Three months ago, Jill learned ghosts are real. Now she has to save the only Acolyte who can help her live in a world of the dead.
In October of 2017, Jill Count held an IRL streaming event from within the haunted hospital of Saint Heart. The events there left her forever changed and able to now see ghosts.
Haunted by the ghost of a young man she met there, Jill travels to find Tyrone, hoping he can help her.
Finding him missing, she is quickly roped into helping save him.
Little does she know what she is actually walking into.
There are seven magics, five more than have ever been explored, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. The kobolds, once a beast of myth, have forged an alliance with Celeste. A mad demigod rages across the land, aiming to end the tyranny of monarchies with Celeste in his sights. Meanwhile, a magical talking sword is busy preparing the misfit mages of the Ryuusian Royal Cabal for a clash against an arcane foe from distant lands of fable.
Brilliant Shadows is a visual novel that follows the story of Veronica Ashmar, a new graduate of the Mountain and a necromancer. Tradition dictates that upon graduation, necromancers and paladins are to perform the pairing ritual. Binding together one of each type of mage, entwining their lives and powers with another and sealing their fates together with a matching mark upon their primary hands.
Ithaqua Labs artist Sita "Geckos" Duncan has launched a Patreon with behind-the-scenes looks at the making of our visual novels, as well as the opportunity for you to vote on what outfits/hairstyles characters will wear. Check it out at Patreon.com/GeckosArt
Hey all! We’ve been hard at work on the next Perceptions of the Dead 2 story over at Ithaqua Labs these past weeks.
In addition to new backgrounds and cgs, I spent a good chunk of time updating, optimizing, and expanding upon existing sprites. Jill’s sprite has received a new outfit and hairstyle, and, along with Owen, has been converted to new code for Ren’Py called Layered Images. It’s super modular and forgiving, once you wrap your head around it, and makes updating and expanding sprites super easy (compared to the old style)!
Because of that Owen now has some extra expressions and arm variations to help liven up his sprite and get across his personality.
Tyrone’s sprite has been totally overhauled, as well. His initial sprite was pretty bare-bones since his role in the first story was so small. You’ll get to spend some more time with him in Undercover Undead!
We’ve also picked up a few amazing new voices for new characters, and will hopefully have names and samples to share with you soon.
Last but not least I’ve been really enjoying drawing and animating the CGs for the story, and I hope that you all end up enjoying them as much as I have been ^^
Perceptions of the Dead 2 Was released this summer and is available both on Steam and Itch.io. Second story – Undercover Undead
Work on the second story for the game is well underway. We’ve received a few hundred voice lines from our current roster of awesome VA’s, and auditions for extras for the story are also underway.
As with all Perceptions of the Dead games, there will be a good amount of experimentation with visual storytelling.
Some extra sprite poses have been made for Tulip, who features as a main character in the second story. The lovely Lauren Kawamura did a particularly great job on the voices for her, and was so animated in doing so that I wanted the sprite to at least try to keep up with her.
Other sprites may see some updated poses as well, time will tell! Tulip, in particular, is easy to do extra poses for since she has only 1 outfit and 1 hairstyle, so any extra art positions or body positions don’t immediately result in cumulatively large amounts of required work.
That, paired with Ren’Py having a newly released Layered Sprite system, left me wanting to try to take advantage of extra animated sprites.
Composed by the everlovely Johnathan Johnson. It contains 23 songs that you’ve heard from the game, and at least one that hasn’t yet made an appearance.
Auditions for extra characters for story 2, Undercover Undead, are underway and the script has been added into Ren’Py as coding begins.
Hey all, it’s been a hot minute since we’ve had a post about our goings-ons here!
Perceptions of the Dead
A short, free to play visual novel with 3 spooky, goofy short stories about ghosts and monsters.
Each story is 15-30 minutes long and is fully voice acted.
It was released for free on Halloween of 2017, and you can find it onSteamandItch!
Shortly following this, we were inspired by the response that it got to work on a sequel to the game.
The story continues with the characters that you are introduced to in part 1, and a few new folk show up as well.
It’s about 1 hour and 30 minutes to 2 hours long, and features short, animated clips to help enhance the story.
A second short story is currently in production and will be added to the game as a free patch, thanks to our wonderful Kickstarter Backers.
It features some voices you may recognize from the Book of Gray Magic series, and an OST by Johnathan Johnson.
Stop by and take a peak if you think the story interests you!
And thank you for playing our games~!
There are seven magics, five more than have ever been explored, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. The kobolds, once a beast of myth, have forged an alliance with Celeste. A mad demigod rages across the land, aiming to end the tyranny of monarchies with Celeste in his sights. Meanwhile, a magical talking sword is busy preparing the misfit mages of the Ryuusian Royal Cabal for a clash against an arcane foe from distant lands of fable.
You know, normal things.
One thing is certain, no threat the cabal faces compares to their greatest challenge: relationships, love, and family troubles.
Pale Spectrum is the sequel to Brilliant Shadows, and both are adventures from the Book of Gray Magic. Follow along with Necromancers, Paladins, Witches, and Changelings in this story of intrigue, mystery and magic.
Pale Spectrum
Pale Spectrum is around 6-13 hours of play time depending on read speed and route choice. The game has a number of large branches and a plethora of smaller ones, enhancing its replay potential. It sits at just over 200k words.
Voice Acting
All spoken lines in the game are voiced, bringing an extra level of life to our cast of 30+ characters.
Choices
There are over 50 choices that you can make in the game, all of which influence the 10+ unique endings.
Music
Pale Spectrum features an extensive, combined sound track from the Book of Gray Magic series. Pale Spectrum boasts 27 original tracks, and, combined with Brilliant Shadows 21 original tracks, has an hour of beautiful orchestral music composed by Johnathan Johnson.
The Main Cast
The story follows along with Belinda, Ash, Terra, Hektor, Prude, Aelfnod and Aku as main characters.
It’s been a little bit here since our last update. Balancing art, coding, emails and various public relation things can be quite a handful, and most days I just opt for doing work instead of talking about it!
That being said, I am more likely to update our Twitter with misc. progress and various things that plague/amuse me that are at least mildly game dev related.
Another round of auditions ended, and the results are as such!
Jordan Haro as Vasco
Anairis Quinones as Felicia
Ben Balmaceda as Preston
Caitlin Buckley as Nik Juza as Knife
SungWon Cho is now voicing Krok!
The other sprites are still being rendered. Pale Spectrum has 27 character folders at the moment, not counting small extras. I’m getting through the game at a decent pace, but it’ll still be a bit before everything is shiny!
One entire route of the game is coded (if bare bones in places) into the game, with the other routes creeping along. This amount of writing sits at just under 100,000 words. The last lines for a handful of main characters were commissioned, and some were even sent in!
It is the beginning of the end, and it has been quite exciting.
On the same hand, we have been dealing with construction on the house that we’re renting, and so the last ~two weeks have been a strange, randomized sort of torture involving hammer men for as little as 1 hour to as long as 11 hours a day, weekdays and/or weekends included. The sheer randomness and extended nature of this construction, a lot of energy has been spent on not going insane, as our little two person studio works from home. Having your home being hammered on from up to two sides at a time is incredibly distracting, and has played a number on our sleep/work schedules.
Fear the hammer men.
That being said, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing through the game’s newer chapters that are less polished, as it means I haven’t read it more than once or twice. Some of the voice lines coming in catch me so delightedly off guard that it just brightens my day, or sends me into giggle fits. It’s a lot of work, putting in voices, but definitely a delight.
As inspiration and time has struck me, I’ve begun working on later chapter cgs.
Our lovely musician Johnathan Johnson, who composed for both Brilliant Shadows and Pale Spectrum, recently launched his own studio’s Kickstarter for a game filled with lovely, unique ladies. It was wildly successful and you can take a peek at what they’re up to here, if a political drama / romance visual novel sounds like something you’d be into!
With some shiny new software upgrades to help speed up his composing, he was nice enough to create a short, epic track based off of Brilliant Shadows’ theme which he was kind enough to let us use in the game.
For anyone interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, such as the time-lapse of this image, you can check out my Patreon for various tidbits. The highlights of these tidbits will show up in the Art Book, once that gets started/finished!
James Larabee, the amazing voice of Sword and a truly awesome individual in general, prompted me for some convention merchandise, which got me thinking. We don’t have a huge amount of it in general, so this image popped up in my head and I’m going to get some post-card sized prints of it, as well as use it as a CG during one of the final chapters. I may raffle off one on our Patreon for funsies in the near future.
I have officially started the sketch for the poster of the game, and I’m thinking I’ll actually end up making two posters, possibly? As this first one has 12 characters in it, and while it is lovingly busy, I’m also thinking of a simpler one of just our lovely lady protagonist, Belinda. Sketches of this will likely show up on the Patreon shortly, if I’m ever confident enough in the mess to show it before completion!
Well, now that I’ve written you all a small book! Hope everyone’s having a nice week.
Being a two person studio, and also being that we just moved into a new place, both Nyo and I have been super busy, and so making updates has fallen to the wayside!
Now that we have all of the information, I can finally post the results from the latescast auditions.
Aside from that, I’ve been adding background variants to scenes as I go through and polish chapter 2. As well as narrative coding (sprite expressions) and music.
The ending for the Mountain storyline has been written, and there’s only one remaining ending for the Palace storyline left to finish off. Which is good! Since the budget for the game is creeping close to what we had for it, which is pretty nutsy, seeing as that means we’ve spent over $5,000 on voice acting for the game so far.
It’s great to see that the end is in sight! While not entirely certain of the exact release date just now, I’m aiming roughly for April-May, as that is the 1 year mark since the kickstarter campaign ended. We’ll see how it goes! This may just mean that the game is ready for beta testing during this time, or that it’s done except for a handful of voice over lines, but I think it’s a good goal to work towards.
The studio has officially gotten moved into a new house, so expect the work flow to ramp up again as we get more and more settled.
I hope everyone is having a great new year. It’s been a roller coaster over here, never a dull moment.
Been hard at work finishing chapter 1 off completely. There’s a rather extended fight scene that boasts many cgs that are just about completed now.
Have some cg teasers and monster sprites! For the longest time I was struggling with the fight scene, as action shots are not my strength. Thanks to an unending wave of confidence from not only my husband but also from my friends, I was able to find something that worked for me! Since then, the cgs have been coming out great and I’ve really been enjoying them and feeling very proud of them.
Alpha/Beta testers?
I’ve been considering trying to get some help on the alpha/beta testing front of Pale Spectrum as we code more and more branches within the game. I may end up asking for beta testers before too long, if there’s any interest there.
Aside from that, I’ve launched a small Kickstarter called “100 Fantasy Portraits” where you can get your character into Oria Trail, a game that I’ve been doing art for on and off and that IDHAS Studios has been coding. It’s inspired by Oregon Trail and revolves around the fantasy/sci-fi lives of some young human/dragon folks.
Those of you that follow me on Patreon will have seen these portraits as they were made!
Whether you’re just interested in having a custom digital portrait of you, a loved one or one of your original characters/D&D characters, pop on by and see if it’s up your alley.
For anyone concerned about having this on my plate as the same time as Pale Spectrum, these portraits are a great treat for me and give me a chance to warm up or wind down from the heavy rendering required for Pale Spectrum.
Thought I’d pop by and put a little image of Hek and Prude here. Hek doesn’t seem to grasp the point.
Familial visits have just about wrapped up, so we’re settling back into a work schedule. Things have been slow this December as I’ve personally been out of town for 3 of the 4 weeks of December, and now with Christmas, my Birthday and then New Years, the party never stops!
More updates to come in January. Hope everybody is having a great weekend, and that 2017 turns out to be a good year!
