✨Hello Moongazers!

WistieCutie here to announce a big Devlog, so please, bear with me.

◼️For those of you who follow Fujitsuki’s page, we released the first chapter of a new game named « Rakuen:E », however, like explained in this devlog: SoraKagi’s first devlog

I had to come up with a new name for Rakuen:E , namely « SoraKagi ».

But another change came up with this new title, the visuals. 

Unsatisfied with the way the characters looked in the game, and with my art-style improving, I decided to redraw -everything- in the game. From the characters’ dialogue sprites (which includes over 100 sprites) and all the CGs (over 40 of them), everything got a little relooking.

Being the only artist behind the project, as you might expect, this is a long process… very long indeed!

The way things were planned, Rakuen:E’s first chapter was supposed to be re-released under its new name, SoraKagi, at the end of January. By February, I, with the help of my teammates (audio director, music composers…), was supposed to start the development of the second chapter, but as I explained, the process of redrawing all the visuals greatly delayed this progress by a couple of months.

◼️As of now, May the 15th, I’m almost done redrawing everything, the game will then go through a beta-test and it’ll be back online for everyone to play it!

🟥Not to leave you empty-handed, here’s a snippet of my progress! (⚠️Notes: most of the images below are gifs or were compressed to fit with itch.io limited resolution and not overload the page, so the quality isn’t exactly the best.)

◼️First let’s take a look at those three characters’ dialogue sprites (Aloe, Rosa and Dottie). The first sprites shown for each respective character are the beta sprites (1), which were used during the early development of the game, seconds sprites are the outdated sprites (2), which have been used until now, and the third ones are the final, official sprites (3), which will appear in the next release.

 beta sprites (1) outdated sprites (2) final sprites (3)

◼️Another important thing to point out about the new sprites is that,  unlike the outdated sprites (2), the final sprites (3) have full body rendering.

◼️Finally, another improvement that comes with the new dialogue sprites is that they have been made to appear less static.

Instead of using two static sprites per character, a character now has one sprite that comes with different variations. The emotions have also been improved for each character so that they have more unique expressions and appear less lifeless.

 (the 5MB limitation didn’t help with this gif.)

🔺Now, let’s talk about the CGs, because redrawing all the sprites also implied redrawing all the CGs!

An important goal of mine was to make the CGs look more vibrant and more consistent, to make the characters look as similar to their respective sprites as possible and to incorporate more 3D backgrounds in some CGs.

◼️Let’s take a look at a few exemples: (⚠️again, all pictures below have been compressed to prevent the page from looking too cluttered.)

◼️In the upper picture, the artstyle was different from the rest of the game, the character looked different from his sprites and the overall picture looks more desaturated.

◼️Very few pictures were including a background, instead using abstract patterns in the back, and  were framed in those… weird, ugly huds.

Talking about huds (when observing specific key items) they also got a brand new design.

All in all, here’s a glimpse at what I’ve been working on, during my spare time, for the past four months. I’m doing my best to put the game back online.

Thank you everyone for reading this devlog, following our progress and for being patient! 
Have a nice day!