The Abugida Effect - Episode 5 - Battle on the Hungerdome

[Chugachugs]

@Wulf_Diomhaireachd
Thanks. The last two days haven’t been great for me so I appreciate the comments.

Unimportant Background Stuff

I’ve been using a mouse to draw everything, the same way I’ve ever done anything. I’m thinking about getting myself a drawing tablet so I could try with a stylus instead.

I want to start including more original sprites. I did a couple of these in the Ruby episode. I think the edits have started looking fairly decent at least.

I want to have a fun cast of characters with conflicting goals and ideas. I don’t think the characters themselves have been fully realized, however I’m hopeful with more scenes and dialogue there can be better development. I don’t think I’m that good at writing dialogue. A lot of the characters do not have very original designs, I’m pretty heavily taking from stuff I like but trying to put my own influence on it.

My inspirations are pretty clear and I’ve mentioned some in the game, here are some examples:

Most of the music I’ve taken are from the amazing talents of composers Takeshi Abo, Takeaki Watanabe, and Kenichi Arakawa who have long histories working with FM Synth music. Others include Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Yoshinobu Hiraiwa, Chris Hulsbeck, Akira Sato, Hiroaki Sano, Masahiro Kajihara, and Jesper Kyd. In particular I love Jesper Kyd’s older Genesis music and will try to fit it in whenever possible. I think Takeshi Abo is my favorite if I had to pick. I discovered his soundtrack for the PC-98 version of FlixMix while working on this game and I have included so many songs from it. FlixMix itself is just this puzzle anthology game thing it’s so random.

The rest are old songs I like which have nothing to do with 1980s and 1990s gaming, but I think it works. They’re more well-known in the west if I had to guess. I need to include a text file with credits so people can look up stuff if they’re curious.

I want every scene to be special or at least impactful in some way. I end up wasting a lot of time sometimes for things that barely take any time at all to play. I might be making scenes too short, but I don’t see the point in making something longer unless it’s important, or visually impressive, or whatever. That’s a philosophy I had while making the Ruby episode so it probably feels a little different in comparison. There’s some cuts I still want to improve, mainly the in-game sprites.

Yeah, you’re right I should just fix the episode order. I’m thinking too Star Wars when it should simply be 1->2->3->etc. This way it’s less confusing and an earlier part could just be Episode 0. I can make that change in the next build.

Next, thanks for the proofreading. RPGMaker doesn’t have a spellchecker and I miss stuff even when I read it over fifty times. I can make some corrections to that. As for Mira’s sprite, I can try to improve the appearance. She’s suppose to be wearing a belt too, it’s just completely missing on the sprite because I’m dumb.

[Wulf_Diomhaireachd]

Hey, it’s completely fine to take inspiration from other people, and it’s clear you’ve got a deep love and respect for these older works. Drawing inspiration from those pieces and giving your own spin on them is a great way to demonstrate that. It’s impossible to find anything, even outside of games, that’s truly 100% original. Hell, even within your main focus period of the 80s and 90s, there’s countless works that will have inspired each other, and it’s great that they’re continuing to inspire stuff like this.

As for your character roster, I’d be far more concerned if any of them were fully fleshed out after just two and a bit chapters. Worldbuilding and storytelling takes time, as do the character’s personalities and relationships within that. Right now you’ve got a wide range of characters, each with their own interests and unique connections, and can be taken pretty much wherever you want them to. Seeing the sibling relationship between Phil and Ange, the age gap between Mira and James, the new characters seen aboard the Mother Goose (or is that just its codename? I forget), all of it serves to create a much more immersive world that I’m invested in and want to learn more about.

@Chugachugs

I end up wasting a lot of time sometimes for things that barely take any time at all to play

Welcome to the world of game development. Jokes aside, all of those short gameplay segments add up and enhance the overall experience. What may seem like minor additions or wastes of time can make all the difference in pushing a game from “yeah this is pretty good” to “wow, they thought of this??” Not that the entire game has to be absolutely packed with moments like these, of course, but whenever they are present they’re always welcomed. The perfect example is going back and adding that flashback scene for Cody on Hogo-5, it really drives home his feelings during that period. Either that or I’ve had a colossal memory failure and wiped that scene from my mind the first time I played. I’m going to hope it was the former. Either way, it’s a great scene regardless.

I’ll get through the rest of the game soon^TM, really looking forward to how the rest of it pans out.

[BadIdea4]

This post took me from “oh, looks interesting, I’ll give it some time to cook and maybe give it a spin” to “I will now play the game”. Never stop producing labors of love.

[Lundar]

Just played it through. Love the art, love the characters, excited to see where it goes!
Are you still looking for questions?

[Chugachugs]

@Wulf_Diomhaireachd
The ship is called the UG Rhea. UG stands for the United Government. The name “Mother Goose” is just a call sign for the Captain (she is suppose to represent a motherly figure, although I suppose the ship being called Rhea is similar). There are other call signs as well for some characters that will come up. The portrait art for Spark-1 is not done. I’m still working on that…

The Cody flashback was added in the first update. I wanted the way character’s backstories are revealed to be presented in different ways: James sees silhouettes of people that look like constellations in the night sky to show his naive innocence as a child. Cody sees himself as a shadow as he watches events unfold from his past (is there anything he sees that other people do not see?). Miranda has a surreal dream sequences that relates to her past, while being corrupted/tainted by something unknown. I had something in mind for Veska as well, however it’s been cut for now which is why it’s really plain and boring. It would probably be similar to James, but not quite.

@Lundar
Yes, always. If you have questions for the characters or details about the setting/lore and I don’t want to answer it in-thread I’ll probably try to include it in the game. I can’t promise who will answer said questions though or if you’ll get a real answer.

I quite like the “post-game” after parties that exist in some VNs where the characters talk about the game/story itself they’re in, which is partly the inspiration for the meta-breaking scenes. The other part are the Some Bullshit Holiday Specials, which are also just funny.

[Lundar]

How many solar systems does the UG watch over? Is it a significant part of the galaxy like the Republic or Empire in Star Wars or is it a countable number of worlds like in… perhaps Stellaris?

[Chugachugs]

@Lundar
Yeah that’s a perfect question. I was thinking about having a galaxy map for the debriefing, but that was something I cut and didn’t include. I’m not going to give an exact answer right now, but maybe in the future…

---

Progress Notes:

I’ve rearranged the Episode numbers given Wulf’s suggestion. I also made the episode select an option at the start instead of being mandatory. You’ll have a choice between starting a new playthrough or going to the episode select. I was thinking it would be cool if in the Episode Select there would be a map screen and when you select an episode it would highlight where the episode takes place or something. Maybe even give a synopsis of the events leading up to that point in case you hadn’t played in awhile and couldn’t remember what was happening. I don’t know.

I’ve spent a bit of time on a pretty involved scene for the next episode. There will be a large amount of exploration. I plan to have some puzzle-solving, with hopefully a bad ending/dead end if you fail the puzzle. If I include bad endings I will probably force the player to save beforehand. None of the bad endings will be canon they’re just an excuse for bad things to happen. This would also allow for a tiny bit of divergence without having full on story routes which would be too much work.

In addition, there are still either missing or placeholder graphics for the Ruby Episode (henceforth Episode 2) that I expect to improve upon before the next update. This includes: The UG Rhea CG, the Riley in the morning scene is suppose to have a CG that scrolls down on the left side of the screen and she’s missing sprites, Mira and Riley at the gym missing sprites, the gym in general is a lot of placeholder tilesets, Mira stuffing herself at the mess hall is suppose to be more involved at least needs a couple faces and a bloated sprite, Ange enjoying her ice cream, the Spark-1 person needs a face sprite at the very least and would be present at the debriefing, and Charu is also suppose to be at the debriefing although I’ve already fixed that.

Here’s a graphic I plan to add in (will probably edit a little first):

I’m not sure when I’ll finish the next episode so I’m not even going to give a guess because I was way off last time anyway. I may do a smaller update that adds in fixes for older stuff in the meanwhile.

I’m very much looking forward to WaxeRed’s Project Atlas and there are also “normal” game release in January I actually plan on playing that may take a long time. In any case, I don’t plan on stopping so we’ll see what 2024 is like.

[Wulf_Diomhaireachd]

Well I’ve played through the last bit of the episode (finally, no this totally wasn’t 2 weeks late), not much else to say other than I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of mysterious plot points to keep me guessing, I’m certainly intrigued to know what could happen next.

[Bonesmcco7]

Wow this is looking good, you have definetly improved in the art front since the first demo i played

[Bonesmcco7]

Some banners and logos i put together for steam

[bellystuffing1234]

I missed old art type its ai but that was really cool

[Chugachugs]

@Wulf_Diomhaireachd
Yeah there wasn’t too much left. The Ruby episode might be shorter than Hogo-5 I’m not really sure. I did spend less time on it overall (less than two months) even though it has more art, although I didn’t actually finish everything since I wanted to release it before I was really busy in December.

@Bonesmcco7
Heh, I don’t know about Steam. Does that count as fanart? I’m going to count it as fanart. The word Abugida has nothing to do with its actual meaning (probably), but it’s certainly a tricky word.

I did make some MSPA fanart in like…2009 or 2010 which is why I like the sharp no anti-aliasing look with thick outlines but smaller inside lines. I also like the chibi gag CGs you see in VNs or older games.

I guess true to my word I bought myself a drawing tablet over the holiday. I’ve tried using it for some of the new art in the next episode so some of it is probably going to look weird since I’ve never used a stylus. I’ve been trying to do the initial line art with the tablet. I’m still doing the coloring and finer detail with a mouse after since I need pixel precision for certain things and I feel like a caveman with a stick otherwise.

@bellystuffing1234
I thought it was cool too. Obviously I don’t think my own art is as good on an “objective” level, but I’ll just leave it at that.

---

Progress Report:

I’ve done some work on the next episode. It’s like…15 minutes long and barely finished. I think I’m going to break it into two parts so it’s not over an hour long and also feel unreasonable for me to finish. Bit by bit.

The next episode will be called A Cry For Help instead. The Harvest and The Harvester will follow after that. Basically the end of A Cry For Help will be what the mid-point of the Harvest episode was before. I didn’t realize how long things would take from looking at my outline and then actually writing it.

I can show what the new episode title I have in mind looks like. I like trying to be clever when I make these and have some (poorly hidden) meaning in them. I reused the helmet that I had originally for Harvest because it is important. The Mega Man 4 reference is ruined because even though Harvest will be Episode 4 again it’s not going to have the helmet in it anymore…how sad.

Episode 3 - A Cry For Help

EDIT:
I’ve uploaded a minor update to the game. It’s mainly just general polish. There’s still a couple things missing from Ep2 but eh, whatever it’ll happen when it happens.

Summary

Ep# Reordering, General Polishing:

1. Reordered the episode numbers. Incident on Hogo-5 is now Episode 1, Growing Ruby is now Episode 2, etc.
2. Redrew the art for the title screen, also updated the screenshots here and on Itch.
3. Fixed typos in Ep1 and Ep2.
4. Added most of the missing graphics for Ep2, still haven’t done a couple but the important stuff is there.
5. Improved the appearance of Cody’s portraits.
6. Added another scene to the Ep3 preview.

A lot of Episode 3 has been written and some of the graphics have been finished. I’m quite happy with how some of the CGs look. It shouldn’t be too long before a release since I’m actually splitting this episode in half. Although, I may get distracted by late January game releases…

Because I’m really happy how a set(!) of recent CGs I made looks I’ll be spicy and share an extremely cropped image of an upcoming Ep3 one:

[Chugachugs]

Episode 3 - A Cry For Help:

I’ve added the next episode to the game. It’s about 30 minutes long. It’s really the first half of a longer episode so it’s probably going to feel that way. This is the first update where I used a drawing tablet for most of the art. There’s some graphics missing, but I think it’s finished enough to release. For fetish stuff there’s more stuffing and the weight gain/inflation has become more explicit, maybe even explicit enough to be tags for this thread.

I hope people enjoy even if it’s not that much.

[Wulf_Diomhaireachd]

Just started this, but there’s a loading error once Frank reaches Veska’s room:

probably because the file name for that song looks like this:

The game technically still runs, but that error pops up every few seconds and freezes the game.

[Chugachugs]

Some of the songs have Japanese names which is probably causing the crash if you don’t have the locales installed or whatever. I can rename the files with Japanese characters (and update the scripts) to something else and see if that works.

I also found a softlock if you start a new game so I’ve fixed that.

I’ll upload a fix for these issues soon.

EDIT:
I’ve uploaded a hotfix.

EDITX2:
Dammit I missed some parts I need to upload another fix.

Okay I uploaded Hotfix2 which should work for everyone.

EDITX3:
I missed another one…I’ll upload a Hotfix 3 soon…

Okay I’ve checked everything and don’t see any crashes. I’ve uploaded Hotfix3 which should be the last one I need to do on short notice.

Also thanks to whoever added proper tags.

[DraskVorton]

The chapter was good, the art seems to be getting better and I there are some gameplay aspects that are moving in what I think is the right direction. The fetish writing is also improving and felt a bit more spread out rather than being fully isolated to a single scene which is how the last two chapters felt.

Something I mentioned on the page for Skirjasaga as an area for improvement is giving the player some interaction as a means of progressing dialogue - make them interact with world objects to prompt the next chunk of text rather than simply write everything. The example I gave then was Some Bullshit, there are a number of scenes that could play out as cutscenes but instead a bit of autonomy is handed to the player giving them the illusion of control - all the text is the same so the additional writing workload isn’t huge, but it breaks up the existing writing between triggers.

For Abugida, Chapter 3 did this to a greater extent than the earlier chapters and I think benefitted from it. Having the doctor need to search his office via player control & the small act of having Veska go grab the cake rather than have it be fully scripted both inject a little bit of player agency which helps to counter the inclination to skip through dialogue.

Another area for growth that I mentioned for Skirjasaga that could apply here is giving more world interaction while controlling some of the characters. Importantly, this gives the game another way of including fetish material without having to dedicate full scenes to it & therefore doesn’t cut into the desired plot. As an example, if the player is controlling Mira in the ship, you could have food objects sprinkled around the world that can be interacted with to trigger text about her eating them. This wouldn’t need to impact any narrative aspects (Mira doesn’t gain weight any faster for doing this, it’s just allowing the player to act out her current binging) and it’s a way of expanding play time as the player is incentivized to explore the room/ship section to find the content (actually pretty similar to how you handled the ship tour section with the brief lines, just in a non-scripted manner).

Again, I enjoyed this Episode and each seems to have improved on writing and technical aspects over the last. I’m Looking forward to seeing how this project progresses.

[Bonesmcco7]

Very good, The art is definitely getting better and i like the way the story is going, as for critiques I agree with what DraskVorton was saying about more interactability with environments i would of loved to have been able to move more around the ship as Mira with the binge cutscene. Personally i think you should slow down on the development as to not burn out and also in order to not releases as many hotfixes lol, some more art would also be appreciated; apart from that great episode as always.

[BubblegumCandy1945]

just played this for the first time, don’t really comment much but I’m a huge fan of what you’ve done with miranda so far, I really like how the gain is relatively fast paced in terms of play time and I like how you’ve shown off a very small gain instead of just having her going straight to being fat. excited to see more with her!

[Chugachugs]

@DraskVorton
When I was writing the original OP I was actually going to put Skirjasaga as a third inspiration, but I didn’t for some reason. I like that one quite a bit as well. I think my narrative structure most closely resembles Apostles or Skirjasaga I guess.

I understand wanting more interaction as the player during scenes. I could try to do that more. I honestly have no experience writing anything, let alone “erotic” scenes so I’m not sure what people would want. I’ve been designing scenes to be very straight forward and hopefully entertaining. The idea is that each part is an episode of a show or something, and the player is the viewer. Although obviously this concept removes any form of interaction from the player. This is more apparent in Ep2 and Ep3 since they’re more straight forward than Ep1 which has some parts that I think are mildly confusing because the maps aren’t straight forward. I’m not really great at making maps.

I have no desire to include any sort of combat or actual RPG gameplay, but I have been trying to figure out a balance between being pure story vs any sort of gameplay. You can see this in Ep2 where I have two sections where you can walk around and talk to characters which is completely up to the player if they want to do that. I want to have another segment like this in Ep4 and I plan for the player to actually have to involve themselves instead of simply being an observer.

@Bonesmcco7
I could try to have more interactivity in the future instead of a scene being fully scripted, especially for the fetish scenes.

Don’t worry about burnout. I spend maybe 1-2 hours every other day on this. I’ve also been getting distracted with Yakuza 8 (Infinite Wealth) which is probably going to take me 100 hours to finish. I don’t feel especially pressured to spend time on Abugida and I’ve been enjoying myself when I do. The only difficult part for me is being unable to tell my normal friends something I’ve spent a lot of time on since for a more normal game project it would be really cool to share with people you know, oh well.

@BubblegumCandy1945
I’m glad you like Mira, she might be getting TOO much screen time, but that’s not my fault! I actually wrote an entire scene with her and Frank for Ep3, but I cut it because I thought it was garbage.

And yes, a girl being slightly chubby is extremely hot. I like gradual progressions and hope to capture that in the game. One of the core ideas I want the game to have is a recurring cast of characters that undergo changes as time passes, not only from a character development perspective, but also other forms of changes.

When I’m writing something I think it’s important to have this concept of setup → payoff. You set something up, and then there’s a payoff later. It could even be MUCH later, however the point is that you’ve put the idea or question in someone’s head and they can think about it (or ignore it) until its relevance becomes clear. Also, by establishing a timeline you can create a history of events that are what make settings interesting in the first place.

[Bonesmcco7]

And yes, a girl being slightly chubby is extremely hot. I like gradual progressions and hope to capture that in the game.

100% on this, i feel like a lot of game dont like to do the slow gain; which i understand but still.