing posts 1 to 38
(4 edits) (+2)

Early devlog posts present illustrations, ideas and concepts that were altered or discarded . Some time has passed. The game page is up.


I've been writing and drawing a lot of stuff for a visual novel since the beginning of the year. Now, Harmful Heaven has taken a lot of shape and I'm sure I can move on to the part where I start coding the stuff in ren'py.

desi-sera

Serious, calculating and focused - Cheerful, merry and ingenuous

Sera, a silly boy who wanted to get out of his village, and Desi, a woman with a questionable past, meet on the way to the boat, the vehicle that will take them to the heaven prepared by the angels of the world. The road to the boat is chaotic and bizarre, and they can die by them.

Will Sera and Desi make it to heaven?


I want Harmful Heaven to be a small visual novel with adorable moments and conflicts where everyone shows their worst, in parallel.
Even with all your flaws and demons, what matters at the end of the day is how you deal with it and the actions you do to yourself, your friends and the world. All of that on a journey to heaven.

Features:

  • Concise length, things will always happen to keep you interested.
  • Sera and Desi use rifles to fight, you will have to use the mouse to click and shoot in battles.
  • Crazy characters that will probably make you laugh but will also scare you. They all fall into this category
  • Everything has a background: The end of the world, the angels, the world, Sera and Desi, their enemies and their friends.
  • 5 Endings of which I hope, each ending feels satisfying, especially the true one. They will be easy to get out of, this is designed to be beaten in one or two plays.

Can be your best friend

This is what angels looks like. They are like cats.

The progress I'll share here will be more technical than anything, since I've been working on this for months, but it's only now that I'm going to start coding the game. Thanks ren'py you are easy to use.

Thanks for taking the time to read. If you liked what you saw I hope you get to play Harmful Heaven. I forgot to say that it will be a free game.

Issue 2, Things seem to be going well

  • I haven't coded anything in ren'py, but what I have done is write the story again. The previous versions had a very simple and basic vision, that was supposed to be what I wanted, but its events and resolution seem very basic to me, and if I don't like it, others might not like it. This new version of the story, which at the moment has 10K words and is in the middle of the story, convinces me much more. After finishing it, comes the overall revision process, and only then I'll start coding the visual novel.
  • Harmful Heaven was conceived as the smallest and most short project I could create, the new additions to the story I had to choose very carefully not to ruin that. I think I expanded the story in a way I can handle.
  • I have added to the list tools associated with ren'py that I will be using, such as Twine to Ren'Py and Ren'Py Accessibility Add-On. One so I can write dialog better and the other for player accessibility. A bit related, while drawing the backgrounds, I decided that the black color will be much more prevalent than the white color, since white could cause discomfort and difficulty to the view.
  • I also decided to use BGM music, SE audio and music in general from Pixabay and Freesound for sound effects, and MaouDamashii and YouFulca for music.  I've known about Maou's music for years, it's awesome and I'm happy to use their material.

For the following posts I will have illustrative images, because pure text can be boring. Undoubtedly, what I have worked the most on this time is the writing, with which I am satisfied and I hope that the final result will satisfy me. The development continues.

(1 edit)

Issue 3, some decisions

After experimenting and testing a few things, I have decided to make some changes in how the game is played. In the first post I said that there would be a QTE mini-game that appeared regularly in the fights, now it's discarded.

Before (Up), after (Down)

I tested the QTE code, script made by Papiersam. It works and it's good. But after seeing how my visual novel would look like with QTE in practice, it made me question whether to use it or not.

I've played Fate/Extra and Tsukuhime, visual novels made by Type-Moon. It has made me question several things about how I see visual novels. The ones I've played don't have action story segments, or they do in a small dose, but these two VNs have life and death conflicts pretty regularly and I've seen how these VNs present life and death conflicts in an immersive and tense way. Music, descriptions of the situation, characters changing their reactions to the situation, unsettling music, and decisions where one is right and another leads to a death ending.

I haven't played The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog, but I read a review that said that while they liked the VN, didn't like the minigames it had, saying that feels the developers didn't trust that the game couldn't hold up to being a visual novel.

I had the feeling that the QTE would be bad for the game, but after testing it, trying alternatives and listening to opinions about it, I have made the decision not to use QTE in the game. Their absence will be compensated by constant crucial decisions in moments of conflict and better use of text for atmosphere. I consider this a good change, but I wouldn't discard experimenting with QTE in a visual novel, but in a different game, not this one. The development continues.

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I am not well financially, and I have to balance this with my college studies. Bringing this to fruition as soon as possible would do me a lot of good so I can start my career of sorts. I thought for a while about what I could do to improve the development to the complete version of Harmful Heaven, and this is what I decided.


  • Originally Harmful Heaven was going to be a very short game, but now the expansions I've done on it made that no longer the case. The things I've added haven't been that great either, but I consider it now worth uploading a demo. Within the story of the game, the story takes place over 3 days (Actually it's 2 days, but *beep* spoilers) so I can make a demo that covers the first day of the story.

    Uploading a demo would be a very good thing: I'll have something playable that I can present, I can get opinions and feedback from those who play and the game page will circulate on Itch.io and may gain a following. I'm excited about the idea and I'm going to work harder to make the demo a reality.  (besides the full game, of course).
  • And the second most important decision is that I'm going to discard Ren'py as an engine for Harmful Heaven.

    I've been using RPG Maker since I was a kid, several iterations of the software. I've done quite a lot of stuff there, goofy stuff and none of it complete. After that, I had a phase where I was like "I must expand my horizons!" and i started experimenting with a lot of different engines. I didn't get to experiment much with them out of fear, I didn't get to do much or anything at all. The requirement of real programming and coding and scripting for even the smallest things got the better of me. The engine I stayed with of all the ones I tried was Ren'py... And for the moment I will discard it.

    In RPG Maker you can already make visual novels, but I wanted to do it in Ren'py to give me the illusion that I'm doing real programming... When what I've done is used codes from the tutorial, from scripts made by others and from reddit searches. All that to do extremely minimal and basic things. That's why I'm going to switch to a program that I know quite well, to make the development of Harmful Heaven more dynamic. It will still be a visual novel and will have no map exploration sections and no rpg elements. I switched to RPG Maker for this because I know how to use the engine, not to make Harmful Heaven an RPG.

I guess that's okay. I'm tired. Anyone is reading this? I was told that devlogs are more important to the dev than to those reading, so I would continue this thread even if no one was reading it. I'm just frustrated, but I have to keep going.

(+1)

Hello!!! idk if this will help ease your frustration, but I just read through your entire thread and i find your VN fascinating!!! it fits my taste completely!! I'm excited to play the demo :DDD i wish you good luck both with the game and with your studies :))

(+1)

Thank you for your words, it motivates me to continue with the project. I don't know what else to say, I'm glad to see such a nice message.

(+1)



It's been several days without an update, I have to write stuff and, fortunately, I bring positive news relating to the project

Making the visual novel in RPG Maker felt pretty good for the flexibility and speed of the development,  I've done several scenes of the story and did a couple of placeholders for other scenes still in development. There's still a lot of text and decision making still left to add but doing things in an engine I know well makes things much better. Thanks to Kanji the Grass for making the Visual Novel Style plugin. I can add visual novel classic stuff to the game thanks to this.

In technical terms, the development couldn't be going better. Next time I will progress enough to put 20% on the post.

A good part of this time was spent practicing my drawing as well, I've managed to make some improvements to make the characters look better than before. I think I've succeeded. If I hadn't taken the time to practice these days the final character designs would look like this: 


And instead, they will now look like this: 


If you consider that something was lost or downgraded please tell me so, I personally think it's an improvement but I could be wrong. Along the way it lost the always-surprised Desi's face, but I might add it as a reaction.
(There are more characters besides Sera and Desi, but I'm still redesigning them)

It's about time I started designing the final art for the game, I've done so many sketches and so many changes, I've come up with something that looks good to me. I hope myself and others will enjoy the final result.


(+1)

I have managed to make playable sections of Harmful Heaven at this point. It's a visual novel, so it's no great achievement, but the fact that I've made it this far means that the project is in a development that's going well.

Two people are very important in this project, Utsukushi Hana and Eurobeatlover, I love them very much. They are very aware of the work and progress I make, I'm still in charge of the design, art and writing but I show everything to them, having points of view of people who know about those things (One is good at drawing and the other at writing) is important, the final Harmful Heaven would be a lower quality thing if it wasn't for them. (Nothing assures me that the actual Harmful Heaven could be bad too, I better be quiet and keep working on it).

Talking about Harmful Heaven as a complete game, there are things that have changed from when I started developing this in January of this year, here a small list of things that were going but not anymore.

  • The two protagonists were going to be devoid of feelings. They were not going to be hired killers, but because of the story taking place in the apocalypse, they were going to kill anything they came across, without hesitation. It's much different now, but will the current Sera and Desi be forced to kill in the current storyline?
  •  Much less gentleness, and kindness. I don't know how to say it, now and before in the story there were going to be deaths, tragedies and despair, but before it was in a dry, half sarcastic way. When the story was much simpler and shorter it looked good I think, but not now. I like the current tone much better.
  • In the first post I said there were going to be 5 endings.... With all the changes made to the story, none of the 4/5 endings can no longer be integrated into the current version. Writing one more time I could come up with replacements for the new storyline, but it's a shame. Maybe I could put those discarded endings as bonus scenes.

I was thinking about creating a reddit account to upload clips of the game in some rpg maker subreddit, because I've seen how games get to win people that way, but I don't know, maybe it's not that big of a deal and what I post in itch.io is enough.

For the next posts I will be more open about characters and story segments. I've analyzed it and it won't be that big of a deal to introduce the important characters. And maybe by telling elements of the story I can make it more interesting. Things are going well, very good.

I don't know what profile picture to put on my profile that isn't a dog or a cat.

(+1)

I have made a short introduction to the story of Harmful Heaven.


How was it? I want to create interest in the story so I decided to start with this. How do you think the story will go based on this?

(+1)

The development these days has been a collision of feelings, bad and good. I think it would be good to start passing screenshots of the game. The first screenshots of the game. The first language of the game is Spanish, but as soon as I finish the script in-game I will translate it to English. For now, I will translate the screenshots with text below them. I will talk about the experience in a separate post.

Start - Continue - Credits - Configurations


"Inevitably, the bombs began to fall." "Everyone decided to act to survive" "A little journey to heaven has started."


"... I have my rifle and my magic scarf, I should be fine."



"Why would you scare me? You look stupid."

"On your way to the boat, wanderers?" "I'm sure you been waiting for this famous ride." "Get in! We're going straight to the boat!"

Those screenshots screams "videogame in development", don't they? Only the sprites are final. The text box, the colors, the font, the main menu and things like that are still pending. Wow, saying it like that sounds like a lot, well yes it is a lot. Not to mention the lack of music and few sound effects.

Really, if developing in RPG Maker is already difficult for me, using an engine that requires programming would finish me. It's partly because I'm making a visual novel, which is different from a Top-Down, but even if it's not impossible, it's exhausting. But it's a matter of planning my work time better and getting used to it, so it won't be so difficult little by little.

I have had periods of reflection on many things, mainly my situation and all that entails what I am doing and how I am. It is hard and overwhelming, but part of being adults is knowing how to balance things to face situations like this in the best possible way, so I will definitely continue, and I will complete this project, and many others. Actually my outburst was going to be much more long-winded but since I already did it mentally I don't think it's necessary.

(1 edit) (+1)

The full script is nearing completion. After a lot of thinking about the final stretch of the story and discussion with Eurobeatlover and Utsukushi Hana, I have finally decided on the final sequence of events for Harmful Heaven. I mean, the ending and epilogue were already decided a long time ago, but what was missing were the exact things that would happen up to that point. I think it turned out to be something interesting. With that crossed off the list, the script would be complete and what would be left would be the game itself.

Here are some small illustrations of the game parts



And look at these three individuals


Very apocalyptic

Edit: Ok uh the quality manager/editor/friend Eurobeatlover tells me that presenting these illustrations in this post was a bad idea. You see, these dummies will be in only one scene and I didn't give it the effort as I would do with important characters, and it told me that posting them would give the impression that this is the peak of my illustrator skills (very bad). I mean, I'm very novice but, not like that either. So, that. Sorry.

I don't know if it's Firefox or my pc or both, but the browser really crashes lately with anything. I've already had to rewrite what I wanted to post three times. From now on I will do my itch.io-post things writing in notepad++ 
RPG Maker MV and Aseprite are available on linux thanks to steam, the only thing that really prevents me from trying some linux distribution is the fact that I don't have the disk space to have both OS, because I don't think I will be able to go straight to linux. Also, dowload the alternative versions of my software for Linux. Maybe, when I start earning some money, I will buy a new hard disk to have more space / replace the one I have that is too old and at any moment it will break down. My old computer can no longer handle all the whims of windows 10 little by little.
God, technology is a stressful thing if you don't have the money.

In the end, however, the development continues. And I think this is a bad time to say it, but thanks to the RPG Maker MV export facility, the game will be also on linux.

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Entiendo lo de las ilustraciones. No se preocupes por eso, siempre se aprende con las acciones. Ahora bien, en general tengo que admitir que la premisa de la historia al comienzo es suficientemente atractiva por sí misma. Lo único que le invito a replantearse -tomando en consideración opiniones externas- el cómo hacer que esa misma seducción aplique a las visuales del juego. No soy experto en el área pero de igual forma le sugiero tomar referencias de estilos similares y asi consiga una consistencia a la cual aferrarse.

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My not-really-editors have commented on how my illustrations are inconsistent. I have to assume this as a problem. Thanks for the comment, I didn't reply to you immediately because I was busy getting emotional about someone commenting in my work. My references are like a juice of many fruits blended in a single glass, but I'd better decide on something concrete to reference. Thanks to the feedback.

I say this without any disrespect, but I think you used a translator to speak to me in my first language. It's not necessary, I understand and write English decently, but the intent is appreciated!

Edit: I'm glad to read that the initial premise of the story is something interesting. Thanks for that too

Nah, my spanish is native. Sometimes I just forget in what language I'm talking to. And my natural driven expressionism it's also particular and strange by its own as you may see.

60 days since I created this post. The simple decision to create this devlog represented an important step for me. This is the furthest I have come with any project I have ever tried to complete, I am happy and saddened at the same time.

According to the modification date of the .txt of the first Harmful Heaven writeup, the project was technically born on January 25, 2023. And now, we are just about halfway through the year. I feel good that I've been so consistent, but.... God, I feel like a failure looking back at all the previous things I failed to complete. I'm hoping that Harmful Heaven will be the thing that breaks this cycle that I've had since I've been trying to do these things since I was a kid.

Harmful Heaven is the most consistent and playable game I've made so far. Mainly because the gameplay of the game consists of reading. But... It's still a piece of playable software that's telling a story, one in development, but when I test to see if everything is working right, I feel like the game is... A game, i can play it and say "yes, it's in development, but it's definitely a game." I don't have words to express how that makes me happy.

Seeing the career of other developers, maybe I will be more professional and efficient if I start drinking beer. I'm 18 so I can do that, I'm sure I'll be cool and successful like ZUN if I start drinking a lot of beer.... Just kidding, it would be a huge expense.

A song from an anime I did not see was decisive in determining the tone and direction of the story of Harmful Heaven. Was this one: Jounetsu ni Tsuite Katarubeki ni, san no Shinjitsu.


I may do English lyrics later. "We rolled ourselves to fate, but miracles are awakening." Those kinds of phrases have the song. I like to think it's Sera who sings the song, I think it suits him.

Things seem to be going well. Still, I'd like to somehow reduce my entertainment time, but I can't lie to myself. I have to spend at least 1 hour playing some game or reading some manga. I have to learn to discipline myself and be stricter with myself.

(+1)

Nice devlog. A few thoughts.

Please reconsider the names. Sera is a female name and Desi, well, google it. If you insist, better maybe make it nicknames, like for Désirée and Seraph.

The game is whatever you want it to be. The engine is only a tool to make it easier to program. That said, if you do not want a kinetic novel, mini games and sandbox are good to break away from that. Illusion of choice vn with different ending in name only, are still kinetic, as far as I am concerend. As for vn, you know best if you want to have game play or just a branching story to read. Both have their fans.

Please be aware that this is a hobby. You can dream of becoming so successful that you can live from your hobby, of course, but indie dev is actually a synonym for unemployed (or overconfident boastful amateur with delusions about own skill and own game quality). You should still aim for a day job.

You can see the page view for topics and compare to other devlogs. Many of your views will stem from the same people though. And this section of the community is kinda deprecated as explained in the sticky.

I do not know how translator friendly rpg maker is. But if you hardcode the game in non-english, well, .... And if you do write wihtout translator in comments your engrish is good enough to write the game in that. But this is the opinion of a non native english speaker here ;-)

The problem with getting exposure is that you get exposure. People will say nice things, people will say not so nice things. Some only for the lulz. It is hard to see the valid criticism behind the insults. Your art so far sucks. That was not nice of me to say, but it is true. For me it looks not like pixel art, but like pixels drawn by a kid. If this is intentional, well, ok, can be done, but is hard to pull off. Art is a skill and takes lots of practise to look good. And without classes in that, it might take even longer. Also, even if you had a refined art style, people might just not like it, as it is a matter of personal taste. I do not like most pixel art in general for example. I think your chibis are good.

Oh, and your approach looks already more professional than most of the so called indie devs here. I wish you luck and fun with your hobby.

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Seeing what you commented on the topic I did made me want you to take a look at my devlog and comment. What a thing.

If Translator++ (software for editing and translating text from RPG Maker games) has a replace text style option, I will change them to Désirée and Seraph. I would refuse if Sera and Desi were names with special meanings, but the truth is that I decided them quickly and without thinking too much when I had this story as a thing of many jokes and little seriousness. Besides, Désirée and Seraph sound better.

Thanks for the comment about the game can be whatever I want, some time ago I decided definitively what I was going to do and I have already made some sections of the story already playable and I like the way they were/are.

After my first year in this,I understood that I am not going to make a living out of this. I don't think so at all, I don't think it's possible with my capabilities. But it's my fault with using "successful" ambiguously, what I want is to have a little reputation with a niche audience that is willing to support me so that I can continue making games. That's the most I can aspire to, and I think it's realistic to pursue that. My fault also for mentioning ZUN he's in another very high league.

Your art so far sucks. That was not nice of me to say, but it is true.

Uh, that hurt, but I guess I have to prepare myself to read it quite a few times. I'm not following the rules of a particular style, I don't think it's pixel art as such either. The way I draw is a result of ignoring what I don't like about a style and just sticking with what I like. I suppose I could improve if I apply myself more to this to make it more convincing.

your approach looks already more professional than most of the so called indie devs here.

Do you really think so? Thank you thank you, I feel like the best thing anyone can say to me on this is that I'm being professional. Although I think you can give me a compliment without disparaging other users.

Thanks for stopping by and taking your time to comment.

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Oh, you can keep the names as they were. It just bothers nitpickers like me, if never an hint of an explanation is given. And boys having a girls name and girls having a non-name is something to stumble over.

The boy could have been made fun for the angelic sounding name and thus only uses a short form. Or since it is postapocalpytic. People usually have better things to do than running around with their passports. They have no last names eithers, after all. So an introduction could be like:

Your name is what? That is not a name. - Duhhh. It is not my real name, I chose it myself! It is a new world, didn't you notice?

Or. That is an odd name for a boy. - That is because it is a nickname, doofus.

Whatever you like.  Even subtle as one of the kids carrying a school bag with a name tag on it that spells the full name.   But if you do nothing, I have to assume it is a world were these types of names are normal. Or worse, I could misinterpred the gender of your toons. All of this could of course be intentional. Like foreshadowing with the whole angel topics.

Names in such a setting can be anything. Including origin places, occupations or making fun of a activity the character did. In postapocalyptic, you might be called Rpg or Pixels, if you talk about your preapocalyptic activities.

Since it is your hobby, it should make fun to you foremost. There are just too many indie devs. Even if you make a good game, have an inviting game page, a free game, stunning social media ... you still have hundreds or rather thousands of people that are the same. I could play a new vn every day, and never accidentally stumble over yours. And I do have a backlog of literally hundreds of games to play. Maybe I should comment less and play more ;-)

Regarding your art style. Yes, I did say that intentionally, of course. But also because in my opinion it is like that. It is just not appealing to me (but not appaling either...) There are not many objective criteria to look at art. I can give an example of an evolving art style. There is a webcomic, questionable content. It runs 20 years now and the artist is self taught. You can look at the style evolving by looking every 100 pages or so. (he has over 5000 now). Or you might know the anime Shin Chan as another example. That one looks not quite like other anime...

Oh and it is pixel art to me. It is not very artsy and not the usual kind, yes, but you draw in low resolution, so I can see the pixels and stair case effects. The style is drawing-like-a-kid. And in this day and age, if I can see the pixels, it is intentional. (ok, maybe it is just low resolution art and not pixel art, report me to art police, if you must)

As you might have noticed, i am a forum lurker. So I do see lots of topics by ... "aspiring" developers. It was not a compliment for compliments sake, of course you are free to see it like that. As you are free to take offense by people not liking your game or your art. But you go at it without the attitude, that i observe so often. You know your current limitations and seem to have a plan. Compared to those others you are professional and they ... are not. I diss them because they project this delusional attitude: I made half a line of code and managed to press export on a game engine, thus I am a developer; why is no one playing (buying) my game. Seriously. If you dig in the forum you see lots of such threads. And if you take a look at the game, you see the why in the first seconds and question the meaning of the term indie game developer. Maybe they think it is (indie game) (developer). While I see it as (indie) (game developer). 

(+2)

I've mentioned several things about Sera (Seraph) and Desi (Désirée), which is normal because they are the main characters of the game, but what other important characters are on the list? A few more, here they go, will be introduced for the first time.


This is Boum. Since the apocalypse began, he uses his explosive handling skills to attack others and try to get through the days. He is someone relaxed and cheerful, but tries not to be so in the current situation.


Impelia. At some point in her life she abandoned her studies to focus on publish books. She did fairly alright, but her stories are famous. She has a special relationship with the angels, it will be decisive in the story.


Aragrace and her daughter Ari. The mother is the leader of the group of funny and dangerous people who adore the angels. They help the people they meet around. They believe that because they adore the angels, when they die they will all go to heaven.


Who is she? She will appear somewhat late in the story, but she will be integrated in a shocking way. The red belt she wears is a thing that people in the Harmful Heaven world see and have a heart attack.

The development continues, it's going well. Let's see if I make some important progress this weekend.

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Hah! You are doing the nameing thing I mentioned. Boum. I think we can be sure that this is not his birth name ;-)

I like the fake halo.

The Harmful Heaven page is up, in order for the game to gain traction on the platform. Still no screenshots, or banner, or a decent cover, but will have them eventually.


I've been working on the design, I haven't had many problems. Once I identified the procedure to make the visual novel in the engine, I've advanced without much trouble.

Electrical problems have been hitting hard where I live. What a pain. Between that and fatigue and everything else it's a stressful thing.

The development continues.

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We all can't wait for the game to be released 😄

I don't know how much personal stuff I can tell in a devlog, but since it's part of the development process it counts, right? In any case, don't read this if you are only interested in the product, please.

Here there should be a paragraph talking a bit about my feelings about some things on the internet. That paragraph I deleted and rewrote for several hours already.

I just don't know how to express myself. The more I want to say something, the more I have no idea how to say it. I'm stupid and an idiot, I confirm it every day (it's not an insult to myself, it's a trait I find hard to accept) so I never know when something I think is right is actually wrong.  If it wasn't for the support of my most valued friends, I wouldn't find myself here with the "courage" (running a public project, what courage that takes) to run a devlog of a serious project.

 I feel like I'm going to die every time I want to express something minimally personal, when I would like to do it at least once in a while so as not to be perceived as a robot. But it's that when I try not to be someone who talks like an artificial intelligence I'm someone very unbearable and insufferable. I just don't know how to deal with it, and worse still that it was bad for me to try to do that when I was a minor, now that I'm an adult + trying to pull this whole thing off, it will be even less tolerated.

At least I can try here. On itch.io not many people hang out, much less their forums and much less this section. I can leave my stuff a bit over here. I will indicate when I want to talk about something personal that is not so much related to Harmful Heaven but has to do with how i feel. I have a long way to go.

It got dark before I knew it when I finished writing this. I feel now that it was a waste of time. I'll compensate by staying up late and sleeping in at 6 AM. I have to finish this and I have to finish it right.

(+2)
I'm stupid and an idiot

That is doubtful. I think you overthink too much. Real stupid people and idiots do usually not realize their condition. which makes them so obnoxious.

so I never know when something I think is right is actually wrong

Read about  formal arguments. For some stuff you can deduce what is right by  following logic. And if you find that what you thought was true derived by faulty logic  or faulty premises   you will have answers too. But for some stuff it  cannot be done. Anything that boils down to matters of taste. Or stuff that is not capable of being true or false. But it also can help if you know for yourself why you think something is right or wrong.

At the very least you might get a buffer against snake oil merchants. Be they political or ideological.  If all they have is faulty formal arguments, they are most likely very wrong. People are harder. Because people lie. A lot. Some even do it on purpose.

The most common "lie" here on itch is, that people think they are game developers. This is more exagerration than lie, but it is the self publishing thing. Are self published writers really writers? Are youtubers actors and directors? Technically, maybe. But there is a difference between amateur and professional. But who would honestly call themselves an amateur game developer ;-)

it will be even less tolerated

Most adults are insufferable in their idiosyncracies. Just look at me and my overly long texts.   And the ones you suffer, you just did not look hard enough or just do not care anymore, so you suffer them in silence. The problem with the internet is, that people have lower barriers to be inpolite.  and some are just mean for the lulz.

The pandemic exposed lots of disturbing  people. You would never have considered them  to be  like that. But in happy sunshine times, you do not see how people really are. The amount of stupidity is frighteningly high among "adults".

I want to talk about something personal that is not so much related to Harmful Heaven

That is not advised. You can of course set up a blog or something  and link to it on your profile and even game page. Which would give you even more freedom, because a lot of things are out of place in the community  here.

If you have thoughts about certain topics, you should search for forums dealing with those topics to exchange with like minded people. The community here is for indie and hobby games. Talking about other stuff is rather discouraged and people might react alienated or not at all.  If google fails you, look at reddit. There is a subreddit for just about anyhting.

The creative expression of choice here, is of course, making a game about it.

But tl;dr, Do not listen too closely    to strangers on the internet.

Deleted 247 days ago

Why, thankyou there.   It is rare that someone reads what I write. Like seriously.  Most shy away from the long text. It is always better in your own head, and if you can type almost as fast as you can speak, texts tend to get long. Too long for comment sections.

I learned arguing in school and what no one prepared me for, was, that the internet has a use for this.  But so many people use fake arguments and unsound logic. That led me to the lists of fallacies you can read on wikipedia and  elsewhere. People  fail to think. It is not that they are stupid, but they literally lack the knowledge how to. And how to  spot people talking out of their ... well, let's just say, I like to think about stuff and present my opinions in a more reasoned manner. They are still opinions of course, but someone taught me a while ago that it is important to be able to reason your doing.  (It was a bureacrat that  had some leeway in makeing decisions, so he likes to  reason it, to distinguish it from arbitrary or random decisions.)

For game design that would translate to things like, I make my game in an engine that I can use so I can make progress faster.  Or my protagonist is a teenager, in the hopes that teenagers can relate to him.

And for me that is why I can say confidently that most game devs are hobby enthusiasts, even if they claim or wish otherwise. Because I can point to analoguos situation in all creative arts as the internet made it quite easy to self publish. A blessing and a curse.

The huge opportunity and advantage is, that you do not have to cater to a publisher. You can do you.

Deleted 247 days ago
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Your logic and your way of expressing yourself really make me reflect and question things. Positively.

I call myself a stupid idiot because I make so many stupid mistakes that other people wouldn't make in environments like college, home or with my friends. But what you say makes sense. I still think it's a trait to get used to, but I've also met dumb people who don't know they're dumb and they're the worst.

Yes, you are absolutely right that Itch.io is not a casual forum for socializing, I mean, there is socializing but on other lines. I can leave the talking about personal stuff for other places, it's just that I'm afraid that people will perceive me as a robot because of how I've shown myself so far. But, there are better ways to say things about yourself in a light and brief way instead of making your devlog of your project a personal blog.

Um, I use reddit a lot recently to visit posts from a franchise that is very complicated. But I wouldn't want to make an account because of the reputation it has (I've never, ever read the word 'redditor' in a positive tone) but I can look for alternatives. With the whole twitter thing dying it's become popular something called Mastodon which looks interesting. anyway! The point is to look for other places to express things better.

I will try to faithfully follow the advice of "Do not listen too closely to strangers on the internet." but adding "unless what they say makes sense" like the things you said. Sorry if I didn't answer everything but I read your posts repeatedly to catch everything 100%. Thank you for advising me.

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I call myself a stupid idiot because I make so many stupid mistakes that other people wouldn't make in environments like college, home or with my friends

You are biased. You know about your own mistakes. But you often do not know about the mistakes other people make. Like painting a wall. You do see the errors you made, the paint splashes, the place where you had to repair the wall, the place where  you had to paint twice because of  sloppy  painting or dark colors on the wall.  All the stuff most others would not notice or deem important.    While I can of course not tell you how stupid you really are, I do can tell you that  phenomenons like this are real. They go hand in hand with stuff like confirmation bias and even overconfidence like the  Dunning-Kruger effect. (That could be   me trash talking game devs, because I think, I could do it better ;-)

Regarding the robot thing ... gaming was once nerd territory... ;-)

Good to see that you already picked up one of the fundamental rules of sound arguments. It does not matter who says something. It could be proverbial  villain or the town idiot. If premise is true and logic is sound, argument is sound.

(Reddit is a swamp. It more or less  is a mirror of the internet users. The good and the bad. And you can guess what side gets more coverage outside of reddit. But it might become a self fulfilling prophecy. If enough people avoid reddit because of bad reputation, only the people going there for the bad reputation will be there. Be sure not to give real personal infos there. Or anyhwere for that matter.)

Deleted 247 days ago
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Thank you for your words, they make me feel better. I can be more idle from time to time so I don't get saturated with what I do. It's just that I feel this is something I have to do (it IS something I have to do) and I have to be disciplined if I want to get it right, since lack of discipline is one of my biggest flaws. But, everything in moderation. Thanks for your kindness.

Deleted 247 days ago

Things continue to go well for the project. I wanted to post when I've already completed the script but it's been days since I've updated this post.

The feeling is getting stronger and stronger that this will be the first job I will complete. The characters I created didn't remain as mere sketches, they received their respective final designs, in-game sprites, dialogues they say, stories for each one, etc. This is the farthest I have ever gone. Right now I just have to get on with it.

I've messed around with Translator ++ and have more or less formulated the way I will translate the game into English. I promise that the English text will be of the same quality as the one I'm writing these lines with, I don't promise it will be professional - it will be in a future where I pay a translator who does a much better job than the one I'm going to do. That future is not near.

Posts ago I mentioned that Harmful Heaven was going to have a demo... Eurobeatlover made a statement about it, saying that I myself said that the game would last hopefully only 1 hour, and to release a demo of it would be very silly because of that, and so that's it, the game will be released in full.

Although extending myself with the "complete"... I was surprised by all the twists and turns the story took to get to what it is. It's a story of the end of the world, and, without going into too much detail, it has a happy ending...
I feel like I'm going to disappoint a lot of people with that. Maybe, just maybe, when I have stable conditions (a new hard drive, a little more stability in general) I'd like to take an alternate route that consists of using all the ideas/elements/side things that are considered "sad end of the world game" and turn them into the focus, in a story that leads to a bad ending for reflection. It won't be soon, not even when I complete the game, but it's something I could give myself as a compliment to myself like "congratulations for completing your first game, let's make an alternative story to celebrate".

...

WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THAT?!? The game is not even 50% complete!!!! Focus on the main thing!!!! Focus on the main thing!!!!

Since almost everything I consume is digital, I would like to make my own low quality custom cover art for fun. Here, Harmful Heaven in physical format.


The development continues.

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Whatever you do to write your English in comments, it is better English than I encounter in most games here. Including paid games.    While I might not be the best to judge, since  English is not my native language, I do see the mistakes, engrish and oddities in games (and comments).

All your base are belong to us! (That meme is older than you  ;-)

The script of Harmful Heaven reached its end.

I have to correct it, fix what is wrong, improve the things that can be improved, finally edit the text to integrate it into the videogame. But it has a development and an ending, it has. At least in the quality of a prototype.

I have not stopped celebrating this personally, it is for me a major achievement. I wanted to share it with Eurobeatlover, but he spends more time nagging me for writing this nonstop from late at night until the early hours of the morning. He's worried that I'm going the route of a developer who puts his health below work. I will try not to do this again. But it's just that this for me was something special, I've written thousands of stories and this is the only one I've managed to write to the end. It's been 6 months since I started writing the various drafts of Harmful Heaven, and today I have given it a definitive end after so many.

I am so happy and proud of myself. I haven't updated this thread because I wanted the next post to be me announcing this.

The development continues, with more energy than ever.

The character sketching phase has been finished for a while, and soon the story writting phase will be finished as well. It won't be long before I start working only on the engine and the game itself. I have to make the preparations.

Originally Harmful Heaven was going to last only one day, its story. Then it was extended to 2 and it was for a long time, but Eurobeatlover told me "how do you want to make the audience feel the game's friendships are organic if they all met in 2 days" and now the story lasts 27 days. That is to say, the end of the world starts 3 days and by the time Sera and Dess decide to cooperate giving beginning to the story 3 days have passed.



The idea is that every time a day starts, this screen representing characters doing something will be shown. Sometimes they will be the main characters, other times they will be other characters that were left out of the focus but not to leave so much in the air what happened to them. Accompanied by three squares with small icons representing the characters, plus the remaining days to the "Day of the final bomb".

After revising the script and leaving it in a non-prototype state, I will make the scenes in the engine. This is really going well, even if the final game ends up being somewhat mediocre, I'll be able to say that I made my first complete game. I have to continue.

I've already made the corrections to the first segment and Eurbeatlover read it. I point out a few problems, all can be fixed with 2nd correction while introducing it into the game. Except one, which is cringe. He said the text is cringe. He also said that months ago when he read an early version of Harmful Heaven and he said it again now. I don't think I can do anything to make the text not cringe at this point, it will be for the next one to avoid making it cringe.

Also, I'm working extra hard to bring a surprise... It's not a big deal so I won't give too many details, but there's an interesting little thing coming.

I've created a mastodon account, I'll comment on things there from time to time. I have also been considering creating a Twitter account, but... The reason I haven't done that and instead got a mastodon is because I've only seen bad things about Twitter, but it's just that various creatives use it and are doing well, using it occasionally and in moderation. I don't know.

Anyway, not so many problems at the moment. Work has been friendly, it's scaring me a little bit how things are going well actually.
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The main story of Harmful Heaven has been revised and corrected, and a second correction is planned as it is integrated into the game as such. I don't know much about videogame versions, you could say that the game is in a 0.1 state and the script is in its 1.0 verion, so the project is in the middle? I'm going to think so then, it's a visual novel so I think it's okay to look at it that way.

Eurobeatlover thinks that even with its problems, it's a decent story that a number of people might like. Thank you very much, you've not stopped supporting the quality of the story from the beginning. I hope the story is even a little better when it's in the game itself. Definitely!

It would be interesting if a story/script could be treated like a video game, in the sense that it makes sense to present a changelog of changes with each update. So like, you test 1.0 and over time you experience each update that comes out, as if it were Minecraft or Terraria.

I'm going to try something.

Harmful Heaven - Harmful Route 1.0 changelog

  • - Added 2 endings. One good and one bad.
    - Removed extra flashback at the end of the story.
  • - Changed 'King Red' to 'Sir Crimson'..
  • - Added more screen time to a character that a beta reader likes.
  • - Added lyrics to a song that doesn't exist at the end.
  • - Added tragedy at the end.
  • - Ending where everyone is happy removed (now only several are happy.)

That doesn't work.

From here on I will work more and more on the game itself. It's curious that this is the last post on this page because the project is in the middle. Harmful Heaven will be a reality soon!

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Really great project! I'm impressed at how dedicated you've been. It's fine to go with an flat style but I think you should clean up the sprites (they look like early drafts), especially the feet. Some animations for the curved lines (like the UI elements) would really emphasize the funky storyline, and make obvious that the bending is an intentional style choice rather than a defect. It looks great already though and a thousand times better than I can draw lol.

Everyone has told me that the art looks like it was made from a rough draft (Funny thing because I have to do like 3 of the same drawing for the final version.... I have a lot of room for improvement). So yes, I will provoke editing and always add details and lines to make them look as nice as possible. Plus hands and feet are the hardest thing for me to draw, I have to improve that too. 

Sorry if it's annoying to ask but, what makes you consider the story funky? I'm not saying it's a wrong or far out way of looking at it, but I want to know.

Thanks for your comments!

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The character art, the strange names, and the angels. I'm not familiar with VNs though so I'm not sure how funky it is compared to others. Your art is still a thousand times better than mine (I'm a programmer XD), and the flat style makes it instantly recognizable compared to most VNs. I also think it's kinda cute ;).

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already had some scenes done in game, but they were few and early in the script. Now that the script is complete, I've been organizing myself so that the game is built from the inside in the most optimal way possible.



This was a recent decision when I completed the story, I felt that with some twists and shifts I could get more out of the story, since I intentionally left a few things out to make the story work. So I decided to reserve two open slots for two possible routes to continue where the main story left off.

Those who play visual novels are familiar with this: Routes that you play in a recommended (or sometimes strict) order where the story goes down different paths and gets more complex each time, taking advantage of things the previous route did and left off. But I have the problem that this was a poorly thought out decision, it was practically done in days, the supposed 'Harmful Route' was supposed to be the only story available, and it's the one that will be available in version 1.0 of the game, but if at the end of the game I am satisfied with what I did, there are people who liked it and would like to see more development of the visual novel (optional, a generous soul supports me monetarily a little bit.) I dare to expand the story of Harmful Heaven in 1 or 2 more routes. Harmful Route lasts an average of 2 hours (taken out by beta reader reading time) so they are not long stories either, which makes things easier.

There are scenes, themes and characters to be exposed and shine in these two routes, but.... It won't matter much if the first main story is bad! I have to make Harmful Heaven's main story as good as possible so that there is a quality base from the beginning and worth the expansions. All the more reason to give my best effort in this!

The following is not a flowchart, it's more of a super basic guide so I don't get so lost in what I'm going to do in the in-game construction of the story. I make references to important events in the game.

I've done several other things today, but I'll show them later. Dang, I slept very little and woke up with more energy than I should have, I feel like my body is a machine, a very worn out one right now, I'll try to sleep early. The development continues.

Things are not bad, first to say that. I haven't gone through any tragedies in all these days either. I've just been feeling beaten down in more ways than one.

It's a little late to do a full update today, so in short, I've been busy introducing the text from the document to the game itself, with the things that go with it, and organizing the scenes and sections of the game. I know it's exaggeratedly pathetic to say this and then say I've been copying and pasting text, I'll elaborate on that later but it still sounds embarrassing.

I have not been able to go as smoothly as I would have liked, but there are no major problems that threaten the work. It's not like I haven't made any progress either, that's something, every day I manage to put a floating terraria platform on the bridge. It's a matter of perseverance. I will make a more explanatory post later.

(Found in google images)

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Hey!

I couldn't help but notice your insane dedication to this project of yours, and your resilience through everything you're dealing with. I wish I could read every word of this devlog, but it's quite a lot... and I have to say, that's amazing!

It means you care about your work.

I couldn't just read without saying anything, so... please keep going. Don't stop trying to do whatever you want to achieve, don't give up, all the inspirational stuff. 

Your game seems to be coming along nicely! One user commented on your professional approach to this project, and I have to agree. How you stay committed to this devlog, how you plan out your next steps, all of that!

I'm not really a fan of visual novels, but your dedication and passion have convinced me to give yours a shot! Like everyone else here, I can't wait for you to release Harmful Heaven. It'll be so cool to see when you finally get there!

Real proud of you!  

I had to take my time to process what you have written.

No need to read everything in the devlog, thanks for taking your time for what you have read. Your words of encouragement are powerful, unless I lose to my problems, I will definitely finish this project.

It's good that people consider that I'm working in a professional way, it makes me feel that I'm doing things right, thank you.

The gameplay of visual novels consists of reading, and sometimes take decisions and a collection of saves to load for various ramifications. It's definitely not a type of game for everyone and it's okay if it's not your thing.

Thanks again for your kind words.

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Harmful Heaven is a visual novel where the apocalyptic adventures of young Sera and the mysterious Dess take place.

The game has been in development since January 2023, starting with drafts of initial scenes of the story, and drawings of the main characters. It was going to be something much simpler than it is now - The actual game is simple in a way, but it used to be more plain.

With the planet being bombarded, Sera and Dess meet by chance on the way to the boat to heaven, and decide to cooperate to survive. From beginning to end, they will be presented with illogical situations and unhinged events, in a world where bombs destroy normality and take the world into strange facets.

The storyline that is planned to be published first, Dess' Resolution, will focus more on the disturbed woman Desírée, what her name before she died came to mean to the world, and what Dess intends to do from now on.

This is the project with which I've worked more consistently, if I was well disciplined maybe I would have finished it months ago, but I'm still in training, and at a bad time. My computer, apart from being old in terms of specs, is several years old, including the hard drive. I have started to make plans to back up important files, since the hard drive will eventually get ruined one day, thing that in these years i've always fear, because replacing it is not within my monetary reach. I don't know how I ended up with a decent computer in the condition I'm in in the first place.

From here on out, I'm going to take drastic measures with myself. Starting with today, I decided not to sleep and stay awake to make more progress. The script is finalized, and I'm making additions and corrections as I incorporate words into the game. The way I will do things from now on would be more or less like this:


More than 40k words are the ones that were chosen to be the definitive story after writing thousands of drafts in all these months.

Making everything legitimately good is a priority. Harmful Heaven, even if it has flaws, should not overshadow everything and become something that is only talked about negatively. Or, that it's a "meh" game along the lines of "it was entertaining, but nothing more." I have to make this game to be something more than these two things, all these months must have paid off in something, Harmful Heaven has to be something more. Not a masterpiece; that's impossible. I guess a 9/10 is being unrealistic, also 8/10. The best I can aspire to is something a little lower than that.

In other maid-news, I've started using Cohost, a social network that I feel really comfortable with and that looks promising (better be one of the first.). In the future I plan to make a page (not an account, a page) that represents the whole series of projects I'm going to do, but for now, I have this personal account where I talk about various things.

That's really the most important thing I had to communicate, I had no idea how to say it, so hence the inactivity on this devlog. I hope with all my heart to make this project to go ahead, and to go well. Thanks for reading this post.

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My old computer has given me countless headaches. Today all of RPG Maker got messed up (and the whole computer too) because Steam Web Helper decided to consume an insane amount of ram and cpu, and I was offline with almost nothing open. Actually this is something normal every day, but it frustrates me because I use the least amount of programs possible so that in my work sessions it doesn't happen, and yet it does.

Something that has kept me "terrified" of getting into making the scenes of the game, is the fact that to insert images (pictures called in the folders) you have to place them with XY coordinates. I would have preferred an interface to place the pictures, position them manually, I hope it's understandable. But, I already realized how the XY coordinates work based on the custom resolution that I have of the game (it is not the base resolution of rpg maker MV). Maybe MZ already improved this. Anyway, now I work with this part without fear.

As it was seen in the screenshots, the backgrounds are very simple, and that's why... I'd better not try to make backgrounds if they are going to be very basic. I have in mind a way to present the visuals in the game without introducing 'normal' backgrounds, only elements like characters or objects. I have to test this way of putting backgrounds, because it will be much better than basic backgrounds from someone who doesn't know how to draw backgrounds. Well, I still have a lot to learn when drawing characters, but at least there I disguise it as best I can.

Those are the midnight comments. I didn't have internet all afternoon, next time I'll make these posts earlier.

Today's image is Dess in her final moments before getting her hair changed.


My colleagues say that her current hair makes her look like a man. It wasn't the intention, but it's interesting. Anyway I consider her current hair much better than what she had before.

All right, bedtime. The development continues tomorrow. My friends were upset when I told them I subtracted sleep hours to work more, and they are right when they were upset. I'm not good at staying awake with sleep anyway.

Over the past few days I've been taking care of the "scenery" for the game, along with inserting tons of story text. The process of this goes like this: Insert text from the script into the game, adding tags so that it displays along with other things, then add the visuals - the sprites, portraits, illustration windows, sound effects and music, and finally test and correct, and leaving it finished when it feels good. 

Only the first scene is complete, so I could see what Harmful Heaven is going to look like when it's finished.... Is it okay for me to speak negatively about my game? Tsukuhime (2000) has a better presentation, with the limitations they had at the time. This one I can hardly consider 'finished'. Is too simplistic, too basic. I don't have the artistic skills for real quality illustrations, nor am I a programmer to customize the game's presentation. game. This is difficult because solving it would imply things like paying a programmer, or learning programming (which I tried a thousand times and failed a thousand times) or dedicating other months to improve my drawings.

Right now, I just hope that the set of elements of the game will overcome the shortcomings and result in something worthwhile.


Only one of these boxes is finished. All the others have only a few illustrations, or are just pure text. And I'm not even  halfway through the script, not to mention that I keep writing scenes to 'fix' things here and there.

Sometimes I tell myself that I had good days, but, that's kind of like a breather to get back to normal. The truth is that I am the most pathetic stage of my life. If I had been successful before, my house would stop, and I wouldn't have to lose sleep over the fact that one day my computer decides not to turn on. Instead, I find myself in exactly the same condition as when I set out to start this, if not worse.

Health first - if I lose my health it's the end. But, I would like to mimic at least a little bit those work days of professional creatives. Those things that are no secret in the art industries. That requires a lot of work and discipline. It's not healthy. But in my case, if I fail at this, I don't know if I'll feel good about what comes next. My case is particular. Besides, I've been inept for a lot longer than I should be, I have to make up for it. I'm not good at staying awake, but I found a way to sleep for a few hours and wake up feeling rested - I just have to stay awake and then go to bed with my phone and alarm set. If I don't give it my all, I won't make it out of this sad cycle I'm in.

I give the estimated completion date for Harmful Heaven as sometime in October. I remember when I first started this and I thought I was going to complete my first game about 4 years ago. Now, I've lost count of how many incomplete projects I have. I will give my all to change that soon.

Now, some drawings:


This is how, after many drawings and versions, the angels will finally look like.


The divine bombs that destroy the world during the 30 days of the apocalypse.


And this is the final design of a character that didn't look the way I wanted it to before. But now it does

Time to continue the game, the development continues.

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I am ashamed to post things frequently (more or less, with a lapse of 2 or 3 days) because what I have done I don't consider something worth showing. HH is not a traditional game, and a lot of the work goes to text, but I also work on things outside of text. I'm going to try to break that embarrassment by sharing a few things I've done.

Something I got to work on trying to figure out what I could change or improve to give it a better presentation. There is the window design, the font, and a change of other interface designs. But there is also the backgrounds.


I don't know how to draw backgrounds. But something I'm a little better at is rpg style maps. I was encouraged to go try that.


These background sceneries are not explorable or interactive, they work as a substitute for traditional backgrounds that cannot be drawn. I think it looks good, my colleagues think so.


"Why would you scare me? You have a stupid face"

There are several things to correct and change about this image, but the idea of the background maps and the front-facing sprites is there.


Plus, the face of this character looks better!

And I added a new font that replaces the base font of RPG Maker MV. It's called Ubuntu Mono.

"Either you're scared of them, or you love them, or you don't care about them."

"Even though they are gods living on earth, that's their social status."

"Although... I'll bet someone has managed to keep something with them."


I got a bug in the posting page and had to press 'Post' or else I would lose what I had written. Apart from all the visuals I have posted, I have worked a lot on the inclusion of text to the game, I have advanced in the development of scenes, I have decided the tracks that I will place and the sound effects that will accompany the scene, I think this could raise a little the presentation of the game, although it can not be seen in screenshots.

Something that I have thought a lot is to make a Maidelen Ch. in youtube where I post a few fotages to share videos in a simple way, but my colleagues repeat me that it is a bad idea, because being a video editor is a whole other subject that I would have to learn  and because HH is a visual novel, not a game with a gameplay that when you see it you say "it looks fun". For the moment I won't do it, but I might make one in order to share progress and general things about this kind of profession, maybe when HH Asassin's Resolution is complete.

Time is going really fast, everything is heavy and my life continues to be a roller coaster.

I've make new illustrations for Sera and Dess presentations.




.*
I have lost fear to the visual-novel scene creation, I figure out tiny and simple tricks, and also now I manage to put the first segment of Assassin's Resolution in the game. Now comes the scene... Scening? I have to draw a lot of ilustrations, maps, maps tiny edits and put them in scenes with music and sound effects to create nothing more nothing less that the game itself. Just today the first scene of the game has been completed by the updated illustrations of Sera and Dess.

I dropped the plugin NovelStyle. Is a free work and I have used it for free, thanks for the author for their job, but, has some bugs, flaws and inconsistencies. I humble think that is better to put save points per scene in the whole game. Every time a scene finishes, the save menu comes out. Can appear in the middle of a scene if the thing is long.

These would be the most important things I manage to do in these days... I'm not in the good status I wish i have, but as I say, a step every day. I feel like my whole world is on a pendulum, my two beloved colleagues and works of fiction are what have kept my mind ok, because I manage to get things outside of that sad and pathetic, worse than before. When i was a kid, these aren't the feelings I want to have when developing a clave part of a videogame, but thats how adult things are.

For improve the image I have in myself, I was thinking in saying goodbye to Stay Night Archer and puts as my icon a draw of a simple cat with dumb eyes. Something like Kinoko Nasu's mushroom man, or Fujimoto's heart, or Oda's fish-head man. Its a popular thing so it wouldn't be bad, right? I'll try later.

That's all for now.

* That dot that I put in bold and italic is a bug. If I deleted it, the Sera png is deleted and I get to the top of the page. Itch.io forums posts has various bugs, but this is the most weird one.
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I believe this is called story boarding.

Also, bragging about weird bugs,   the typeface used on itch does not render backspaces correctly on my system. And I have no clue as to why.  This leadstotextlookinglike this. There are non breakable spaces or whatever they are called. If I manually override the font, it looks correct. Or if I look at it on my phone. Those spaces are not used regularly much, but they appear when copy/pasting a lot, in the editor boxes in comments and game descriptions.

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Looks like the forum posts section of Itch needs a bit of polish

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I don't think I said things like "the last few weeks have been the hardest in the development of Harmful Heaven" before. It would have been funny if I had always said that and it was like a catch phrase.

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The last few weeks have been the hardest in the development of Harmful Heaven.

(Continue in the next post)

...

... I just lost all the text I was writing. The way the Itch.io forum works is just another antagonist.

Let's see what I can do.

Ok, for some reason, the only thing that prevented me from publishing the post with all these three parts together was because of this image... For some reason. I tweaked it a bit, reuploaded it and it was solved, at the cost of accidentally losing all the text I had written, but then I managed to recover it. Although this was half disastrous.

 Is this image possessed by a demon...?

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You can usually use ctrl-z to undo. As long as the edit box is still open, that is.

In other news, I finally managed to get rid of my nbsp bug. This is one of these bugs that are so exotic you cannot even suspect that it is this kind of bug. I reinstalled the Lato font. Imagine this, the automatically installed font that my OS manages, somehow was missing the character for nbsp. Or it had 0 width.  If I had manully installed those fonts, I would not be that surprised. But I never touched system fonts.

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After having abandoned other stories or put other projects on indefinite pause, I said 'we have to do something new, something small, something I can handle'. I wanted to go the 'see something new and build from there' route and among several things, I decided to go for inspiration from two manga that I really liked: Girls' Last Tour and Fire Punch. I also took my love with Fallout, and along with that, I went to write the first drafts.

Months later, the 8K word draft grew to 70K words by now. The standard for visual novels are much more, but what I'm trying to say with this was that originally, it was going to be a story without any pretensions, the two main characters were going to be unfeeling beings who see no problem in killing senselessly and making jokes about how bad things are. Everything that is now was built was out of my silly need to make not leave things as something small. It didn't help that, to see what visual novels are like, I played Tsukuhime and Fate/Stay Night Realta Nua. A lot of my preconceptions about how fictional stories work were shattered. (That happens like 2 times a year for me).

The need to turn HH into something more, even if it's just a little bit more, became strong. It doesn't help that when I'm working on something like this, I can't get it out of my head until I give it some sort of "final sentence". I've stopped thinking about my previous projects because of the above, but with HH I always tried to relate it to things I saw in other stories, associate songs with the story itself, when I was with things like the shower just looking at the wall imagining things with HH.... Eurobeatlover says that bets the final game with the two routes will gonna be 4 hours long. This is a big project for me, but because I'm novice. Still, I hope I can feel satisfied when I finally finish this.


And how is it going at the moment?

All the text for the first part of the Dess route is in the game. I have already adjusted a plugin and a pattern, as well as collected the necessary soundtrack and sound effects. I want to finish writing Sera's route to start making the first part of the other one.

Eurobeatlover is someone who really wants everything to have logic and quality. Practically every day we have discussions about how to bring the story to a better end. It is funny that this is the least I will write about in this post, but, those discussions are every day, and last for hours, and they have brought the story to a better end. Thank you, my visual novel elitist. (Joke)  Utsukushi Hana has contributed as well, only less but it is normal, her strength is in drawing, not so much in writing, but she still provides good ideas.

Eurobeatlover keeps telling me that making a demo of this is a bad idea, but.... For several reasons, I'd better dare to do this.

The idea I have with this is: Dess's route Pt1, then Pt2, then the full Sera's route. Contrary to what I planned before, that the game would reach its 1.0 state with the first story complete, in the Sera's route I have put everything I left out because I couldn't put them in the first route, so I can't consider Harmful Heaven as a complete game until both routes are complete.

I am open to whoever is reading this to express their point of view on everything stated I've stated. At the beginning when I was a kid I was hugely into that "you can create games by only yourself! After all these years, um, I guess it's true, but in my case, I can't make a *good* game by myself, and I accept any kind of help to make this project come out as good as possible.

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Happy new year 2024. Sorry for not posting any update in several months.

This game started its development (at least, the making of the story script) in January of the past year. Unlike all my incomplete projects, Harmful Heaven was started without thinking so much and without planing. It changed with the time, and now it reached a definitive point. Let's share the progress in three parts:

On technical

RPG Maker has been dropped for this. Harmful Heaven is now being made in Ren'Py.

Inserting the script in the game  (in RM) is tedious and slow. Also mimic the feel of a visual novel. But I was still decided to do all of it in RPG Maker MV... I dropped Windows 10 and install Linux on my PC. Since then, using the computer is 50 % more enjoyable. and much less stressful. I was relieved knowing that RPG Maker MV has native support on Linux. RPG Maker MV can be executed in linux. But the quality of the software there is very questionable. 

So I change to Ren'py, what I should have done since the start, but I didn't because I'm bad in coding, but is what is has to be done. I haven't done big progress in it, but at first sight, inserting the script in the games is so much comfortable, fast and simple. I have trust in the Ren'py community and my capacity to learn, so Harmful Heaven can get fine in technical terms

On the story

The process of the making of the story is like this: This is the story. Is bad. I changed how the story develops. Is bad. I give it an ending. Bad. Drop everything. Now the story is more extended. Is bad. I check and change what I think would improve the story, and a final arc with a new ending. Bad. New route written until the half of it. Is bad. Drop everything, start again.

That's the summary of the process from the past year to today.  The script is in a 'Redo' status, and I want  it to be the last. Is still a fun and frenetic story of the dumb Sera and the dumb Dess fighting in a dying world. What mainly changes is the important moments, all the dialogues, quit and put traits of the characters, more stupid jokes, adding and deleting arcs, and making sure that everything is cohesive.

This is a simple story, but when Harmful Heaven is finally out, I want it to be of a quality that others can enjoy and say "this is fine" at least. This section should be more larger, is the thing I was working the more, but I think this is enough.

On the art

This is 'Good old RPG' Sera. This is gonna be his way of showing. He and the whole game. Novels teach me that with well written words your mind can show you awesome images. And, you know it if you see all the art of this thread... I barely can draw. So the art will be of this simple style, admitting from the start that I don't count with actually good skills. I'll still continue to draw everything (sprites, map-style backgrounds, portraits, etc) but with a new approaching. (Goodbye, every-screen-of-the-game-looking-like-a-(bad)-manga-panel).

And about me, I'm the same, but worse. Thins are going worse. Things in and outside of my control. Is possible that the internet gets cut, and the computer breaks, or get trough months without electricity. Several stuff. I wake up early, and since then I was trying to start up the monitor of my PC, sometimes lasted half and hour, or two hours, but today lasted six hours, just trying to start the monitor. My thoughts in these hours were sad. It was like this since the past year in the end, but is worsening. Like everything here.

This is more to how far I can get, and time doesn't forgive. My PC and internet were in a 'yes' status in these months, but I don't wanted to update this because another post of "the development is hard but I still there" would be just annoying. I hope that with this, the development is now more clear.

Is a matter of going forward. The development of Harmful Heaven continues. 

The game has to be ready in 5 months

This jam called SuNoFes is the most near thing I have to this abomination to be knowed. And is purely by miracle that the PC hasn't go to computer's purgatory. As of september 3, Harmful Heaven has to be playable with the essential elements.

Working with Ren'py is good, most of the time. The art, well the past post. The script is going well, although ton of text that has to be descarted. In fact, several arcs and characters are going to be dropped, because they're gonna lose the time of everyone. 

Also, because everything's is falling apart, I have to resort to art commissions- They say that my art (the game sprite art, not the manga style art, not that, that one is terrible) is enough to put a price tag of 1$. That would come in handy really good. You can find my internet little house here. I haven't made the announcement, but it will be very soon. Look at the last draw I made, I have improved! and also, I chose this particular website cuz it's the only social media that I like. The dude behind Iconoclast and people that have created others itch games are there!

https://cohost.org/Maidelen/post/5321581-looks-like-the-mc-ha

Also Desírée final design!
Really hope in the next 5 months I have tools to work. I really hope it. That's everything truly important I think. Be safe.

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Two points to think about.

Good art does not sell by itself. Neither does it warrant a higher price. The opposite is also true. There is a certain correlation, but my opinion is, that this has more to do with overal quality. So you will have games that are "ugly" and sell like crazy and others that have "beautiful" art, but collect dust instead of paying customers. It is just not that important for indie games. People know what they are buying and what to expect. 

The exception to this is eye candy. If your target audience plays for the nice pictures to look at and the cool music and responsiveness, then it is very important. Many mobile games operate on this basis. Colorful cheery flashy lights and baubles. Ever played Bejeweled?

And taking it a step further, there are text based games.  https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-text-based for examples.

So called pixel art and retro games are another matter. It is sometimes hard to tell good pixel art from bad pixel art, if the pixelation is too pixely or the retro is far too retro. Evil people might even say, that some devs just call their games retro pixel art, because it looks bad and they just pixeled it, so no one could tell ;-) (Not talking about your stuff, that's fine. At least it is a style and not just pixels for pixels' sake.)

The second thing is pricing. If someone is willing to pay 1 $ for your game, that someone probably would have payed 2 $ as well. Transaction fees for low prices suck. Also, if you make a sale, you will get next to nothing and some angry customers that cannot pay less than a Dollar anyways. 

Of course I might be mistaken, there are many games priced at  1 $. Maybe there is something to it.

Also, if you make the game paid, you should include a demo version or a web playable version. Browser version is preferred, it lowers the hurdle for people to try out your game. That last one also goes for pay what you want.

Finally, this is itch. Do not wait till your game is finished to upload something. You talked about music and sound effects, that alone will probably put your game above many in terms of quality. The sound can make a big impact, if it fits the scene.

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I know but, when people calls your art very low levels of quality, and they constantly say that I have to get standards in terms of art, I consider it a huge point to improve... Until I give up, honestly. I would like to be able to draw pixel-manga art for HH, but, I even have hard times for the basics. So I resort to rpg style sprites, that seems like doesn't look bad, everyone has say that it looks neat. That's the key thing. 

There are even visual novels with backgrounds of real life places with filters, and portraits with a few expressions. And even like that they succeed, quality-commercially wise. Just talking of some part of the VN world, not everything. But the point is, the primordial stuff are in the text, and primarily text are like the opposite of stuff like Bejeweled. (Good game, but I prefer Zuma in that regard.)

You get confused, I was talking of the price of my near art commissions, not the game. Harmful Heaven is heavily amateur, and there are solo indie games better than this for free. So it would  be like an insult to pay for this in it's current state. There's a way to this to be decent to be payed but, that way is not near. I have to use the most 'cards' possible for I to be able to succeed in this strange work, so putting this as free is crucial. As much at I desperate for money. But I'm gonna take some suggestion with the pricing of my art commissions.

And also, I really wanted to make a demo for this first, but I was heavily insisted that it was doing more harm hahahahahahahaha you get it than good. So is better that the full game, with it's two routes/storylines are there from the first submit, because it's very probable that the people that play the first incomplete version, will not come back when there's the full one. And, I'm gonna put more effort in the audiovisual then.

(I hope it's clear what parts answers to the respective parts)

and there are solo indie games better than this for free. 

Pay what you want is popular on itch for a reason. People paying for games do not do it to have a bargain. Well, not for most indie games anyways. "better" is not an attribute that is applicable in my opinion. You just need to find people that would like what you do. Which is an incredibly hard task. And if your target audience is freeloaders to begin with, chances for donations go down.

I might be dead wrong, but my logic for releasing a work in progress, as soon at is somewhat playable, is this: you do near zero marketing. Anyone finding you or your stuff despite the lack of visibility cannot even check out if they would like what you do. They can't really have an eye on your progress. Indie game supporters like that. Evidence is all the successful unfinished games that do have a patreon. What you want to find is players that would like to see your project get finished. You will have a very hard time finding those, if you go public after it is done.

If you release a finished product, you do compete against all the finished free games. Also, you operate in a bubble. While there is danger of trolls and an even higher chance of getting no feedback at all, you also miss out on testing your game for a wider audience. And you can train and experimenting how to release a game, how to update it and so on.

Money wise, it might help if you do not think of payments for most indie games here as payments and buying a product. It is support for the developer. Itch could to a better job here and take the cake away from patreon, but pay what you want for a "free" game is essentially this concept. Bargain hunting is for Steam and more professional devs that sell minimum priced items.

Of course all that does not matter much for a hobby project and talk is cheap. The important thing is you should have fun making the game. Not even professionals can reliably go indie. I am talking about developers that have years of professinal training and worked in the business. Same for art students with a degree. Doing indipendent commissions for a living is a rarity.

If you do commissions and actually find customers for that, very well done.

Harmful Heaven will be available to play in a sort of a special story, one where you can see how it's an average day on the journey of Sera and Dess, alongside the story of Dess when she was a kid, calling herself Charlotte. She lived in Tierrazúl, an royal island with the most modern and peaceful lifestyle of all of Rock Star. In the present day, it's gone, because the past king ordered it's destruction to stop propagating something to the rest of the world. Charlotte watched all of the fall of the royal island.

The short story of Charlotte isn't exactly apocalyptic, like the normal story of Harmful Heaven is, but it will have a constant feeling that anything isn't right and will fall down in any moment. It will also have cute elements, comedy and pretty moments, between Charlotte and her grandma and his friend.

The sunofest ends in 1 month and 25 days. I hope I can finish this in less than a month. Will share related stuff soon.

The sunofest is not a ranked jam, but an exposition one, so it's important to submit the game as soon as possible, even if it's a prologue.



This devlog is sure a mess. I wanted to read it, but I'm scared by the amount of stupidity it has since past year. Even so, this has manage to make interest between, three, four, some people, and 100 views to a game page with nothing to download. Finally, it seems like something playable will be out very soon! So I will try to re take this. I don't now how.

Visual novels are already hard to do this kind of thing. And one of the reason of why I stopped posting on this is because half of these posts were just talking how life is harsh.  The PC is still able to be turned on, somehow. I have an art style that I think I get good, and I think it will be liked by other people, and most important, the story has been rewritten to infinity, so I believe is at the very least, not bad. I promise zero boredom while reading Harmful Heaven.

I'm scared of the amount of games on the Sunofes, I sure have to gain attention to people to decide to play this.

Don't mock at the eyes of tiny Dess.

The demo will come out in a few weeks!!

Less than a month for sunofes to end, I feel like I wasted an opportunity. I feel loss. I don't know how much people will play this, I lose constancy and will in all this time in terms of do the effort to giving to know more people about this project. It's kind of hopeless.


Not terrible!