An update discussing the progression of the story in WAGAKKIWA, some fixes, and some problems that have been run into.

Posted by SenpaiJake on Feb 11th, 2014

Hello everyone, Jake here from Paperviper. Time for another update on WAGAKKIWA. For a few days, I've been working on writing the actual first scene in Akahana's path, and I just completed and wrapped it all up today. That now puts the progression of both the story and game programming at around 4% so yay to that. Anyways, I ran into a problem that I didn't think about before beginning this entire project while making this script - and that problem is the sizes of the character sprites. For Akahana's sport sprites, hers only, I've cropped each one and that caused them to be different sizes, so I tried my best to make a way to have those displayables show without "layering" or long dissolve periods occuring, and that ended up with me having the displayables fade out and in with no effect. It doesn't look the best, but it still works and it's what made the scene get complete! From now on though, I'm definitely making sure to make all other character sprites the same size. For those who come here hungry for images, here's two screenshot's from the next scene I finished writing today:



(Hideo finding out something he wish he didn't.) (Hideo finding out something he wish he didn't.)

(Hideo yawning after a tiring work out)

Trust me when I say this seen was long, and by that I mean it's almost 500 lines of code long. So these screenshots show only tiny portion of it, but it still gives you something to enjoy and look forward too. Basically, this is the indication of me saying that I'm going to do my best to run through programming all of the parts of the Akahana path of the story so there's progression being made. It's happening, but gradually as I face roadblocks and obstacles both with the game and in real life.

Now, time for some other news revolving around WAGAKKIWA. As you may have already found out, WAGAKKIWA is being programmed with the Visual Novel focused engine named "Ren'py." This engine in all do respects is great being something done free and sorta in the form of a hobbyist project. It's popularity continues to rise, and it's flooded into the place known as HO/MA/GO now. Recently, I atteneded a Homago "Geekout" about the "Basics of Renpy," and it was great (though we all got side-tracked). Now, another Ren'py-based "geekout" is being hosted on the 13th of February from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM PST discussing the games people are making that are there. You can participate if you have a game or not, experience or not, if you want to ask a question about any developer's upcoming Ren'py based games. I will be attending this one as well, so if you have questions about WAGAKKIWA I suggest you grab a spot for it before they're all gone! It's going to be on a Google Hangout, and just a bunch of geeky programmers discussing their past, present, and future projects (and we of Paperviper definitely have future projects, especially ones that will count on Ren'py!) so I hope to see you there.

The last thing I want to share is the update about my entire concept of WAGAKKIWA, or more so it's future after it's official release (which is expected to be around the end of 2014, if not the beginning of 2015). Yesterday, I devoted hours of my time writing about future Paperviper games, and during that I made a section writing about WAGAKKIWA - not the game itself but the adaptations and future of it. Like in the last post (or the one before the last post, I don't quite remember), I mentioned something about 'Extra Story Packs,' kinda like DLC for a game. I will confirm in this article that yes; these will be real things after the release of the game. And yes; they will cost money (but only around $1 to $1.50 per pack) and yes; they will download and install into your copy of WAGAKKIWA (the main game) and be accessible via the 'Extras' screen. Since this is WAGAKKIWA's official place of news, I figured that confirming this here would be great, and I've already written the story outlines for the packs.

That's it for now, it's time for me to trope on back to the scripts and check the current words, sentences, etc., to make sure it's all correct and continue writing Akahana's path. Make sure if you wish to keep updated, that you track this game and thanks for reading!

~Jake of Paperviper