Decided it was about time for an update as to what I’ve been doing. This summer I’m working on some of my last few classes for my bachelor’s degree (comm tech/arts coursework), my web development skills, my Python coding skills, and both The Pirate King’s Daughter and The Lonely. The Lonely actually has a lot more prose that’s been written out for it, so I’m glad for that. I’ve already got a programmer for PKD – one of my dear friends from college. He’s interested in the project so far. I’ll need to find an artist for both projects.

My birthday was Monday, and to celebrate my 27th year of life I took a vacation from Saturday through Monday, which I spent writing, reading, and relaxing. I read a lot of the non-fiction stuff I’ve wanted to catch up with, but I also tried to play through Umineko no Naku Koro Ni. To be honest? I was rather disappointed. I’d tried to start it up before, and life got busy, but this time I found myself getting bored with the mundane pacing of things. There isn’t a lot of conflict in the first part, so far, so it feels like it’s dragging. The fact that it’s non-interactive and that the characters were going through all this background of I know so and so because such and such bothered me. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen the anime series, so I’ve already been exposed to all the action there throughout all of the archs.

And the killing. All of the killing.

The thing that I think bothered me most was the silly language, like “kikikiki” and such. Things were translated pretty much straight from the Japanese, and if the Japanese use that kind of laughter, it might make sense culturally, but I found it a pain reading through the netspeak-like flow of it in parts. Sometimes people would say very silly things that came off as very strong attempts to be true to speech or culture, but I found it irksome to try to read through. It made it hard to take seriously. The anime seemed so polished and graceful to me in comparison.

The music would sometimes get to be a little grating, too. Then again, it is only just the first chapter in a series of eight… (Though since the eight chapters of Higurashi came out before it, wouldn’t that make it the ninth?)

I really want to like it, especially because I liked the anime series, and as someone that’s trying to write for that medium, I really need to read more of the works. To me, 07th Expansion’s works are some of the most pivotal texts in the visual/kinetic sphere outside of Dischan’s work, so it’s important to me to understand those works.

Another novel I played, though it was about two months ago now, is Re: Alistair, and that was kind of fun at the same time. It was more visual novel than a kinetic/sound novel. It had dating sim elements to it and though the characters and choices and who Alistair eventually was were a bit transparent, it was still a fun, short game. I’m hoping to make some fun short games myself. I’ll need to participate in NaNoReNo this year; maybe I’ll take some of my smaller and shorter ideas and make something of it. I tend to think in the scale of epics, so sometimes that’s hard to whittle things down.

Work is being done on the mechanics for the Pirate King’s Daughter. I already have good story, but as I’ve seen, story doesn’t mean very much if it’s not something fun to play through. I’ll hopefully be giving my friend a rough enough design document in the next few weeks.

Back to studying web development and HTML 5. Talk soon!