01 Jul June 2023 Update
Hello backers! Summer is in full swing here so we are staying indoors and pushing forward with development.
Discord Roles
Unfortunately, we were unable to get finalized the role assigning bot before Discord began pushing their name update functionality so we have redesigned the bot to work via backer E-mails. This means by inputting your backer E-mail you’ll be able to have your role assigned without issue. The bot will be released in July so the goal is to have everyone’s role assigned by end of July. Thank you for your patience as we work out the new solution for the updated Discord ID system.
◆2023.06.30 PENNY BLOOD Project Diary
Good evening, everyone. One month has passed since we finished the walkthrough version in May, allowing us to experience a slightly slower-paced month where we returned back to business as usual. We’re right in the middle of the rainy season, which has caused Niigata to see a lot of rainy days.
Now then, let us begin this month’s PENNY BLOOD Project Diary.
While our various publisher candidates check out our walkthrough version, I’ve been having a postmortem session all by myself where I try to think about what I could have done to make the content feel fuller, and whether or not there was anything else I could have done midst the production. When creating games, there will always be a limit to the time and budget you have, and there are countless points within the development period where you are forced to make compromises somewhere. It’s been a while, but I’m experiencing one of those yet again.
Still, now that peace (?) has been restored to us, I’ve been working on all the office work that’s piled up while making my next preparations.
As I start back up on the story outline… Well, let’s say that everything I want to put into the game would be 100% of its volume. What if we’re only able to create 80% of that due to budgetary reasons? Or what if we have to compromise and make it 60%, or 50%… Oh no, how are we going to do this?! Just to make sure nothing like that happens, I’ve been separating story parts into blocks and labeling them with priorities. As the common Japanese saying goes, it isn’t a good idea to spread the cloth open too wide, I don’t want to simplify it so much that the cloth ends up the size of a hand towel! It’s all rather difficult.
I wanted to rouse myself into action and really enjoy my work, so I decided to make a correlation table for the characters, meant to display how the characters of PENNY BLOOD see each other as I write the scenario. As the story continues, the characters’ impressions of each other might change a bit, but looking at the general way they see each other should make it easier for me to come up with conversations and ideas for scenes.
Throughout July, Kato-san worked on drawing the details for Suseri while finishing up her illustration. Lots of warm colors were used in the initial design, so she re-examined the colors and changed the inner color of Suseri’s hair to a green that’s close to blue in order to make her overall impression look more invigorating. Suseri is the only main character who’s wearing a uniform, so she made sure to give a prim and proper atmosphere to the final version.
Today’s update is special, because we’re showing off not only the readjusted Suseri but the readjusted Luca as well!
As I wrote about last time, Luca is stuck at age 10, so we used the gothic version that was chosen during the Double Kickstarter campaign’s three choices and made his face and body look cuter and younger, since he’ll need to have an innocent image for story reasons.
Hanya-san finished Gol, the dark fusion monster, and is now back to drawing monsters. He’s currently working on a powerful enemy that appears halfway through the story…a really gross design based on an insect. We can’t show you this one, so instead we’ll show you the finalized version of Gol since we only showed the partly-finished version last month.
Watanabe-san finished drawing the image board for the New York sewers (dungeon). I’ve got yet another freshly-finished, piping hot image to show you here! The New York sewers made headlines in the 1930s as a scary, dangerous place where monsters (giant alligators?) were said to lurk. I intend to take a bit of inspiration from those sorts of urban legends and make it a terrifying dungeon in PENNY BLOOD as well.
……That concludes this month’s update. Whenever I go out for a walk during clear skies in between the rain and see cumulonimbus clouds, it reminds me that another hot summer is right around the corner.
See you all next month.
Matsuzo Machida
Message from Hirota-san
Good evening, everyone.
In May, we were all extremely busy working on the walkthrough version. As far as the sound production goes, I did as much as I could in the time I was given. Some parts of it came out really well, but there were other parts that I can’t say the same about, so I’ll need to squeeze out some more knowledge and improve those bits.
From this point on, for a while, I’ll turn back to the work I did when we first started development, analyze the atmosphere for each scene, and think about how the sound should be. It sounds simple when I write it out, but there’s actually a lot of work that needs to be done here, and it’s all very important, so I need to keep myself concentrated. Unlike the period of time when we actually started development, however, I now know a great deal more about the background and time period of the game’s setting, so it feels like all the ideas that are coming to me are lined up along the same wavelength.
As far as music is concerned, I’ve come up with a ton of different ideas that I’d like to try. I plan to do a lot of trial and error in July as I perform test recordings with my allies.