7/17/18 Writing: The Service Club

The past week I’ve been working on some designs for the GUI. Here’s an update to the quick-menu you see in game:

CG by Gato-san

And this is a CG gallery menu I created in Krita. Note, this menu is subject to change. It still needs a navigation for a continued CG gallery screen, and I’ve been thinking of increasing the amount of CG’s per screen to 6.

Ai Chibi by @SpryxNya on Twitter

I still have a couple improvements to make before showing off the rest of the menus. Look forward to that! In this week’s post, I’ll be talking about the writing of Nakajo and the Service Club as the main plot device to drive the story forward.

The Service Club

(left to right) Sumiko, Tatsuya, Nakajo, Motoko, Ai, and Daisuke

The Service Club is a major plot device in the story of Nakajo. A club that is dedicated to provide their service for those to come to them for help. This could be anything from helping a student with homework, moving furniture for staff, and help promoting school events.

I mentioned in a previous post that when creating the Service Club for Nakajo, when thinking of a type of club that was non-specific and that anyone can participate in, there were few choices. The Service Club seemed to be the best option for this mixed group of classmates.

As for the overall story of Nakajo, it isn’t just a Bishōjo game where the main objective is to romance your choice of love interests. Your choices and paths you take in Nakajo will also effect the character development of the colorful characters in Class 2-D.

Chapter Structure

Each chapter of Nakajo is going to be cut into several sub-chapters where they cover about an entire school day through the perspective of Nakajo. Each of these sub-chapters are written in an episodic, story-circle style with a short story/event that begins and ends within that sub-chapter but affects the story as a whole.

Here are the titles for the first couple of sub-chapters:

• 0-0 – Take Me Back
• 0-1 – I Don’t Want to Fight
• 1-1 – First Day of Your Old Life
• 1-2 – Indigo
• 1-3 – We Interrupt This Broadcast!
• 1-4 – Something About Shimada
• 1-5 – Weekend At Nakajo’s

Dan Harmon’s “Story Circle” Technique

I mentioned Dan Harmon’s show Community in a previous blog post and how that show was part of the inspiration for the Service Club. You may also be familiar with Dan Harmon’s other work in his other popular show, Rick and Morty.

The “Story Circle” technique is a storytelling framework he had invented. He created this technique with inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s structure of the Monomyth, or better known as “The Heroes Journey”. Dan Harmon basically simplified Joseph Campell’s structure of the Monomyth into an circular 8-step process.

Seriously, if you ever get stuck trying to write a story, this is a great tool to use. You can read more about it here: Channel 101 Wikia or this .PDF

“The steps are as follows:

1. A character is in a zone of comfort or familiarity.
2. They desire something.
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation.
4. They adapt to that situation.
5. They get that which they wanted.
6. They pay a price for it.
7. They return to their familiar situation.
8. They have changed as a result of the journey.“[1]

This formula has definitely helped me through the writing process, especially when accounting for the 20+ characters. There is no way we’re we going to throw all the characters at you in the beginning and expect you to remember them off the bat. Much like reality, meeting people and building relationships happens naturally and slowly. It’s the impressions, interactions, and experiences that make people memorable.

The best advice I’ve heard about having a lot of characters in a story is to avoid introducing more than one character at a time. Establish characters well enough for the reader/player to get an impression of what their personality is like. Then show what it’s like to interact with them, and give them a memorable experience they can be identified with.

This is why I’m using the Story Circle to create a sort of episodic plot to meet each character in Class 2-D. With each sub-chapter putting a focus on specific groups of characters outside the protagonists. The demo will sort of be like the introduction of the key characters in the story of Nakajo.

Once you read Story Structure 101, you’ll start to see this structure with many TV Shows, Movies, Books, and Comics. Seriously, try writing something using this technique, you’ll be surprised with what you’ll come up with.

Here’s an example of how I applied this technique to Chapter 1-3 in Nakajo:

1. Nakajo is in the Service Club room with his friends.

2. Everyone is excited to watch their weekly school news broadcast produced by the Broadcasting Club. When watching the broadcast, the school’s entire internet crashes during the broadcast. The Broadcasting Club asks the Service Club for help.

3. The Service Club decides to split-up into two groups to fulfill their multiple service requests. Group 1 will offer their services to the Broadcasting Club, while Group 2 will help another group of students find a club to participate in.

4.  This is where the story splits.

a) If Nakajo chooses to go with Group 1, they learn that someone is taking all the internet bandwidth somewhere in the school. Group 2 manages to find the culprits.

b) If Nakajo chooses to go with Group 2, he meets the second love interest and learns she wants to make her own club. They go and search for the other 3 students and learn that they are the root of Group 1’s problem.

5. The Broadcast Club can resume their show! The second love interest creates the Movie Club to prevent the culprits from pirating movies at school and instead, use a movie streaming platform.

6. It is now apparent that Nakajo now has a second love interest. If they chose path a, they would meet her later in the chapter.

7. The Club is able to watch their weekly school news broadcast, this time with no interruptions.

8. Nakajo has his first true experience of selflessness and helping others in need of their service! Nakajo is now more confident in leading the Service Club.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for reading!

There is one thing I left out, and that is side-chapters. In the future, I’ll go more in depth about side-chapters, they are chapters where you’ll take the perspective of another classmate in Class 2-D and experience their story!

-LaChez

7/10/18: Updated Sprites Part 1

If you have seen our progress Nakajo on social media like Twitter and Instagram, you might have noticed that we’ve been redesigning and updating sprites. Many of the older sprites you’ll see below were all made in 2016. Gato-san’s style has progressively changed over the years and thought we should update older art assets and really flesh out the character’s personalities of Class 2-D.Some of these characters have been listed but we’ve yet to formally introduce them. I’ll likely create some posts titled, “Meet: x” on this blog in the future that acts as an introduction as well as a character overview of the characters. For now, I’ll leave you with some short summaries of some of the characters to appear in the demo.

Sayuri Shimamura

Old

Current

Sayuri’s father works for SanematsuCo. – The company Nakajo’s family owns. She’s known Nakajo since they were children, but is disappointed to learn that Nakajo hardly remember’s much about her. Sayuri has the reputation as the beautiful rich girl of Class 2-D, she loathes the attention she draws and would rather spend her time in solitude. Miyako-Sensei is concerned about Sayuri not being able to stay in a club for very long and tasks the Service Club to help Sayuri find the right club.

Yuji Hamada

Yuji(left) and Chojiro(Right) Hamada

Yuji is the President of the Broadcasting Club and twin brother of Chojiro Hamada. The Broadcasting Club hosts the livestream show, Ibaraki 2nd Live! every Wednesday during club hours. They have complete creative freedom in their broadcasts and have become very popular among their peers. Yuji acts as the producer, making sure everything goes smoothly when producing content for their show.

Old

Current

Yuka and Miyoko Hazuki

Yuka Hazuki by Sekigan @ DeviantArt

Yuka and Miyoko Hazuki are part of the school’s Drama Club. They spend their time after school hours practicing skits with their club mates and also appearring in the Broadcasting Club’s live skits. They want to make use of the Service Club by asking them for help with tasks like building and tearing down sets or needing extras in their productions.

 

Hiro Sakura

Hiro is the star Offensive Center and Team Captain for the school’s Basketball Club. He comes from a family with high expectations with older siblings whom compete at an Olympic-level at other various sports. Hiro is a go-getter and will never collapse under pressure so long as he is surrounded by his friends. Hiro as the club’s captain is worried about the decreasing attendance of the Basketball Club’s games and asks the Service Club to help promote their events.

Old

Current

Basketball Uniform

There are even more sprites that have been updated. I’ll be sure to make a part 2 in the future!-Lachez

7/3/18: Pair Sprites and Bubble Emotes

Happy July everyone! Had a busy couple of weeks but here are some game assets we’ve been working on!

The Hamada Brothers. Yuji and Chojiro Hamada

Bubble emotes

The past week I’ve been experimenting with these bubble emotes our artist, Gato-san made. I made a simple mock-up with a test build in the video below:

Note that was made in a mock-up build, as we’re still working on the GUI. I’m thinking about making a startup animation for the bubbles, as well as making some unique sound effects for each emote when triggered. Below is an example:

I originally made the screencap video as an example for Gato-san but wanted to share how we would intend to use it. As for conveying the emotions as intended it is also a good indicator of how many points you may gain from the affinity system after selecting a choice.

Here’s some other examples with Motoko and Sayuri:

 

Paired Sprites

Gato-San has also been working on paired character sprites! These sprites are being made for friends, love interests, and even the siblings in Class 2-D.

Yoji Shimada and Mikka Kobayashi

Nakajo’s classmates already have established relationships prior to the story and it’s important to convey this and help the player understand the relationships between the key characters with these paired sprites.

The paired sprites can generally be used in most situations but thought it would give the characters a more personal connection making these sprites in pairs like they were meant for each other.

Next week, I’ll be posting about the writing for Nakajo that includes programming, scripts, paths, love interests, clubs, and sub-chapters!

Shin Matsumoto and Fumiko Kawaguchi

 

 

 

Nakajo in 2018

Welcome to our new development blog!

Im LaChez, creator and writer of this project! We did have another blog at some point but it was not updated very often, so I thought it was time to start a new blog altogether!

Creating Nakajo

Back in 2013 before this project first began, Nakajo started as a story revolving around Nakajo Sanematsu’s struggle to find his own identity aside from being the heir to his family’s fortune and Motoko Yuki’s struggling family life.

The two were always unwillingly stuck together in these bizarre situations with their classmates and slowly built a relationship as the story went on.  They became popular through their interactions with the colorful characters of Class 2-D.

As I began to understand visual novels from learning how to use the Renpy engine and playing various other lemmasoft visual novels at the time, I started to think about how I wanted to lay out the story as a whole. During the first month, I created the characters: Yuka Hazuki and Mitsuko Saito, and Ai Kamiya as other potential love interests for Nakajo with the idea of a bishoujo in mind.

 

Yuka is in the Drama Club, Mitsuko is in the Music Club, and Ai was in the soccer club. After establishing the story and cast, came a long writer’s block and an odd turn in my life where I almost stopped working on the project altogether.

The Struggle (’13 to ’15)

I’ll try to make this as short and simple as possible. I was in a living situation working minimum wage in retail and having rent that cost more than I was making due to my hours being cut. For the scale of project I first had in mind, I did not have a budget to fund a visual novel with it’s own unique assets. All I could do at the time was work on the script until I was in a more stable situation.

The landlord was terrible at communication and would not let me out of the lease even though I met the correct conditions to back out of the lease. It was a stressful and complicated situation but I managed to tough it out before the lease was up. For the rest of 2014, I was stuck at another job only with even less motivation to write.

I ended up moving back home for quite some time with a new job but shortly after started to attend a technical college in the fall of 2015. I was juggling between a job, school, and had the inspiration to rework Nakajo as a whole during this period.

Rework

There are still bits and pieces left from the original script but they felt lackluster to what direction we’re taking now. I thought, “Well, all the love interests are in clubs so why shouldn’t Nakajo be in a club?” and wanted to give the story a group dynamic.

 

Tatsuya and Sumiko were recurring characters in the original script but didn’t belong to clubs in particular. Tatsuya had worked tirelessly at his family restaurant and Sumiko was part of the Student Council.

Nakajo and Motoko’s interactions would effect the nature of their relationship as well as other classmates. That was the original recurring theme at the time before making Nakajo the president of the Service Club.

Inspiration

I took inspiration from my favorite television comedy, Community. A show about 7 misfits of different ages backgrounds in what started as a Spanish class study group but in its later seasons evolved into a committee literally in charge of trying to save the school.

Community has incredible actors like Allison Brie, Chevy Chase, Ken Jeong and one of my favorite comedian and musicians, Donald Glover. If you have Hulu, I highly recommend watching it! It is incredibly satirical and the characters are absolutely lovable.

The closest thing to that show I could incorporate Nakajo’s story was something like a Service Club. Something non-specific and anyone would be able to participate in. You may be familiar with this club from the OreGairu series. This is also a good watch if you like slice of life, romantic comedies and drama.

From the start I wanted Nakajo to interact and get to know all of his classmates over the course of the story. This was an experience I fondly enjoyed back when I was school.

My Background

I grew up in a smaller suburban town in Minnesota. My family was Laotian in a 70% Caucasian community. It was a town with a close-knit community where was fairly common to run into someone you knew wherever you went and rumors spread like wildfire.

My high school experience can literally be described like American movies and TV shows with groups you could pick out simply by looking at them. All the stereotypical varieties of jocks, preps, goths, emos, gangsters, skaters, hicks and so much more.

In high school I was part of the band kids. I’m talking about concert band playing the clarinet. This close-knit friend group would expand through the years. We all still get together for parties and bonfires to his day.

Halloween ’17

Sophomore year, a couple of these friends and I started a hardcore metal band (Some of you may have heard this genre referred to as screamo) and played local shows all over our home state of Minnesota.

It was quite the unique experience. We were teenagers around the ages of 15-16 playing in this niche music scene full of older musicians in their 20’s that toured around the US for a living. I met some pretty down to earth people during that time.

I wanted to give Nakajo this experience of meeting and interacting with many different diverse groups of people. I soon began to overhaul the story focusing on the Service Club interacting with their classmates and their clubs. Some of the other clubs that Nakajo’s classmates are part of include: the Basketball Club, Drama Club, Music Club, Art Club, and Broadcasting Club.

Artists

During this time, I came into contact with Gato Hayakawa or lordofelemental on deviantart. He is an Indonesian artist whom I’ve had the honor to work with the past couple years. Gato-San is incredibly amazing at drawing mechas.

Gato is an incredible character artist, since 2015 he’s been working with me to create most of the art assets like character design/sprites, CG, and more. Please check out his work at DeviantArt.

I’ve also been working with Anirhapsodist for quite some time as well. Her relative handsofmidaz who worked on some of the earlier Nakajo sprites, referred me to her. She’s an incredible Professional Visual Graphics artist from the Philippines, also acting as a moral support over the years. Ani has made all of the fantastic backgrounds for Nakajo so far! Here is her DeviantArt!

Current State

Now that it’s 2018 and I graduated from technical college in May, I’ve picked up on writing after being inconsistent for so long.

I am currently at about 35,000 words with the latest script and am aiming for a demo build that may roughly be 100,000 words or more. We’ll be aiming for a demo build this fall or early winter.

As for art assets, we’re going to be working on CG’s for quite some time. We currently have character sprites for 30+ characters at this point and have been updating as we go with Gato’s art style consistently improving. I’m also going to have Ani work on a new game logo soon.

Soon I’ll be looking to work with a programmer and other possible roles for art and writing to expand the team. I have many ideas in store for this visual novel and really hope to find the right people to fill such roles.

If you’ve made it this far I hope you enjoyed reading this and look forward to more updates in the future.

-LaChez