November/December 2023 Update
Welcome to the November 2023 Update (Well, actually it’s December now isn’t it!).
Campaign Update
Backerkit Store Additions
Since we have entered the holiday season we want to allow more people the chance to pre-order Penny Blood or Armed Fantasia so we are planning to enable the PayPal purchasing option in BackerKit. However, there are important steps to follow due to the intricacies of integrating PayPal, especially since Kickstarter does not support it directly.
Please note, if you’re using PayPal to purchase something via the Double Kickstarter pre-order store, fill out your survey until the payment step and do not finalize it. You’ll be charged once the shipping costs are confirmed. This process ensures your order is correctly processed.
Survey Update
This is also the time where we are going to fix the ongoing survey bugs that have plagued us since we first launched the survey. These are the fixes:
- We have adjusted the [Both Games – Combo Physical and Digital] survey questions to accurately reflect the correct choices now. If you have chosen that reward please help us by adjusting your survey via the link below.
- Please adjust your survey to change your Discord ID from the old format to the new format if you use a new unique discord name now instead of the old format with the four numbers at the end.
- We have altered one question to ask backers if we could send them information about other Japanese campaigns in the future (probably once every two years or so). This is only to help other Japanese creators since it’s a small industry and we are all trying to learn from and help each other. If you are OK with this, please adjust your survey to answer yes to that survey question.
Please help us adjust your survey by going here and re-completing it:
https://double-kickstarter.backerkit.com/
The security for the role dispersal bot has created some headaches so the fastest way for us to supply your role is to have you go in and re-complete your survey. We apologize for this extra step but it will be the last time we need to make this request.
Development Updates
All of a sudden, the days have gotten shorter, and we can feel the temperature difference with our bodies more and more as time goes on. We hope you’re all in good health.
A main staff member will be bringing you this month’s report instead of Kaneko.
ARMED FANTASIA November 2023 Project Diary
Hello, everyone. I’m Ishii, the chief director of Armed Fantasia. We’re working hard to reach our monthly development goes, but since the people sitting diagonally to the right of me and directly in front of me are very busy working to complete the goals that are due by the end of this year, and I “look less busy by comparison,” I’m going to write this month’s report.
Field-related
Towns and dungeons
We’re working on brushing up Lostave, the town where Ingram’s childhood home is, while aiming to complete our end-of-the-year goals. More and more work is being done on the landscapes, so the resolution of the world is increasing with every new day.
Regarding Lostave… It’s a place where people who excavate massive ruins ended up gathering and turned into a sort of settlement at some point, making it a town that embodies the westernpunk characteristics of Armed Fantasia. The combination of the Western-style buildings and giant mining machines make it unique.
It’s sad that we can only show it to you through text rather than images at this moment, but I think the visuals we’re working on are going to be pretty exciting, so I hope you’re all looking forward to it.
Battle-related
Battle screen UI
Battles in Armed Fantasia have a ton of elements to them, so we’ve been doing a lot of trial and error regarding the UI and what to keep vs. what to exclude. Thanks to all our hard work, we’re finally seeing the light in the tunnel.
In addition to that, Kaneko’s sense of aesthetics says that the text info should be as large as possible, which has caused our UI people to work very hard.
Scenario-related
Main Scenario
As I mentioned earlier, the two people in charge of this are very busy. Sometimes I hear them saying inappropriate things, such as “it’s a battle so big it’ll change the entire landscape,” which makes me fear for what’s yet to come. They aren’t thinking about the future at all.
As far as work status goes, things are still being written. But the progress is going well, and Kaneko has started working on scenes for the last dungeon.
Storyboards
That isn’t enough text to make for a proper update, however, so this time I’d like to try and explain how I go about creating storyboards.
First I thoroughly read the scenario, then pick up several points based on the images that surfaced in my head. Then, based on that, I stare intently at the background documents, thinking of cuts that will tie everything together and create the scenes.
As for the actual work, the length can be adjusted, but no detailed editing work needs to be done, so the composition mostly gets decided based on the storyboard alone.
If you want information on various direction techniques, it might be better to read technical books on the subject, but I think that as long as I prioritize my focus on what the scene is supposed to convey to the player, everything more or less comes to me.
Game event storyboards are more lenient when it comes to length compared to anime or movie storyboards, but there are a lot of things that can’t be created easily due to asset problems, so having a bit of knowledge regarding game production can help there.
The real difficulty regarding transforming Kaneko’s scenarios into storyboards is that every scene has a lot of content to them. All of the elements are interesting of course…they’re just very dense, I suppose would be the right word. Whenever I try to put everything together, I get lots of images in my head, but they sometimes end up being too costly, and so on and so forth. I spend a lot of time racking my brains trying to figure out what to cut and what to keep in order to turn it into an amount of work that the designers can actually handle.
When things get to be too much, I go to Kaneko and ask him something like “What do you think about…(cutting a specific piece of content)?”
In most cases, he either says “Hmm… But it’s entertaining, isn’t it?” or “It’s good, though,” and I end up having to go back to my seat and stare up at the ceiling.
Just the other day, we had a conversation like that regarding a certain scene in the prologue. If you try to think about what it was like before the scene was finally created or how it was originally written as you play the game, my hard work may yet be rewarded.
Incidentally, whenever Kaneko’s name is credited for scenario writing, he properly checks every element of the art related to the scenario outside of the storyboards as well.
Design-related
ARMs
We’ve finished all the designs for the weapons used by both enemies and allies.
In this game, excluding the incredible energy source known as the Lacrima Drive, the weapons all have rather secure constructions to them, which makes us want exact scale props.
Kaiju (Anomalies)
This month, we’re revealing the elephant to you. Its name is Grootslang.
Cute, isn’t it? Children love it.
Honestly, it actually took us quite a bit of effort to hone in on the right image for Grootslang. With elephants, the form alone makes it look like an elephant, so I remember only ending up with nothing but an elephant and cradling my head in my hands in front of the order for a while. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts when you actually run into this kaiju in-game.
That concludes this month’s report.
There’s only one month left of this year, but we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for continuing to cheer Armed Fantasia on for the rest of 2023.
