Demo followup and other things

Happy upcoming holidays, everyone!

Have some chibi "Pirate Mermaid" guys, courtesy of Nellie.

After releasing the Pirate Mermaid demo at the beginning of the month, Nellie and I have been stoked to see such a positive initial response! To every person who's tried our game and given feedback, or left even the simplest words of support - thank you from the bottom of our hearts! You are really lifting our spirits and inspiring us to work hard than ever! :D As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions or things you'd like to see in the full game!

Some people have asked if the full version will be a free or commercial release. To confirm, "The Pirate Mermaid" will be a free game (we'd like as many people to play it as possible xD).

Meanwhile, in the land of AXIOM.01, I've been working on-and-off on some more art. The amazing bunbun taught me a more pro way to color in SAI (thank you, great teacher! I'll work hard so I don't shame you, lol), and now the "fringe effect" tool is my new best friend. I must resist the urge to spam it for shading everywhere.

Heck yeah, fringe effect! (is shot for art crimes)

And so, after liberal amounts of fringing, I've recently finished some promo art. I've actually been wanting to do a "promo poster" for a while, so I'm happy that I've finally gotten around to it. Some of you might have already noticed that I've switched out the old banner on the AXIOM.01 page for a shinier (albiet more oddly-shaped) version.

Super fugly.

Slightly less fugly (I hope).

So yeah, I've decided to go with a puzzle theme to reflect the mystery side of the game. The full image has all the main characters, of course, but I'll save it for the demo release. Here's hoping that happens sometime before the world ends! xD

New Chibi Art

Great news - the amazingly talented Nellie of NSEY Games is doing chibis for AXIOM.01! Her art is so cute, I can't wait for everybody to see it in the game. xD Since Christie and Remy are currently topping the character popularity poll, I'll just show their linearts for now.

(By the way, anyone have any suggestions on what the character who wins the popularity poll should ultimately get? I was thinking about doing extra scenes or endings for the winner, but that wouldn't work if that's the MC, haha.)

Also, Tsuroika did an awesome Phoenix Wright-style parody pic - haha, I could totally see Christie doing this at some point!

In non-art related news, would anyone like Sylvia (the female best friend) to be a love interest, potentially as a unlockable bonus path? I don't mind adding a GxG path, but it's gonna be extra work, so I wanted to see how much interest there was first.

The start of CGs

Originally, I wasn’t going to start drawing CGs for my game until I’d finished everything else. I figured, you know, I’m still learning, so the CGs are going to look wildly inconsistent unless I churn them all at the same point in my “art development.” Then I realized I wouldn’t have any “art development” unless I started drawing more often, so here we are.

So far, I’ve done sketches for the 5 CGs that I want to include in the AXIOM.01 demo. Coloring is coming along gradually. My neck is quite sore from bending down all the time haha – I need to toughen up! 

Here's the first one. Haven't started on any backgrounds yet. -_-

An increasingly attractive alternative is to be lazy and find some way of getting around doing full CGs. I’ve been toying with the idea of using smaller panels so I don’t have to finish the full images (and don't have to do real backgrounds either hurhurhur). 

So I started with this...

But maybe I could just do this instead (possibly with some small animations)??

The panels might look like something from an action sequence, though, so I don’t know if I can use them for everything. Hmm, actually, maybe I should make more of them for action parts...oh man, must resist urge to pile on more work...

But yeah, if anyone has thoughts on this, let me know! Do you generally prefer to see full CGs, or are smaller panels okay, too?

AXIOM.01 Character Intros

Time for some more info on the cast of AXIOM.01! Lots of character details and more pictures under the jump cut below.