thekenikaridevblog

[thekenikaridevblog]

you know you're cooked when the event scroll bar looks like this

[thekenikaridevblog]

you know you're cooked when the event scroll bar looks like this

[thekenikaridevblog]

I FINALLY GOT TO DO A SCENE I'VE BEEN WANTING TO MAKE SINCE THE BEGINNING AAAAAAA. NOT ONLY THAT BUT I ALSO MANAGED TO CONNECT IT TO SOME OTHER THREADS AND MAKE IT ADVANCE THE PLOT BESIDES IT BEING. FOR THE FUNNIES. I cannot wait for people to see this omg

Background edits (5/8)

Backgrounds (0/1)

New character sprites (1/1) (it won't even be used for day 3 why did i put this)

Special character sprite bundle thing (3/7) (ended up removing a sprite)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (1/17 at least) (the one I've done has a lot of expressions and changing poses so it's a p big deal!)

Dialogue (18%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

finished the lunch dialogue and i'm really close to finally getting to the free times! these ones will be a pretty decent task since, even though there (probably) won't be any alt dialogue based on previous free time choices (due to. reasons) they're gonna have those CGs that alternate expressions a lot and those are always a ride and a half

I should probably get to writing the script for those to make things easier

also i finished the expressions for the sprite i mentioned in the last update :3

Finally I get to use this gif properly

Anyways! Like before, this progression chart post thing will be exclusively of day 3, the day before the trial, and that's where all my dev efforts will be directed towards. The full chapter 1 is more than half finished, now we just need the final home stretch and you'll finally be able to see this gay tragedy I've been cooking

Hope you guys will stick along for the ride :D

Background edits (there won't be any new backgrounds per se, but the old ones will get a lot of variations that will require more or less work, so imma keep track of that) (4/7)

Backgrounds (0/1) (edit: whoops I forgot there is a new background lol)

Tilesets (0/0)

New character sprites (0.5/1) (the number could easily go up, don't take the 1 for granted)

Special character sprite bundle thing (2/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (0/17 at least) (idk the count might be off. These things tend to go way out of proportion)

Dialogue (0.5%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

[thekenikaridevblog]

Putting the first coding loop I've ever added to this game! I've tested it a bit and they're easy to understand, so I'll probably add more as the story goes

[thekenikaridevblog]

Quick announcement

Hello! I've made some changes to the Kenikari itch.io page and I would like to announce them here

For starters, now it displays a bulletin of info of stuff on the game like how many GCs and endings it has, and a bit of the type of gameplay (since i realised that the screenshots I put didn't really show it)

But also, and here's the big thing

Now you can tip the game!

It's still free, of course, but I made it so that you can give me some pocket change when you download it if you feel so inclined :3 This won't solve my life and provide a stable income forever and ever, but I think it'd be nice to give people the option to support this project. No matter how small the contribution, all tips are greatly appreciated and i will kiss you on the mouth if you give me a single cent. Do not test me I will love you forever

^ this is me loving u forever

[thekenikaridevblog]

since last year I did a halloween doodle to celebrate, I decided to do one again this year!

[thekenikaridevblog]

I like the way your brain works, friend

darker day is Detah having a beach episode except it's actually him finding a subterranean cavern with water below his house (cave). so he invites everyone over to go and have fun

brightest night is the city going through a power outage so they go to alex's house and make a bonfire in his garden and tell stories and roast marshmallows and take a proper look at the stars bc god knows you can't do that in a city with shitton light pollution

fun lil kenikari fact:

originally the game was meant to have a sub-name (like she-ra: princess of power or your turn to die: death game by majority)

it was meant to go "Kenikari: darker day and brightest night"

it ended up being scrapped because i always shortened it to kenikari in my mind and it didn't really add anything to the story or themes. or was even remotely relevant to anything that happened in the plot. it was just a random phrase I came up with

and also because i legit forgot i had a sub-name when i was making the title screen and itch.io page

[thekenikaridevblog]

fun lil kenikari fact:

originally the game was meant to have a sub-name (like she-ra: princess of power or your turn to die: death game by majority)

it was meant to go "Kenikari: darker day and brightest night"

it ended up being scrapped because i always shortened it to kenikari in my mind and it didn't really add anything to the story or themes. or was even remotely relevant to anything that happened in the plot. it was just a random phrase I came up with

and also because i legit forgot i had a sub-name when i was making the title screen and itch.io page

[thekenikaridevblog]

Background edits (5/8)

Backgrounds (0/1)

New character sprites (1/1) (it won't even be used for day 3 why did i put this)

Special character sprite bundle thing (3/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (0/17 at least)

Dialogue (2%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

Did some pretty decent progress these past 2 weeks! I finished day 3's breakfast scene, and figured out a pretty decent way to make all these events go together cohesively. I finished one of the special sprites bundle thing but I still gotta add a few more facial expressions to fully call it done. But yea! We balling

Finally I get to use this gif properly

Anyways! Like before, this progression chart post thing will be exclusively of day 3, the day before the trial, and that's where all my dev efforts will be directed towards. The full chapter 1 is more than half finished, now we just need the final home stretch and you'll finally be able to see this gay tragedy I've been cooking

Hope you guys will stick along for the ride :D

Background edits (there won't be any new backgrounds per se, but the old ones will get a lot of variations that will require more or less work, so imma keep track of that) (4/7)

Backgrounds (0/1) (edit: whoops I forgot there is a new background lol)

Tilesets (0/0)

New character sprites (0.5/1) (the number could easily go up, don't take the 1 for granted)

Special character sprite bundle thing (2/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (0/17 at least) (idk the count might be off. These things tend to go way out of proportion)

Dialogue (0.5%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

[thekenikaridevblog]

a scrapped Mako hairstyle :P

[thekenikaridevblog]

I am once again posting half sneak-peaks half shitposts

this dialogue will (obviously) not appear in the game exactly as it does here, but it felt like the fucking messiah was speaking to me trying to convince me to make her say that. so i did it. i do not regret a single thing

[thekenikaridevblog]

Finally I get to use this gif properly

Anyways! Like before, this progression chart post thing will be exclusively of day 3, the day before the trial, and that's where all my dev efforts will be directed towards. The full chapter 1 is more than half finished, now we just need the final home stretch and you'll finally be able to see this gay tragedy I've been cooking

Hope you guys will stick along for the ride :D

Background edits (there won't be any new backgrounds per se, but the old ones will get a lot of variations that will require more or less work, so imma keep track of that) (4/7)

Backgrounds (0/1) (edit: whoops I forgot there is a new background lol)

Tilesets (0/0)

New character sprites (0.5/1) (the number could easily go up, don't take the 1 for granted)

Special character sprite bundle thing (2/8)

Pixel character sprites (0/1)

CGs (0/17 at least) (idk the count might be off. These things tend to go way out of proportion)

Dialogue (0.5%)

Free time events (0/3) (0%)

Music (0/?)

[thekenikaridevblog]

VVV ramble under the cut! VVV

So, one thing i've recently noticed that sets Kenikari apart from other visual novels in itch.io (aside from yttd lol) is its backgrounds

It's not the fact that the backgrounds are pixelated, or that you can click on them, but the fact that they are drawn at all. I've seen plenty of VNs where the backgrounds are stock images with filters on them or those royalty-free drawn backgrounds you've seen in gacha life videos

you know the ones

(btw, no shade to people who don't add backgrounds to their VNs! i should know, drawing these bad boys is hard, and i understand that for stuff like game jams or school projects you don't exactly have a lot of time to make a bunch of them with good quality)

(another similar thing is when people use the default rpgmaker tilesets to fill in the word. and like i said, no shade to those people either! there have been incredible games used with the default graphics, like the original mad father)

and i thought, "why do default backgrounds and default tilesets bother me so much? why was i so headstrong that i wanted to make my own tilesets, even though i could've easily found something of much higher quality that would've taken me much less effort?"

and then i realised. Visual identity.

it is far more easier for a game to stick to you if it has visuals/music that you can't find anywhere else. can you imagine if undertale used royalty-free songs and sound effects? can you imagine if yttd used photos as its backgrounds? they wouldn't stand out as much, because those projects have lost a facet of themselves that could've been used to make them even more unique

not only that, but there is something else that happens specifically when you use a default background, and that is a loss of immersion

it is harder for me to believe that i am in a real environment that is lived-in by these certain characters if there is nothing special about the place that makes it seem like the characters had an impact on it

a good example of this is Danganronpa: Despair Time

you see this dent on the wall? that's there because one of the characters tripped and fell face-first into it

not only is this hilariously stupid, but it also helps the locations the characters are in to feel alive, that you yourself could go there and interact with the world.

It doesn't have to be property damage, but there are so many small things you can add to your backgrounds to make them feel special: the room of the protagonist has a poster of a band they like, there is a photo in the living room of a family, the sofa has cardboard on the sides because the dog chews on it, there is a tree in the forest with an old carving of the initials of your friends' parents. all of these are tiny silly things that makes the place feel like it truly exists, like it couldn't be replaced by a stock photo

now, let's actually talk about Kenikari. What does my game bring to the table in terms of backgrounds?

I'm gonna be honest, they're nothing actually visually spectacular about them. they're pretty average, sometimes the perspective is a little wonky, or the palettes could be better, or the shading is lackluster, but they're my imperfect backgrounds, and there's no other game out there who has them, so i love them

but what about YTTD? This game was originally meant to be a fangame of that, what do these backgrounds have that YTTD doesn't?

I'm gonna be honest, i heavily copied the general vibe of the layout of chapter 2 for the main hub. and still, these are wildly different! not only in palette, angle, and composition, but there is also something that i have neglected to point out

(ignore the Gin) for one, the backgrounds don't take up the entire screen, so they can be as busy as they want without fear of blocking text or making it difficult to read. (trust me, this was an issue i've had to learn to work around). but also, there is a move button.

the reason why this is such a big deal is that, if you want to go from place to place, you have to click the button, then click on one of the options the game gives you.

Kenikari doesn't have that

the way you move around in the game? you click on the door you want to go through, then the game takes you there. if you want to go back to a place whose entrance isn't shown, you click on the lowest part of the screen, as if you were going to a door that's behind you

it might not seem like much. YTTD has that too, there are a bunch of places where you can click on a door or doorway and it takes you to the next room, but that is not how the game was primarily designed to traverse through

let's bring back the main hub

there are 6 doors/passageways to go through. There is a kitchen, a storage room, a gym, a bedroom, a garden, and the trial grounds, where someone will die

I want you to guess which door leads to which place

this is an extra layer of room design i've had to add to the environments. not only do you have to have every entrance visible, but it also has to be easy for the player to guess which door leads where

"now," i hear you ask, "why would you do that? you literally said that having black space under the background makes it easier for the textboxes to read. you also have to make less background, and you don't have to spend time making every entrance visually unique, wouldn't this be nothing but beneficial?"

and, when it comes to game making, the answer yes! it would take me far less time

but

there is one benefit to making the backgrounds like this

it makes the world feel more connected

let's use yttd again

there's a dining room, a bar, a darts-trowing room, and a bunch of tiny rooms with cushions for the players to drop in once they've passed their first trial. i want you to guess which exit leads where

surprise: there is no possible way for the player to know. i don't think even nankidai himself knows

when you click the 'move' button, three options pop up, and you just click on them and go to the next screen. this makes everything feel so off. in the second chapter you literally keep on getting more and more options for the same room as the story progresses even though there is no visual indicator that more options have been opened up

that's one of my main gripes with games that use this move button function. for open areas like a city it's fine. it'd be weird to have all points of interest in a single background image in a single street, and it'd be awkward to go through may street shots so finally get to where you want to go, but in enclosed spaces, it feels off. where does this door lead to? why can you go to five places even though there are only three doors? why does the architecture do a complete 180 in the next room even though this is the same building, with no aesthetic transition?

i didn't want my world to feel disconnected, and that i could just bullshit a new place to go to if i felt like it, so that's why i'm doing it like this

there is also another facet about my backgrounds that it could be interesting to talk about, but i'd say this post is getting far too long already, so if u want me to talk about it, please tell me!

[thekenikaridevblog]

alright then! the beta has been tested, and even though it was only played once by a friend of mine, there have understandibly been a lot of bugs and such found. some of them were pretty funny, so I decided to make a more detailed patch for some fixes in the style of That One Sims 2 patch note

Fixed a lot of spelling errors, obviously

sometimes i'd straight up forget to restore the dialogue boxes to normal after lare is done with her thinking monologues. whoops

High volume has been a pretty consistent complaint throughout playthroughs, so i've been lowering the volume of the songs

Fixed a GLARINGLY OBVIOUS sound effect error where the waterfall sfx that plays in the garden just. doesn't stop playing. and it follows you through the rest of the playthrough

Made Chuyo's dialogue in the freezer puzzle shorter with the more cards you've got collected to save time for players

Fixed some teleporting oversights in card hell

Because of a copypaste error, some images appear in Bumfuck Nowhere instead of. the screen. (uzomi breached containment)

OH MY GOD I JUST REALISED I FORGOT TO PUT THE CLICK SOUND EFFECT FOR AN ENTIRE SECTION OF CRUCIAL DIALOGUE I'M GOING TO DISAPPEAR INTO THE WOODS

Fixed a small writing issue where a character will act as if it's the first time they're being told something when they were told the exact same thing like. two minutes ago. by the same character

Reworked some dialogue so it's not Two Characters Say The Same Thing But With Different Words (it's been a rather consistent pet peeve of mine with my writing, and i'm trying to fix it (´ - ` )7" )

Accidentally made the player slower than a turtle after a cutscene plays

[thekenikaridevblog]

WE'RE SO FUCKING BACK

[thekenikaridevblog]

Backgrounds (0/0)

Tilesets (1/1)

Normal CGs (8/7) (i did an extra one only for it to end up being unused F)

Dialogue (100%)

New character sprites (6/5)

Cutscenes (0/0)

Free time events (0/0)

Music (1/?)

Pixelated character sprites (1/1) (something came up. Also i fixed lare's pixel sprites a lil bit and added some shadows. also her sprites of carrying chuyo had some egregious errors oh my god how did i not realise i'm going to bang my head against a wall)

Hello everyone! Sorry for vanishing off the face of the earth when it comes to dev updates on this blog. I've been focusing a lot on art fight but still I Very Much missed the once-every-two-weeks update schedule even before july, and for that I apologise

Anyways, I wanted to change a bit how these work

So far, with the post with the Mastermind singing in spanish gif, I was tracking the progress of the full 1.2 chapter. This made it a bit unencouraging because even though I did make progress, it still felt like it was a long way off (which it is don't get me wrong) with how slowly the numbers went up

So I decided I would cut the "end goal" of the updates for now to something more small and manageable and make it feel like it's being done faster. 1.2 was meant to be for days 2, 3, and a bit of 4 of the death game. Since my progress is incredibly linear (by which I mean I make stuff as it happens in the story and I don't work on something that happens on day 3, then on CGs of day 2, then write dialogue of day 4, so on) I have literally only done stuff of day 2.

So I decided that these updates for now will only track the progress of day 2! (I'm also planning on finally showing it to beta testers once it's done, so that's an important milestone, but I won't officially release it until I'm done with days 3 and 4, sorry yall)

So yeah, numbers have changed a lot

Backgrounds (0/0)

Tilesets (1/1)

Normal CGs (4/7)

Dialogue (35%)

New character sprites (5/4) (I still need to do one, I went overboard with other sprites that won't show up in this day)

Cutscenes (0/0)

Free time events (0/0) (there won't be any in this day)

Music (1/?)

[thekenikaridevblog]

Backgrounds (0/0)

Tilesets (1/1)

Normal CGs (6/7)

Dialogue (50%)

New character sprites (6/5) (I ACTUALLY DID THE SPRITES REQUIRED WOO)

Cutscenes (0/0)

Free time events (0/0)

Music (1/?)

Right now, the biggest 'roadblocks' for me are finishing writing some narrative/dialogue branches and doing a final CG with some kinda complex poses.

There are two main branching paths, with a kind of minor third one that you get if you back down from one of the two (think of Deltarune's snowgrave route; you have plenty of opportunities to back down. you gotta program all of those instances yknow? just in case a player actually does that). So far, i've finished writing the 'snowgrave' route, with a good chunk of its cancellation options. I just gotta finish one final minor branch and then i can go write the other, main branch. luckily after that's done all the paths converge so i wont have to spend ages writing all the ''but what would this character say if you had done this back then instead?'' thingies. and also i have the next set of events more planned out in my head so hopefully it'll be easier and faster to do

Hello everyone! Sorry for vanishing off the face of the earth when it comes to dev updates on this blog. I've been focusing a lot on art fight but still I Very Much missed the once-every-two-weeks update schedule even before july, and for that I apologise

Anyways, I wanted to change a bit how these work

So far, with the post with the Mastermind singing in spanish gif, I was tracking the progress of the full 1.2 chapter. This made it a bit unencouraging because even though I did make progress, it still felt like it was a long way off (which it is don't get me wrong) with how slowly the numbers went up

So I decided I would cut the "end goal" of the updates for now to something more small and manageable and make it feel like it's being done faster. 1.2 was meant to be for days 2, 3, and a bit of 4 of the death game. Since my progress is incredibly linear (by which I mean I make stuff as it happens in the story and I don't work on something that happens on day 3, then on CGs of day 2, then write dialogue of day 4, so on) I have literally only done stuff of day 2.

So I decided that these updates for now will only track the progress of day 2! (I'm also planning on finally showing it to beta testers once it's done, so that's an important milestone, but I won't officially release it until I'm done with days 3 and 4, sorry yall)

So yeah, numbers have changed a lot

Backgrounds (0/0)

Tilesets (1/1)

Normal CGs (4/7)

Dialogue (35%)

New character sprites (5/4) (I still need to do one, I went overboard with other sprites that won't show up in this day)

Cutscenes (0/0)

Free time events (0/0) (there won't be any in this day)

Music (1/?)