Status Report - HERO: Week of 09.03

Nagareboshi High School Gate

Greetings travelers! It's been some time since our last update, but work has continued furiously all the same. At the end of August I finished the storyboard, bringing to 100% completion that and the outline, the two documents critical to writing a solid script. With those tools, along with the others developed over the past, writing has begun here at the start of September.

Script Template

For the script itself, I created a template with some built in conditional formatting tools to ease the process. One detects what type of line it is—ordinary dialogue, internal thought, written & sent electronically through chat software, and narrative prose—and applies formatting automatically. That will keep those types straight for when they get coded, as each will have visual changes to the GUI—colors, fonts, etc—to indicate to players that they are different methods of communication. The other tool is a character count. Making sure there aren't too many words in a line or too many lines in a screen is important for a game where the primary interaction comes through reading. My research shows that optimal line length is about 50-60 characters, including spaces, with three lines maximum, to result in about 150 characters per screen of dialogue. I've budgeted for one additional line in case there's need of overflow for a hard stop of 200 characters. The template warns me by turning red if I exceed this limit. There's also space in the script alloted for asset management, indicating what sprite variations are needed for each line, to be filled in when coding occurs.

Nagareboshi Map

Script writing will be the phase of development for the next long while. I'll also continue to produce ancillary assets along the way, as I've been doing. I created a few more secondary characters with names and basic personalities, filled in nearly every empty hole that had been left standing, and created a map of Nagareboshi in matching style to the map of Takeizumi. Remember that short, real-time updates are delivered through twitter. Thanks for continuing to return as we move forward on this journey into the future together!

Nick