Painter Story

So yeah, Painter Story. Hard to believe it’s been eight months since the last post, without anything really to show for it. Most indie game projects would have been dead by now, after such a period of time, but because I’m more stubborn than a mountain of goats, I’m forcing myself and my poor team to carry on.

Working on an indie project is an exercise in pain and frustration. Most of the time you have grand dreams at the start, which have to be hacked down into a stub because you’re short on all the elements required of successful project management: time and money.

And even if you skimp on scope, quality will probably suck, too.

On top of that, everyone else has their own vision of the project, probably competing with yours. And unless you have money to pay everyone for their work on the project at the start, it’s a volunteer effort. As someone who runs conventions, I know how difficult it can be to get volunteers to actually do what’s needed, because they require some kind of mental or emotional buy-in to whatever mindless tasks you assign them. It’s worse than herding cats.

I remember from college, being told of a statistic. Something like four fifths of every project fails, and a good number of those failures are spectacular ones. Forgive me for not remembering the actual numbers, it’s been eons since those days. But yeah. The chances of a project not utterly going up in flames before finishing are not good. The chances of the project actually being completed are pretty bad. And for the project being completed, and turning out well, I’d say that calls for walking in a thunderstorm carrying a metal rod because lightning apparently never strikes twice. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, success is rare, managing an indie project of volunteers is suffering.

Anyway, we’re climbing back on the horse again. I hope to have a draft of the first half of Painter Story complete by this year’s Anime North, and if it isn’t, feel free to yell at me if you see me there.

Thanks again to gebyy-terar for another piece of concept art for Yoshinobu. This time, instead of being in a school uniform, he’s wearing something he can paint in.

Another in-development visual novel project released a one-scene recruitment demo over the weekend, in an effort to get people interested in helping out. I’ve been wondering whether or not to wait for the “prologue” scenes to be written out before doing something similar for Painter Story. After all, despite the assistance of Raide and gebyy, we still don’t have any artists on our team. Nor do we have anyone to handle music and find appropriate sound effects.

Meanwhile, it seems that the team is down to just three people now. One of our team members has been MIA for over a month now due to personal issues, and while it pains me to cut someone when we’re understaffed to begin with…. So we’re down to writer, editor, and director at this time. (It might be for the best having me do all the writing, though — it’ll make life a bit easier for our editor simpleDvorak since he won’t need to merge the writing styles of multiple people.)

Anyway, I hope to actually get the final prologue scenes written by the time Anime North rolls around at the end of the month. Even if I don’t, if I can at least get most of the way there, that’s better than the spinning-wheels feeling the project’s had for me over the past little while.

Last night, I got to be the little girl. What I mean by that is I tried an experiment last night, role-playing as Kourin, being interviewed by another writer from a different visual novel project. The results were… interesting.

One of the issues with Painter Story is that I’m not really that good of a writer (yet). And one of the reasons for that is it’s generally difficult for me to put myself in another person’s shoes, even if that person was created by me in the first place. Thus, the interview, to force me to look at the world from the character’s perspective and respond to things the way she would.

I doubt we’ll bother putting the interview up anywhere, at least for now. It was done on IRC, and is pretty rough, so even if we do put it out, it’ll have a lot of editing for clarity. I plan to have similar interviews for the other characters done by the end of the weekend as well.

In the meantime, I’m looking at starting work on beating out the Monday scenes, and finishing up the writing for the opening scene. Hopefully we’ll have some good progress by the end of the month!

Another piece of art, another KS dev (well, former). Thanks to gebyy-terar, we’ve now got a coloured sketch of Yoshinobu, the main character in Painter Story. We’ve also got an idea of what the male school uniform might look like!

In other news, writing is progressing very slowly lately, but it is actually progressing. There are a couple scenes we’re stuck on at the moment, but hopefully we’ll work through the humps soon.

Part of the writing issue is staff commitments outside of the project, but the big thing for me right now is completely overhauling the very first scene. As originally planned, it didn’t have enough of a hook to grab the reader’s attention — never a good thing, whether you’re reading a book, watching a movie — or playing a VN. So I’ve got to figure out how to redo things so that readers will be pulled into the world of Painter Story quickly, but still give an idea of who Yoshinobu is on the inside.

After that, it’ll be on to beating out and writing the next day’s scenes. Well, writing some of them, and assigning the rest to the other writers.

I feel we’re getting close to the point where it might be good to actually recruit some artists to do backgrounds, sprites, CGs. After we’re up to about the mid-point in writing, I’d like to get a demo put together and use that for getting feedback for revision. At this rate, though, we’ll probably not be at that point until at least November.

Thanks to Raide, one of the character artists for Katawa Shoujo, we finally have some art to show off the Painter Story girls! Along with this commissioned concept piece, I’ve put up character profiles that give a little bit of detail about our hero and heroines! Check it out. The image above leads to a larger version on deviantArt, if you’d like to see the girls in more detail.

With the detailed outline for “act 1” complete, we’re a step closer to actually writing the second draft for Painter Story. Our next step is “beating” the scenes — breaking them down into the particular actions and reactions of the characters.

This is something I picked up from a screenwriting book, Story, by Robert McKee. We’re not doing things exactly the way he says to do it, but VN writing isn’t the same as writing for the big screen anyway. Right now we’re still getting used to it, but the end result should be stronger writing and a more consistent storyline.

Right now, we’re going through the prologue’s scenes, working out the beats and writing them into an outline. Once we’re done with that, we’ll be pushing onto the main story, with the first day’s scenes beaten out, and at the same time start writing the prologue scenes. (There’s nothing saying we have to wait to beat out the whole first act this time!)

Meanwhile, I’m still working on writing up some character profiles that won’t spoil things while still providing a decent amount of information on the characters (who finally have permanent names). It’ll be a while before they’re up, however, as I’m waiting for a surprise to go along with the profiles!

One of the problems with the first attempt at writing Painter Story was the unstructured plot. We knew a bit about the main character and the various girls he could pursue, as well as some potential outcomes. But we never really worked out the route from A to B. And in the old pre-alphas I used to circulate on IRC, it showed, just as badly as the temporary art and audio.

Something that I’ve been doing since we reset the project is building out the plot, working from the top down. (I say me, because the bulk of the work on laying out the plot has been mine, but the others certainly did contribute as well.) Things began by outlining a story for each of the dateable girls, entirely separate from common or shared events. From there, we worked together to take the three disparate mini-outlines, and combine them into one big outline that included common events. At that point, we also identified major story choices that would lead the reader towards a particular path, as well as other choices that might trip them up or lead to better endings.

That work is pretty much done, but for getting to the actual writing, it’s not really enough. It gives a good overall view of what happens, but this 50,000 ft outline doesn’t provide enough low-level detail to identify anything more than key scenes.

So for the past little while, I’ve been working on a more detailed outline for the first part of Painter Story. This one identifies individual scenes, as well as provides at least a paragraph of explanation for each one (or will, when complete). We can identify what’s missing at this level, and let us know where things will go from each particular scene. That way, when it comes to actual writing, I and any other scene writers are more likely to really drive the story forward, and lead in to following scenes better.

This is a long, slow, painful process — but without it, Painter Story would never be as good as I’d hope for. While it’ll probably never be on par with Katawa Shoujo or Cradle Song, I’d still like to create something that sits in the top 25% of original English language visual novels. By constructing a strong story, I’m sure that’s achievable.

I’d like to start off by welcoming miipasu to the PS dev team. While her position is somewhat nebulous at the moment, she’s been helping out with organizing the replanning of the story, and will likely take on some writing and editing duties in the future. We’ll likely have some additional team reshuffling in the near future as mii gets better integrated with the team.

As for the story itself, we’re pretty close to working out the outline from a 50,000 ft perspective. There are a couple days we still have blank, and here and there on plotted days are still openings, questions, and worries. But I would say we’re certainly on track to begin rewriting in October. It doesn’t hurt that the outline for the first few days is still pretty similar to the old draft, which has saved some time and mental energy in this rewrite process. (That’s not to say we’ll be reusing the old draft’s scenes as-is; there are still tweaks and a few good-sized changes in those scenes for the new draft.)

Anyway, the rest of the month will be spent filling those holes, as well as dropping down to a 10,000 ft perspective for the first few days of Painter Story. I’ve been questioning whether or not we want to make a demo out of the first few days, given that all of PS will likely only be about the size of Katawa Shoujo Act 1, but it’s probably still worth doing. In any case, the planning so far has been contingent on focusing on prologue through Wednesday of the story, and that at least we’ll stick to.

Got a chance to play with eroge doll maker program 3D Custom Girl, decided to whip up the Painter Story girls in it.

Meanwhile, we’re still alive, just retooling things.

It’s been three weeks since the last blog post, and we are still hard at work, retooling things so that Painter Story will be a visual novel worthy of your love and adoration. Since we are busy with that, I’d just like to share a couple links which may or may not be helpful. Enjoy.

• Visual Novel Structure
• Visual Novel Structure - Option 2

They’re both by the same guy, detailing some stuff about writing VNs and the path structure they take. Maybe worth a read.