Hey everyone!  Borealis here!

It's time for the next episode, featuring a special guest in the form of my good friend and Venus: Improbable Dream collaborator - Yui!  Enjoy this exclusive devlog written by him about his experience working on the project, and some more behind the scenes details!

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Yui

Hey everyone! I go by YuiReviews online, I make in-depth, spoiler free anime reviews on Twitter.

I’m responsible for the User Interface design, code and integration for Venus: Improbable Dream as well as photo editing, intro and main menu animation and logo design! Thought I’d write a little bit on how I came to work on this awesome project and how everything I worked on came to be!

March 2020

I met Borealis through Reddit, shortly after having read the visual novel Katawa Shoujo. I made a long and very unorganized post with my thoughts about it. Having expressed my love for the game and stating that I wanted new friends with whom I could share my new found love of Visual Novels and anime with, Borealis was the only person I really clicked with, as we are also both musicians and composers.

After a few months of chatting and sharing a common love for the medium, Borealis told me about her passion project and it was from that point on that I started having an interest in participating. In the beginning, we discussed editing background images. She would pick them and I would edit them so they were ready to be integrated into the game. The plan was to try and make them look like paintings while adjusting some lighting or even completely changing the color when needed.  As I went on with this part of the project, we discussed other aspects of the game that could use some love. This is where most of my hours of work went into: The Graphical User Interface (GUI for short).

At first I thought that simply designing the graphics would be enough but it became quickly apparent that coding would be involved. I had some coding experience prior but it was mostly HTML/CSS/Javascript and a little bit of php, however that was a long while ago! Needless to say, I was a little bit short on experience, especially considering that Ren’py uses a form of Python.  The goal was to make this game look like it’s own thing rather than another basic Ren’py game. I knew that we needed it to have a good look, a look fitting to the beauty of Kakeru’s story. To achieve this, I had to learn by going in head first and discovering how it worked by analyzing what was already there, playing with settings and avoiding headaches!  Through designing the visuals with Photoshop, making animations with After Effect and figuring my way through lines of code in the thousands, I feel proud of the result and I only hope that it gives this project justice.

August 2020 

Fast forward to around 2 weeks before we start promoting the Kickstarter, we arrived near a soft deadline. There were a few things that needed to be done, but there were 2 very important parts needing to be done: The logo and the main menu.  I’m no logo designer.  I did some, but I can’t call myself proficient in that department. However... I had an idea. An idea so simple yet full of personality. After pitching my idea to Borealis, I went ahead and started. 

The design was meaningful and fairly simple to make. Since Venus: Improbable Dream’s theme is music and that astronomy plays a role (although unknown even to me), it made sense to mix them both into the brand. That’s when the idea bloomed: Why not make a treble clef into a constellation? It was only a matter of a few hours of work and we had ourselves a logo worthy to be on the cover! 

The menu background animation as well as the intro I’m very fond of. I thought it would make sense if it was a starry sky, since the logo is a constellation! I made it with Photoshop, using some filters and playing with noise. When I was happy with the static version of the sky, it was finally time to animate it! I went into After Effects and played with some effects to generate a somewhat random result that I would play back and forth in a loop, giving this feeling of twinkling stars. Once the sky was alive, making a shooting star was a simple matter but I feel like it really added that extra lovely and comfortable feel.

Conclusion

All in all, I was very happy to join this project. It wasn’t easy but it was definitely a fun experience and I learned a lot in the span of a few months!  I’d like to thank Borealis for allowing me to accompany her on this journey and to all my friends over on twitter and discord who followed the projects, you guys are awesome!

You can find me on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/YuiReviews

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And there we have it!  Hope you enjoyed this view into the Venus: Improbable Dream project from another perspective!  For those of you who are enjoying these devlogs, I have good news - the next few logs will focus on each major character in the game, their creation, and how their personalities and appearances developed from their original concepts!  Stay tuned for more!

Stay warm and safe, everybody!

Borealis