Posted September 06, 2022 by Meant to Bee Studios
#yaoi #boy's love #visual novel #kinetic visual novel #romance
-September, 5, 2022
TNT Tuesday
Current word count: 57,394!
Hyello everyone, it’s Joy! The creative director and writer for Tattoos and Tulips as well as the cofounder of “Meant to Bee Studios”.
Oh man, so much has happened since I posted last week! Lots of editing mostly, which admittedly is pretty fun for me to do, something about ironing out all the wrinkles always helps my control tendencies. (Mainly cause I have to hold back those urges the entirety of the drafting phase otherwise I will never move on.) I’ve gone over this draft so many times I am pretty sick of it lolol.
I’ve been fixing some tenses, grammatical errors, typos, etc… But mostly helping our programmer Lanae out, breaking up big chunks of text, labeling dates in the game, marking where CG’s will go, sfx, and most importantly (annoyingly lol) color coding the names for the expressions. Red-Angry, Blue-Sad, Yellow-Happy, Green-Neutral, Pink-Blush, and Purple- Other. This is a method I’d recommend but warning, it is time consuming lol. But, I know if it will help my team out, even a little I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve just been trying to listen to music and have fun with it.
I think that it’s natural to be sick with your work after a bit, now I want to clarify it’s just reading it over and over I’m tired of, when it comes to getting the game into game format that’s been the most fun.
What helps is seeing more art, hearing more music, and watching the game start to take shape. I’ve been posting on Twitter daily at: https://twitter.com/Meant2Bee_VN so please follow, if you aren’t already.
Seeing people show interest in the game is so very exciting! I want to show so much but have to be especially selective so the demo in January 1st 2023 is still surprising and fun!
This week I want to showcase some of our other team members who aren’t apart of the core team of Meant to Bee Studios (Lanae, Cat, and myself):
Our background artist https://twitter.com/pinacchos and composer https://itch.io/profile/tohera
Funny, these two have lots in common, they both produce quality work in a quick manner. Both were replacements for previous teammates who didn’t suit our project, they reached out to the me directly after seeing something in it they wanted to be a part of (super flattering btw), and they are both amazing at what they do.
Everyone on my team has more talent in their pinky than most people have in their whole body. I am blessed that they not only showed interest in my project but have improved it with their art.
I’ll start with Pinachs. They prove that speed doesn’t detract from quality. Every time they come back with a background I am blown away by the detail, the colors, the lighting, the framing. It’s always close to what I imagined and somehow improved by their imagination.
They do this super cute thing where they sprinkle little bees in (almost) every background, so keep an eye out for those when you play the game! It’s such a fun little detail and the our discord server always blows up every time she posts, mainly with fire emoji’s cause they are the bomb!
They were kind enough to share some images that I can show of their progress making the backgrounds. I will not be showing the final versions, you’ll just have to play our demo when it comes to see ;D
One of my favorite backgrounds we have so far, and one of the most important locations in the entire game is “The Busy Bee” Flower Shop. It’s not only where the story starts, it’s where the main character works and lives (he lives upstairs).
As you can see, the more you look at it the more you notice. It comes in 3 different lightings: Day, Sunset (my personal favorite) and night. They outdid our expectations and it was truly love at first sight. What’s even better is our Sprite Artist: Cat’s sprites (that are gorgeous on their own) work in perfect harmony with the backgrounds it was truly: “meant to be” as we so often like to say.
And it’s so true, it just keeps happening, all these happy little accidents. Hence why we decided to go with Meant to Bee and the little bee motifs present in Tattoos and Tulips which was developed long before I ever considered the studio name.
Pinachs managed to finish half of the backgrounds we need for the Demo already, and it’s genuinely so impressive how quickly they managed to do it! Big shout-outs to them, go follow them and let them know how gorgeous their work is, they more than deserve it.
Alright now, for someone equally as talented! Also super efficient and produces quality tracks time and time again. Aron Stefassonn!
He’s our composer, and when I tell you I NEVER expected to have an original soundtrack for this game, however, I was blessed when Aron reached out to me!
I always dreamed of having an original soundtrack! My favorites being: Persona 4 soundtrack, Hustle Cat, Stardew Valley, Undertale/Deltarune, Danganronpa, and Dramatical Murder just to name a few. Not counting soundtracks from musicals, movies, anime, etc… Music used to be one of my biggest passions and I guess as a listener, still very much is.
Aron’s work is so impressive, I knew from just listening to their past work that they had the skill-set to work with our project. Their previous work is in a much different genre than this one, they are used to working in horror of all things! But he said he could do what we needed, and he was absolutely right!
When I first developed the game back in July of 2021 I had my fiance compose some midi keyboard tracks for our project as it was a lot smaller in scope and admittedly much more amateur. I had one stipulation for any composer I worked with and it was that they use some of his samples in their work.
Aron had no problem doing so, as well as composing some entirely original tracks that I am just in love with. They are lengthy, some going as far as 4 minutes and loop perfectly. They always listen to feedback from the team and are working tirelessly to make this project the best it can be. They capture the vibe of Tattoos in Tulips which is light hearted, romantic, dramatic as well. Their work is going to go such a long way in bringing the story to life and I for one, cannot wait.
I love to listen to all the tracks we have in my spare time. (3 at the moment, and we have a total of 6 so far) And that’s for the entirety of the game, not just the demo! Super impressive since we’ve only been in development for a month!
I won’t be sharing any of the tracks just yet, but stay tuned either here on itch or on twitter because I do plan on posting a some samples. But, if you want to hear his stuff, and trust me you will. I’ll link them here.
https://soundcloud.com/tohera/kitchen-nightmare-ft-kole-bristen
That’s all for this week, next week and the weeks to follow I will be talking more about the other team members and showing more of the game production, every week leading up to my initial devlog and now has been super busy, there are new things almost everyday and we are getting closer to a finished demo everyday!
Until next TNT Tuesday!