Crescent Moon: The Truth of Feelings v1.0

Hi again!

So, just to make it quick, it's a holiday season here (not 'season', but only two weeks), and I had a very little time (there is a pack of homeworks I haven't done), so I had to work on the easier project.

Just to tell you, a few days before the holiday came, I received an e-mail that said that one of my VNs, Crescent Moon, had been uploaded to Softpedia. Well, being curious, I decided to check it by myself. Yes, it was true that Crescent Moon was uploaded to Softpedia, but the review, "Very good story but poor background" . Ouch. Luckily, there hasn't any user review yet.

Being ashamed (yes, I created the BG), I decided to fix it, and then I found out that I no longer had the old resources (it was in Ren'Py 6.9.0 in my old PC, which was virus-infected and I had to delete all of them). So I also had to download the Windows version of it, and then open it in the Ren'Py 6.10.1d launcher.

I didn't dare to play the game (you know how bad it was), so I just went straight to the script. But before it, I went online to find some BGs. Morguefile and Imageafter didn't give me a satisfying results, so I almost got desperate. And then I went to Flickr. At first, I thought that the pictures aren't freely used, so even though there was a lot of good pics, I couldn't download them. But when I went to the FAQ, I found out that some pictures are licensed by CC, which meant they could be used for free. Then I tried to find some good pictures for the background. Luckily, there were so many good pictures there.

Done with the pictures, I checeked the script. Well, some of the terms weren't quite matched with the BGs I had downloaded, like 'white castle', the BG showed a stone castle. So I changed them, quite a work. Then I fixed some mistypos, and then with the addition of some words, the results was great. While the old one consists of 216 screens and 2856 words, here's the lint for the new one:

Ren'Py 6.10.1d lint report, generated at: Tue Sep 14 05:29:09 2010


Statistics:
The game contains 240 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 3200 words, for an average of 13.3 words per screen.
The game contains 0 menus.


Quite a lot, huh? So, then after I upload them to Ren'Py Games, I'm gonna tell Softpedia that I have the update for Crescent Moon. Hope they like it better, and so are you :)



Anyway, this was it. I still got a lot to do. My new project, it might stopped for a while, since after this holiday, I will have a mid-term test. So, see ya!

Download Links:
Windows
Linux
Mac

The Continuation of The Project

Whoa, it has been quite a while since I wrote on this blog, right? Nine months. That's quite a time. And now everything is new on my life. New class, new friends, and so on. And there were many things also happened around my projects.

The first one probably is the NaNoRenO. It is an annual contest where people make a VN from scratch in only a month. It was held on March. I showed the announcement of the contest to my friend, and I also asked whether she could write a short story. She said yes, and in about a week, she gave me her story. And there were about three months left.

The first time I read the story, it was a good one, actually. But I thought it was too short. I then decided to edit the story. In my surprise, the story could be a very long story, or a novel instead. Time passed by, and when there's only a week left, I hadn't finish editing the story. I decided to give up on the contest, because school was also getting harder (it was almost the end of the year).

And then, another chance came. Indonesian's VN Forum, VNProject, held a little contest, similar with NaNoRenO, but this one, there was a prize for the winner. I really wanted to join the contest, but there was a time problem. At that time, I was having my Semester Exam, and unable to work on my project. There was no further improvement on the story, so I decided to cancel the project.

When the holiday season came, I opened an old file contained a story from my friend who wrote the story of Crescent Moon, Himeka-sama. When I read it, I decided to create a new project based on the story.

The story was about the friendship of two orphan boys. Well-written, and like Crescent Moon, it was originally written as a fanfiction , now for her favorite boyband. After I edited the story to fit for an amateur VN (changing of names, some places, etc.) , I got more than 7000 words. If I finished this, it will be the longest VN I've ever created.

But, once again, things didn't do well. I couldn't spend my time working on the project since I was at my aunt's house. I was pretty busy there. But I managed to finish translating and editing the story at the end of the holiday.

I started the programming at the beginning of the twelfthgrade. But that was it. I was hardly able to continue working. This year is a lot busier than before. At the positive side, I got a friend who will help me with the Graphics. Asukawati will help me on the CG and Character Arts, so hopefully you won't see a Paint picture on my VN anymore.

But it wasn't easy. As I am facing the National Exam, she is now also facing her new semester at college. And for this project, I didn't give myself a deadline. I think I won't be able to finish this project, as long as I am still at the school.

Last but not least, I hope I can make some progress on the project. And I may not write often here, but I hope I can tell you whenever I get a good progress.

Cheers!

grim_reaper

Gaming Buddy-R : A Remake

Okay, let's start from the beginning, exactly when I downloaded a VN titled "Gaming Buddy" which was created by Taroku. It was a very short VN, I think it was as short as The Question shipped in the Ren'Py Demo, only Gaming Buddy has no choice. Suddenly, when I was playing Gran Turismo 2 after I played Gaming Buddy, an idea came to my mind. "I think I can make it longer", that was what I thought. So, for the first move, I tried to rewrite the story whilke also looked for some resources.

But, of course, there was a flaw, in fact, some flaws. The project delayed for a few weeks, even almost a few months. Just when I started to work well, there were the Mid-Semester Test and Final Semester Test in almost the same month, the preparation completely took all my time to work on this. So, this Semester holiday, I try to finish this, with deadline before the New Year.

Finally, after a few days of work, I finished the beta version of "Gaming Buddy-R" (The "R" should stand for "Remake"). This was not the release version, because I haven't asked the original creator, Taroku, yet (I thought I should ask the first creator before releasing a remake version of something, so I did it). So I sent him a PM in the Lemmasoft Forums. He approved, and even better, he gave some advices on the beta version, which then became the release version.

The release version is the Version 1.b, because there was also some mistakes in the 1.a. And here is the statistics from the Lint:

Ren'Py 6.10.1d lint report, generated at: Tue Dec 29 02:06:16 2009

Statistics:

The game contains 244 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 1819 words, for an average of 7.5 words per screen.
The game contains 2 menus.


That's short, right? Well...that's all I can do. I couldn't write a longer story because of what Mugenjohncel said as a "Writer's Block". But I managed to make 2 choices in it, and one of them also will give the reader different path (well...the 'Bad Ending' is totally shorter than the good one), so this is technically a Visual Novel. More better, if you compare to my first work, O.T.W.

There are a lot of changes from the original version of Gaming Buddy. From the story, I made different storyline, while also kept some parts. Longer? Of course. Better? I don't know. Then the BG art, I use BGs from Kaikei Sozai Mise and Mei Miyamura, while the original version used BGs from BCS. Then I also added some music from Feather Drug, Tymphony, Maya Felipic, and UNEX. You can find all of them in Jamendo site. I also used some sound effects from A1 and OSA. The only same thing between the remake and the original version is the sprite. We used the same Tsuina sprites, only I added some expressions in the remake.

Some new stuff I learnt in the making of this were the usage of Sound Effects, more Choices, and also the usage of Values (that True/False thing, you know). I also learnt some other Expressions to show text. I was going to use some other customizations, but I think it's enough for this project.

Last but not least, huge thanks to Taroku, the original creator of Gaming Buddy, for the approval and some ideas. Also to samu-kun for the links to

Jamendo. And please, enjoy my third VN and my fifth Ren'Py Project, Gaming Buddy-R.
Download:
Windows
Linux
Mac

PPCT: English Class Presentation

About two weeks after I made my third thing with Ren'Py, which I never shown, my English teacher gave us (all students in my class) assignment on explaining some tenses using PowerPoint Presentation or others. This was a group work, and I was pretty unlucky to get a tense I've never learnt before. I got a Past Perfect Continuous Tense. For God's sake, what was that?! Well... I didn't care much about what was it, but I had a plan on how to make the presentation. You know what my plan was...

A day after we got the assignment, we worked with PowerPoint, I've searched the materials the night before, so we didn't have much problems with this. After working for an hour or more, I told my friends that I was going to finish the rest. They agreed, but they didn't know what I was going to do...

When I reached my home after that, I went straight to my computer, worked this presentation. I had got a few ideas for this presentation before. For the BG, I used one BG from 'Project Nattsu', this was illegal, cuz I didn't tell the maker of 'Project Nattsu', but, come on, this was private use only...

Okay, back again. For Character Art, I planned using 'Wendy' by Mikan. But, because of some problems, I changed it with 'Sylvie' from Deji. It was a nice drawing, too.

What else... oh, right, I didn't use many customized things, but I did use some 'show expression' in the script, which, I thought, responsible for some weird changes between the screen.

Long story short, I finished this after working for a day or two. With still some stuff need to be fixed. But after a few show delays, I managed to clean what was wrong.

So, just about a week or so, we shown the presentation, my friends, of course, surprised. But I told them that this would be easier than normal PowerPoint Presentation (cuz you just need to read the description below, no need to understand much more). So, we did it. My other friends were surprised too, cuz this was a very rare experience (I bet that I was the first student in my school using Ren'Py for presentation).

We managed to finish showing the presentation, but I must say that it wasn't as easy as I thought before. My friends didn't get used to with this kind of thing, so, several mistakes. But, in the end, it was okay, though. My second Ren'Py presentation worked well...

Demokrasi: Visual Novel with Lots of Records

Yep, I'm really sure that this thing has so much records. This is the first Indonesian-language VN, the first presentation VN, the quickest VN I've ever made, first VN talking about Democracy, et cetera, et cetera...(There's much more, if you wanna find out). Okay, enough there. Just a few weeks ago, when my Civics teacher gave us (all students in my class) assignments about Democracy in Indonesia. First, to find a picture that represents it, and we could make a presentation to explain it. And then... you know, I thought it would be great to make a presentation with Ren'Py. I mean, I had learnt all the basics, and for a simple presentation, I thought it was more than enough.

So...after a few delays, I made this presentation only a day before the lesson (I mean, the presentation day), and I worked on it in the evening... So, you know, I needed to hurry... After searching for a few images for BG in the internet, I must processed them first, cuz the size weren't equal with the window size. And then, for the Character Art, I picked 'Peter' from Mikan. Dunno why, just choosing. For music, I picked 'Illusion' from Alessio, I found the file in the Ren'Py demo (Instant Music, Ha!)


After about an hour working on pictures, finally, time to work on script. I found out that this was not too hard, since I already knew what I was going to say for the presentation. Beside that, I did not use customized things.

And...just before 4 hours of working, this was done! Really done, I mean, already built for distribution. This was my record, on making a complete VN (or, in this case, a presentation) in a very short time.

FYI, I think my teacher forgot about that assignment, and right until NOW, I never show this presentation. But, screw it, then...

Oh, do I need to upload this? Dunno, maybe after I fix the credits, cuz I didn't put credits on the script.

O.T.W (Still on the way, and will never finished)

If you see the widget in 'My Finished Projects', you'll find three files with O.T.W-something names. That was my very first project, and still left like that until now...

Back then when I was at my first attempt on using Ren'Py, I was so confused on what story I'm going to write (and still, until now). I don't know how I get the idea to write this thing. Just a flash in my memory, that I was thinking about 'Egoism' before I wrote the story, and yeah, the story itself was about egoism.

The story talks about a man who's going to go to his workplace, and hit by two students. Because of his own egoism, he lost his job. How come? Well...all I can say is: Read it yourself! Oh, right, the story had no choice, so it's Kinetic Novel. Actually there was one choice, but that was for choosing whether you want to read Author's Notes or not.

Background Arts were all photoghraphs, and taken by myself, using my friend's camera. All the photographs were taken on street I'll pass when I'm going to school. Yep, they all were taken in Semarang, in Kalisari and Pemuda Street to be exact. And the school photos were my own school.

Character Arts, there were several characters. I was using 'Wendy' from Mikan, 'Felix' from Tarra-Nakatsu Hua, 'Celeste' from Deji, and one more from Ren.

There were no music for this project, and I was crazy enough to put my schoolname and classname in the project (Cuz for sure, nobody will care!). For many reasons, I wanted to re-work this project, but, you know, I lost my will to do it. So, it might never be re-worked.

In the end, I didn't suggest you to download this, except you're very curious of what a worst story VN could be.

Behind The Script : Crescent Moon

Hey, welcome to the 'Behind The Script'. I made this to place any facts, funny or not, about my projects which is not revealed anywhere except here.

Okay, so this is about Crescent Moon. And there are a few facts revealed below:

1. My Birthday

Okay, to begin with, the first fact that related with this project is my birthday. My birthday is in 2nd of July. And Anne gave the short story at the same day! Okay, the fact is, she doesn't know that that day was my birthday, and she gave it to me because I asked, so, I considered this as a birthday present (Thank You!), and I made the VN as the reply.

2. The 'Illegal' Version

When Anne gave me the story (still, she doesn't know my birthday, until now), she also attached a few songs from some anime. She wanted me to put those songs to the VN. Actually I didn't want to, since these songs wouldn't be legal if I used them in a free VN. Then. finally I decided to made a special version of the VN, which is different from the release version (as you can download them in my earlier post).

So, long story short, I finished the special version. Instead, this was the first version that launched, since I made it before the release version. And after finishing it, I wanted to send it to her. Then the problems came. The filesize is more than 10mb, -this was because of those songs- and the e-mail provider only allowed 10mb of file attachment. I came up with my own idea, which is to separate the songs files from the main files. This worked, actually, when I sent them. But another problem came, she could receive and download it, but she couldn't open it, I didn't really know the problem, so I sent her the release final version, which is smaller than 10mb. She finally able to open it, and said that it was okay. Geez, after all of this, the 'illegal' version really couldn't be launched. I didn't continue checking what was wrong and kept the release version. I guess I really shouldn't work with something illegal, then...