After such a long hiatus, I still would like to finish it.
Maybe it’s just trying to find a reason to sustain me to live on.
So, what is that?
It should all start with my hastily wrapped up first attempt at a self-made game.
Demonstration of Goddess Travel.
It was just called Goddess Travel since I am not good at naming. While I have updated it with multi language support on 2022, during I am developing Past, now and future of Great Rin Chan’s World Advantures. If you have interest in it, you may have a try at https://foobarz076.itch.io/goddess-travel-reworked-version .
During the development process, I found that I grew to love Rin who was originally a supporting character, almost to the point of overtaking the original protagonist Kagura (It shows at title screen, and previous demonstration video :-)).
At first I was going to arrange these as the story for starting a new game again after finishing the stories once, but then at some point in time I realized that at the time I was struggling to carefully plan out in my editing which parts should belong to the content that would happen on the second playthrough. So I switched to planning to make a new work.
2 scenes which I was created in this stage of development.
Then I was announced it on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/barz076/status/1357046831029473280 ) on early 2021, published 2 demo versions on itch.io at July 2021 and July 2022. And then it’s like there’s no news at all. Until I said I gave up at some point last year.
Actually, before I announced my abandonment last August, I had another part of the demo published that was only available in Chinese. It was available on https://kitsunes.eu.org/t/topic/134/2 .
Suo / Raspberry : Well, we are all little guys under Rin Chan. (It is one of updates in this demonstration, you might meet new characters and experience a new piece of the story on a scene you’ve played before.)
So calculating it out, I’ve only made about less than an hour of game content in nearly three years …
Why has progress been so slow and even interrupted for a time?
Most of it is my own fault.
From the beginning the whole project was made by me alone, except for the engine, music and sound effects which mostly used the finished products of others.
I sometimes get a sense of loss that I’m not getting much feedback and slow down my progress as well.
I often put that part on hold to work on something else. Including and fixing my previous work, translating other’s works (I translated Pudras’s Together and SatoriSimulator in English and Forbidden Play G in Chinese in these times.) and others.
My health seems to be failing. (For example, being diagnosed with diabetes earlier last year.)
Ongoing conflict with some in the local community for various reasons such as political differences. It also makes me depressed and unwilling to work for quite a while.
Preparations for the refresh again 🙂
The story begins with Rin, who is taller than everyone in her hometown, leaving with her best friend Kagura on an adventure due to a coincidence. Although the opening may seem outdated, it has similarities to my previous work, including the same scenes and dialogue.
The current path is mostly gentle, likely because I tend to have a chaotic good personality or I am not skilled in creating violent and harsh scenarios with blood and destruction.
One of new scenes added in August 2023 update. I’ll just fool around with footprint mapping without hiding the fact that I can’t do destruction detail effects well. 😂
One (and perhaps the only) thing that will be updated is that I’ll be attempting to have a longer story on one character (rather than switching main characters many times within a chapter). So the already short story that came first will obviously be shorter …
Some third-person stories will be moved to collectible items that maybe won’t be as obvious. As for Rin’s best best friend Kagura … My plan is to including the other half of the story starring her calling “Side Kagura” , and depending on the choices you make in the Side Rin part, this part of the plot will vary.
Other Planning Features
A lot of these ideas have just flashed by me, so a lot of them haven’t been thought out yet as to how to implement them exactly. Some of them may still need help from outside parties.
Some planning features below may only be available in the paid and Patreon-supported version. Specific differences will be discussed a little later.
But I’ll just write them here for now, in case they do come to fruition. 🙂
(It shows current sprite image and standup image for Rin.)
New sprite image for Rin and Kagura.
I need outside help because I lack the knowledge.
Character standup in map dialog.
It was implemented partially on last version, through I didn’t make too many different versions with different expressions
Progress/Achievement system
Track story progress, divergent spots, endings, and achievements.
This might also serve as some hints for players to experience most of the game without external help. (Because I’m not exactly comfortable reading cheats or other players’ processes when I playing games?)
Story and pictures recaps
You’ve probably already experienced similar features in many games, for example, Forbidden Play series?
In addition to a quick re-experience of the plot at the time, could we add some new elements, like background to the story, comments from supporting or other characters (A typical example is Kagura’s comment in Rin’s cutscene) , or even developer interviews?
Voice for protagonists.
Between my current financial situation and future budget, this might be difficult. 🥲
Rin’s voice may be solved through Vocaloid editor and other techniques, then I still don’t know what to do about Kagura’s.
Differences in different outfits over the picture about Rin.
Since the early mapping project files are probably no longer valid, if I were to do that, I would have to recreate almost all of the images of the scene.
Some side stories that might happen
There are several that seem like they could be made into standalone games, right?
Like meeting yourself from another world? Though that plot would probably be rather clichéd nowadays.
Maybe there are people who, at some point, might like the feeling of being looked down on as small as possible. No wonder other people making games like that are more popular than me.
Something about benefits for my Patreon pledges
As with the other sections, these are not yet definitive.
There’s a good chance that I’ll be publishing one chapter at a time for the rest of the time, after all, I’ve been the only one doing almost all of the work. 🙇♀️ The draft of the details is then:
For all my current supporters on Patreon (until December 2023) and new supporters at the $20 level, they will get access to my project repository and be able to try out the version in development at any time.
As for how to streamline this process, I’ll need to build some other services later.
Patreon supporters at the $10 level will receive higher resolution images, decrypted assets, and early access up to two stages.
Patreon supporters at the $5 level and those who purchase the paid version on itch.io will receive higher resolution images and early access to one chapter.
Minimum download price on itch may increase after new chapter release.
Some of the new features mentioned above that are being considered for inclusion will be reserved for the supporter version.
Refreshed version will have a free demonstration version with prologue and first chapter with standard resolution images.
A panoramic view is also purposed for multimedia, cross-scale applications to an outline overview (from a distance) along and across repositories. This so-called “cognitive panorama” is a panoramic view over, and a combination of, cognitive spaces used to capture the larger scale.
Steps for taking and compositing a wide/panoramic photo
Although this time we are going to use 3D software to composite a wide-view photo, and the steps are summarized by GPT, it might be helpful to have a process for taking photos in the field?
Choose a location: Choose a location where you want to shoot, preferably one with a wide open view.
Prepare equipment: you need a camera or cell phone with a panoramic mode. If you don’t have one, you can take a series of photos and then use software to synthesize the panoramic photos.
Shooting: Stand in a fixed position and move the camera or cell phone smoothly from one direction to another. Make sure that each photo is partially overlapped with the previous one, so that it will be more natural and coherent when compositing the panoramic photo.
Compositing panoramic photos: Import the photos you’ve taken into your computer, then use panoramic photo compositing software such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Microsoft ICE, etc. to combine them into one panoramic photo. These software usually have automatic alignment and blending functions, which can help you easily finish the panoramic photo compositing.
Adjustment and optimization: Finally, you can adjust and optimize the panoramic photo, such as adjusting brightness, contrast, color, etc. to make the panoramic photo more perfect.
Create a vertical wide view with MMD
So the next step is to actually do it once.
Of course the first thing to do is to set up the scene.
Generating intermediate images for compositing
Next, choose a starting position as you would for a panoramic photo.
For example, bottom, center, and top.
Just as the distortion will be greater the farther away from the top and bottom of the horizon in the frame when combining panoramic photos, the farther away from the starting point the smaller it will be in the combined image. You may want to keep the subject in the center of the frame as much as possible.
Reducing the horizon angle appropriately will also help mitigate distortion, but perhaps increase the number of intermediate images and extend the time needed for post-processing.
The distance should be 0. Other distance settings may have unintended effects.
You can also adjust the output resolution if needed.
Of course the larger the intermediate image you want to output, the more memory and graphics memory you need 🥲
Adjusting the resolution also adjusts the field of view, you should probably select the starting point after setting the output resolution.
Rotate the X-axis a number of degrees and output a center image after each rotation.
If you have some command line manipulation skills, the following might help you reduce some of the time it takes to repeatedly output each intermediate image.
and the following requires a Windows subsystem for Linux to be installed, it doesn’t matter what distro you choose, as long as you can use ffmpeg.
Or if you have another way of outputting the video as a picture of each frame it will work, I didn’t look into any other methods.
Select another keyframe and rotate the field of view to where the wide view ends (don’t forget to log in).
I’m used to 10 degree intervals with the default field of view setting (30 degrees), but if you have a very narrow center image (e.g. to get around MMD’s output size limitations, etc.), you may want to reduce the angle of movement for each keyframe.
Outputs a video of the start-to-finish range.
If you run into problems later when compositing images that can’t be output as a single image, increasing the frame rate at output may help.
However, increasing the frame rate will also increase the number of intermediate images and lengthen the time needed for post-processing, so you may need to adjust settings such as the field of view angle and output resolution if you still can’t synthesize a single image after increasing the frame rate.
Outputs frame-by-frame images via ffmpeg.
$ ffmpeg -i temp.avi %03d.png -hide_banner
Compositing a wide-view image
I’m using Affinity Photo here.
If you’re used to Photoshop, there should be a similar way to do this.
Select the images you just exported to output the panorama, and if it fits, it should look like a picture in the preview.
Click “OK” and wait for the panorama to finish rendering.
If necessary, you can make some adjustments after confirming the rendering. As well as cropping out the corners.
Then it’s time to output the results.
How do different starting positions affect the output results?
Here are the different effects of positions at 0 degrees up.
Other ways to play?
For example, adjusting the Z-axis position to get closer to the main view:
Setting the center of rotation to the model you want the main view effect on might also work? But my everyday style is 3rd person view so I didn’t try it carefully.
Or turn behind the character:
A side view might be nice too:
All in all it’s just a lot of freehand 🙃
Compositing Horizontal Wide View
The operation is similar to the vertical one, except that this time you have to rotate the Y-axis.
(Though this effect should be able to be synthesized in portrait, too, I think)
Celebrating I archived Amasode to level 1000 on maimai DX 🦊
While why is this title formatted much like the CHUNITHM ? 😂
Which I was inspired from I had reached level 1000 of Amasode in maimai DX .
Although there was some unpleasant other stuff that happened halfway through the production, and some material was lost due to fumbling 🥲 , I was able to salvage some of them.
