Saturday, January 23, 2010

Russia

I have decided that I hate Russia.

Do you know why I hate Russia?

Because some ruskie decided it was a good idea to create a minor malware. It's called Spyhunter 2006 or something.

It pretends to be an anti spyware program, it pops up on your computer every five minutes and displays fake spyware on your computer, telling you to go to their site and download their stuff. It slows your computer to a crawl, is extremely annoying, and eventually prevents your computer from opening key programs.

The key programs it prevents from opening are usually just the stuff that kills it, like The real Spyhunter, or AVG.

However...

In this case I couldn't open up anything to do with the Yukionna project either.

The malware was too far along to delete manually, so I had to go in and reformat the hard drive in order to fix the problem.

I had to erase Yukionna completely.

All that script, gone, fft.

Just like that.

The project is not put on hold, simply delayed thanks to a major and very inconvinient annoyance.

Yukionna will still proceed as planned.

I hate Russia.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Legend of the Yukionna

Apparently getting lost in a snow storm in Japan is a very bad decision. You might run across one of the local legends, a Yukionna, lit. "Snow Woman".

About a week ago I stumbled across a program called Ren'Py, which uses the Python code language at its core to create visual novels. I've never been one for programming, but I wanted to learn nonetheless, and what better way to start than this? So I cracked open Ren'Py and lo and behold, a crappy tutorial and some anime chibi chick greeted me holding a super nintendo controller with a snake puppet.



After fiddling with the Godforsaken thing for about half an hour I finally managed to crack open the actual script (which uses jEdit, so I had to download JAVA -_-').

Then I sat there and STARED at the screen for the better part of five minutes.

"Well crap," I thought to myself, "I'm going to need a development team."

Luckily two of my friends happened to be on call.

An editor and an artist.

K, awesome, I sit back down and stare at the screen again.

"Crap, now I need to figure out what the game is about."



I toiled and angsted for the next day on just what the heck I was going to write, and then I stumbled across the legend of the Yukionna, a Japanese ghost that lures men into snow storms. I should take that back actually, the story of the Yukionna varies greatly from tale to tale.

Sometimes she will guide travelers back to their residence, and ask for an offering in return, it could be an object she fancies, it could be a kiss, it could be sex.

In other stories she is much more brutal and monstrous.

She will consume hearts and souls, lead men into blizzards so deep they would freeze to death, and often times she would kill with an icy kiss.

I thought this was the coolest thing ever, so I decided this is what my visual novel will be about.

Expect character profiles and a summary to be posted when the development is further in.