STORY:

Riza Wolfe is the kind of person often referred to as a daydreamer. With her high school days approaching an end quicker than she would like, and the threat of a mundane adult life looming over her, she’s always wondering if there’s something more out there.

As it turns out, there is.

One day,  Riza receives an unassuming dream catcher as a gift, and soon after finds herself following a character she thought she’d made up through a mysterious nexus realm and into a parallel world, where she is supposedly one of seven “Dreamers” of legend. She gets what she’s always wanted–an adventure, and a greater purpose…sort of. The problem is, no one seems to know exactly why the Dreamers are there, just that means something very, very bad is coming. It’s up to Riza, her new werewolf guardian, Luna, and the assortment of companions they collect along the way to unite with the other Dreamers, and figure out why they were summoned…before it’s too late.

WHAT IT IS:

DreamCatcher: Reflections is a fantasy adventure story told in the form of a series of kinetic novels–visual novels with a linear storyline and minimal “gameplay” elements. DCR is a reboot of my old webcomic, DreamCatcher, and retained a few comic-y qualities--namely a ton of art. It's being released in short, one-chapter updates every 1-2 months, and each chapter features dozens of unique CGs, sometimes strung together for some psuedo-animation. Most of my posted screenshots are just CGs and it's only ever a small fraction of them. It's very much inspired by isekai anime and JRPGs as well as typical western fantasy stories, so if you like that sort of thing, maybe check it out.

WHY I'M ON THIS BOARD:

In short, because this thing is being released in multiple chapters as many individual projects, it doesn't really make sense for me to keep devlogs on each chapter page, so I thought I'd put one for the whole project here. As of now, Chapter 4 just dropped and I'm taking a brief break to work on  a trailer, because somehow I never made one of those, before getting to work on Chapter 5, which I'm hoping will be out in early September. Note that that's Chapter 5 out of a planned 40+, so we're really still at the beginning of this thing. I've been steadily making "quality of life" type improvements with each chapter as I'm learning to use Ren'Py--better sprites, more movement, layered audio, etc. I'm still pretty new to coding and a lot of dev stuff, so bare with me.

SOME MORE ART!:

NOW WHAT?:

I will *attempt* to update this regularly with progress reports on each chapter. Here's hoping I don't forget.

WHERE ELSE TO FIND ME & DCR:

Official Site: dreamcatcherreflections.com

Portfolio: hazuarts.com

Twitter: @hazuarts/@DreamCatcherRef

Tumblr: Hazumirein

DeviantArt: Lunaromon

ArtStation: Hazuarts

First update! Still working on the trailer but I did get a start on Chapter 5 today. Created the new file and put the script and basic coding in place so it at least runs, plus added the UI images, fonts, etc. Also started working on some extremely messy art thumbnails--don't worry, they always look like this.

Scribbly thumbnails turn into somewhat less scribbly sketches. 29 out of 47 planned CGs for Chapter 5 sketched so far, and that's after paring it down from like...53, I think. Luckily I don't have to do much in the way of new sprites for this chapter.

Got derailed for a few days by going back to work (sort of), but I'm trying not to get too far off-track. I pretty much always color the scenes I'm most excited about first.

I have not gotten a chance to update this lately, so, here's the title screen for chapter 5 and a couple finished CGs. As it turns out, going back to work to some degree and having 40 fewer hours a week to work on this did through me off schedule a bit, so I might be looking at a mid-September release for chapter 5 instead of early September, but it shouldn't be later than that. At least I hope not.

Still picking my way through CGs. Almost all of them are lined and flat colored; I'm mostly working on shading and effects now. Art is probably like ~75% done overall.