The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Inadequately posted:

what is a Touhou

Touhou is a series of shmups created by one Ota 'ZUN' Jun'ya, in which cute girls shoot a lot of bullets at each other and then have tea parties. It has an incredibly large fanbase, possibly on account of that aforementioned 'cute girls' thing, and as a result an incredible amount of fan-created material - music, comics and games of all shapes and sizes.

what is Labyrinth of Touhou

Labyrinth of Touhou was a dungeon crawler loosely styled after games like Wizardry or Etrian Odyssey. It had a relatively loose plot and was mostly an excuse to run around in a dungeon with an ever-growing party comprised of the Touhou cast. The sequel, Labyrinth of Touhou 2 came out some time later, and was an improvement in almost every way. This thread will be covering the latter game.

It's not a perfect game - the creators of the game weren't professional game makers, and it shows at times. Being a classic JRPG, it can get awfully grindy near the endgame as well. Nevertheless, I think it's fun enough that it's worth showing off.

Some notes

There's a general Touhou thread here. While a certain amount of digression is expected, please take discussions that stray too off-topic there.

Please spoiler-tag anything that hasn't been shown in the LP yet. There isn't much of a plot, but it's still there. Other than that, be polite and have fun discussing your fave 2hu waifus.

Prologue
The Great Tree, F1

I think the text size for the screenshots is too small for you to use them demonstratively. If they have dialog on them, you should write out the dialog, and you can't really use them to show the status page at all. At least not at that size.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2016 06:29

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 22:51

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Yeah, that makes sense but you should repeat the dialog on them because it's not really readable.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2016 07:42

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

I did some test pages for an Arknights LP, mostly to test myself to see how willing to put in the work I'd be, but I'd also like some feedback:
OP
Prologue
Mission 0-1

# ¿ Jul 11, 2021 22:23

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

vilkacis posted:

Images are pretty heavy - go with jpg for things like this.

You have a lot of repeated faces. It's better to gather most lines into bigger paragraphs. Compare

vs

Personally i like to use a blank image to indent the text instead of repeating the mug, like so:

Makes sense. I was just using a transcript and auto-inserting the faces.

quote:

Also since the portraits don't seem to have varied expressions that need to be made out, you could definitely stand to make them smaller. Portraits aren't supposed to show every detail of a character, just identify them.

Even just half the current size would be adequate for that, but maybe like 75px is a good compromise.

Gotcha. That said, there will eventually be a lot of characters who might be hard to tell apart from just their mug shots. This is a gacha game, after all. I'll try experimenting with different sizes.

quote:

Some of the text on images is a bit hard to read, like here. Is this native resolution? You can go up to 900px wide without running into issues with archival, and that might be a good idea if you can manage it. (But don't upscale images if they don't come in higher resolutions, it never looks good.)

The images are 1600 x 900 when I save them from the emulator, I don't know if that's the native game resolution. I shrunk them in half so they could fit, but I guess 900px is better size to shoot for.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2021 03:46

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

Ibblebibble posted:

Once you get around to the bits of the game where they get better about putting in multiple facial expressions, have you got a handy system to do that on the LP end or will you just be ignoring it?

The transcription I am using does not note their facial expressions so it would take exponentially more work for me to include that, unfortunately.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2021 04:33

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 22:51

Clarste: Apr 15, 2013; Just how many mistakes have you suffered on the way here?

An uncountable number, to be sure.

I redid the prologue with 75x75 portraits and condensing their lines somewhat. The main images are still png, but honestly redoing all of those seems unnecessary when I can just change them up going forward? Unlike portraits we won't be seeing these particular images ever again.

Prologue

# ¿ Jul 12, 2021 05:00

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > The Sandcastle - Let's Play Discussion and Drama (Archive info in OP!)