Delays and Thank Yous

by goku-no-baka

Hello everyone. I'm the Project Leader, Renasci. I would like to apologize for all the delays of the project and my long term absence. I left all of the work to Bluebird's Circle and Archeia, both of them being busy with various projects, due to my lingering illness. I would also like to apologize about the spam in my twitter. Rest assured that I have unsubscribed. Horoscopes will no longer flood your twitter notices.

I had a long talk with Archeia yesterday and with some luck we might be able to make the progress a tad faster than our current speed. We also have a new person in the team named, Yami. I'll properly introduce him once we get our foundation stable.

I also want to thank the Bluebird's Illusion Group in Deviantart for their support and our followers for your extreme patience. Going back to the blog and seeing the conversations in the cbox always bring a smile to our faces. We're definitely doing our best to get this thing done. 

Another thing I'd like to brought up is the Engine. There had been constant questions about why are we moving to a new engine. It's mostly "Aren't you guys just translating? Why are you guys making a new engine for this?"
 

The main reason is...to make the English translation possible. 

In our dev diaries and early entries, you should be able to see one of the biggest problems we were facing. The last attempt we did is that we kept getting an error message when we use the word, "Brother." The other one would be how ugly the fonts looked and how we couldn't figure out how to change the font. Many other things. There's also the issue of repacking the game. Translating visual novels and working with their engines requires an experienced programmer. 

I'm definitely not one. Archeia, who is the only one remotely close to a programmer, has little interest in learning NScripter and is interested in other fields. The question we had back then, "Should we keep working with this engine or should we just use our own?"

It didn't take long for us to agree that we should just use our own. Because we can work better with an engine we spent our life on. We don't want to keep working with NScripter and end up scrapping the project. There's very little interest in BBI from other translation groups last time we tried to hire people or translators. If we won't do it, who will?

If that isn't convincing enough, Archeia also brought up a few things that I found interesting:

• Windows 8 is supported as long as you play in desktop mode.
• A possibility that they can be playable on IOS and Android devices.
• Everyone can use the engine if they want to make their own visual novels.

I know that our decision might be unclear to some people. But everyone is free to try to translate BBI. If they can do it with its current engine and fix the existing bugs, we would gladly support them. But as it stands, we would like to work with our own methods and develop something that is worth our time and effort. That's why we're working hard on the game in the first place! :)

Thank you very much for your continued support and we will definitely get this game done. We're almost there!

Fun News~

Hola everyone, due to work, universities, Renasci being mortally ill (it's complicated) and unable to go online at all, we had been on halt for a while now. The project has to be returned to my hands and using the scarce time I have to reorganize the project in her stead. But after a talk with my trusty partner, BlueBird's Circle, we decided that we'll release a demo on February 14. 

We were going to surprise you guys this December 25th, but alas, things happened and destroyed our plans. We would like to thank everyone with their patience and we're glad that you guys didn't give up on us! The demo would be extremely short, probably a chapter long, but hey? At least it's a proof that we are working on it. And another good news would be, the translation is now 95% done. All that's left is inputting them in the game.

We still have to fix some images, such as the ever annoying Envy's hair because of artifacts, but we'll get there~

There's also a large chance we can provide IOS, Android and Mac support. But we'll get there in due time. (They're written in LUA so it's like, lol <_<;)

Thanks and have some happy holidays everyone!

Art by Robo-Shark

Some little things

I know we've been sort of inactive lately, it's mostly because of my job that has this project on a halt in terms of development. Currently, I was looking over the old engine and slowly having some features from it to the new one. It's mostly the mouse giving me problems haha.

But the good part is some things that I couldn't do from the old engine was don with the new engine. Except, I'm still having trouble importing some new stuff in...

I'll update you guys on that when I have the chance ;-;

Progress~Progress~ VIII

For now we are sorting out Day 3 and Day 4. Apparently, Bluebird's Circle missed some event(s) so we ended up rewriting them with the other events added in.

As for another news, Bluebird's Illusion can be played in MAC but it won't be something direct...Instead, it’s a fairly inexpensive way to play Bluebird's Illusion on your Mac. Using a free program called Virtual Box (https://www.virtualbox.org/) you can run Windows in a window on your mac.


You’ll still need a copy of Windows  and it takes maybe half an hour to get everything set up (including installing windows). Another alternative is a paid program which you may have heard of called, Parallels.

We’d love to hear how this worked for you, once the demo is released! We're still working very hard!

- A little off note

I was looking over TVTropes BBI page earlier and saw this:

"In the Roy ending, Alphonse dies and Edward is heartbroken; but life goes on, Roy becomes Fuhrer while Ed ends up as a General and they even start dating."

I'd have you guys know that this is totally false and whoever wrote that, well, let's just say the entire team wants to murder that person. They never DATED, ok? Maybe a scene in the novel can be intepreted as that but this is totally false. It ends after Ed gets over crying. Jeebuz.

This game isn't yaoi but it does has short fluffy shounen-ai-ish elements that shouldn't be that disturbing, except I guess if you went with the DIRECT creepy, pride!ed (bad) ending. Sorry to disappoint a lot of fans but it just isn't!

Progress~Progress~ VII

TLDR; Archeia is sick and unable to work. Renasci is doing the rest of the work. BBCircle is writing

Break~Time

Sung by Bluebird's Circle~!

Recruitment~

First off, a Translator - Someone that can understand Chinese/Taiwanese Slang. This is just for the developer diaries. There is no need to be worried about translating hordes of scripts. They're just a few images~

We would like at least 2 Beta testers with low PC specs. Aka, your laptop/computer isn't upto date and autodated (WinXP OS is a-ok). This is for us to test if the game is too laggy for some people. If you're interested. Please leave a comment over here and tell us your PC OS, RAM, processor etc. and we'll select from there.

Thank you~

Progress~Progress~ V

This is how I feel right now when things aren't going my way.

STUPID CODE, I'LL FIGURE YOU OUT SOON, JUST YOU WAIT.

Later...

HA GUESS WHAT I WON!

CG is now fully functional~

Progress-wise, day 4 is under construction. Day 3 is rewritten. 

Demo is almost near if only these stupid menus work properly.

Progress~Progress~ IV

Renasci reports:

Oh my, what is this~?
I was working on an installer for BBI and it works nicely well. So far the game is clocking around 180 mb. We'll see how it will look once we cut it down...sometime...

Progress~ Progress~ III

The current status of the BBI:Re team.

Because it's literally impossible for us to contact the translators... The already overworked people of the team went ahead and trudged through the blazing inferno and fought over a series of epic trials and tribulations and facing the final evil overlord of the year, just to translate the remaining 2 days that were required for the demo.
We also translated and made the opening song singable in English for you guys. the day before.

Bluebird's Circle still has to rewrite them and colors still has to edit them and Archeia still needs to whip them to make sure she's satisfied with the outcome before she try to program it in. Overall, we're exhausted and we'll keep working hard as much as we can.

It might not be possible for us to release it by October 7 because of this...unexpected draw back. Let's just say that we'll elaborate the happenings more in the developer diaries than just rant about it in the blog. We're very sorry everyone! We're apparently really horrible with release dates! We'll just keep quiet for now and see how it goes. Everyone's getting sick because of the climate change and we need to be in full health. Thank you for bearing with us!

If you guys want an indepth  progress, just check the progress log!

Progress~ Progress~ II

Okay, update for the day! If you ever check out the Progress Log, you can see some developer notes there sometimes on how we spent the day and what we achieved and all that stuff. So go check it out :D

And now, have some screenshots~
You can now skip a scene completely or just far forward.

Progress~ Progress~

Think of it as a countdown.

Happy FMA Day~

Since today is a special day, we wanted to do something ~special~

And 21 votes say a video. 

So a video it is!

Unfortunately, Archeia is really sick and was unable to show more stuff (and her laptop crashing randomly or losing batteries). We also took some time trying to figure out how to apply subtitles made from Aegissub (wanted to make it animated but it was taking too long) and converting mkv to either avi, wmv or mpeg (and thank goodness we succeeded). So after many blood, sweat and, tears...here's a new vid that shows off other visual effects, and hopefully, better grammar and spelling. We cut off the scenes and added a new one. Just to tease :D

Of course, Fullmetal-Alchemist.com's Project Don't forget :D

Release Date Moved: October 7, 2011

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I'm afraid we'll have to move the release date for the demo to October 7. For those who are rather curious to what is going on:

• Translator problems. Everyone is busy apparently and some got grounded, some just aren't that interested and those who are already busy with rewriting and programming had to translate it with measly Chinese knowledge and friends and connections.

• College is in the way. Archeia and BluebirdsCircle are main victims to this. Set aside from scarce free time, they spend their time rewriting the plot, programming, editing images for the new engine and finally, topped with translation work. Studying time takes priority. We don't want them to fail, don't we~

• We want to include Day 4 no matter what. Just Day 3 isn't going to cut it. We want this demo to be halfway through the game! At least the next time we release, it'll be the last 4 days of the game. Go! Go!

• Renasci's complicated trips to the hospital. Don't even ask~

Thank you for understanding! Please be patient with us and wait warmly~

Don't forget~

White suits you Edward~

With the arrival of October 3 close at hand, the team is working really hard right now to release a demo by then~ The demo will hopefully feature Day 1-3/4. Currently, translations are under way. The Progress Report should reveal what activities were done for today and how far we are~

On another note, we now call this project as Bluebird's Illusion Rebuild rather than a translation patch. This is because we ended up editing the story to make things a whole lot more enjoyable (while still staying true to the original story outline), remade the entire engine from scratch, recreated the sprites to be higher quality, and finally, remade the battle system to be less frustrating than the original.

So many changes in order to maximize the experience that you can get from this game. Hopefully, we will succeed in this regard.

We're still looking for translators with free time just to make everyone's job easier :)

Thank you for following us and hopefully we'll go somewhere!

We thank you for your support. Check back with us soon for more updates and info.~

★Remastered Version Preview

After many tears, sweat and bloodshed, the remastered version is finally functional!

Enjoy, ENJOY, ENJOOOOOOYYYY

~Words from the crying heart of Archeia~

OMG! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT!? It's actually REAL! xD

~Words from the torn heart of Bluebird's Circle~

Yesterday, I updated the progress report like crazy and early this morning. Hopefully everyone is enjoying our progress so far!

▼Remastering Progress

Hi everyone! Renasci speaking and I'm here to deliver the latest news!
Archeia is working very hard but had to take a break today due to her final exams for this trimester. But she left us with these images to show her progress!

Subtitles are not final

Title Screen is finally implemented!

Monologues are in!

CG and Indicator is now properly placed~ The only problem remaining is using the original size

And finally, I'll leave some art~

★Remastering!~~

=comparison between the original JPG and our PNG=

~CLICK PICTURE FOR FULL VIEW~

Bluebird's Circle here on more updates! So--the team decided we were going to remaster everything from the start. Sound effects, smoothing out the sprite work and replacing the low quality tracks with orchestral ones. Everyone's pitching in to help! Just improving and smoothing. :)

=============================

Archeia here, I successfully worked with the engine and the result can be seen below:

This is NOT, I repeat, NOT in the game.

Now it has italics etc. 

Choices are given a cursor instead of changing font text for the sake of readability and accuracy.

★Scans and Scripts

Archeia managed to talked to Bluebird's Circle's earlier and gave us the RAW and modified version of Day 1-4 scripts. We're currently changing how some things are phrased for the sake of fluency~

Bluebird's Circle, Faith, translated Bluebird's Illusion manga pages a while back. Archeia took the liberty of editing and cleaning them. Here you go~