BBI: R is still alive!

Hello dear followers and visitors!

We have a new website that you can visit here!

We apologize for the super lack of updates. We've been so busy we haven't been able to work on BBI. But now we do! We also have a few things to say:

• We are active in Facebook! If you wish to keep up-to-date in our progress, please join this group.
• We also have a Discord group if you are interested!

As for the development itself:

• We are working with a our new and stable game engine for this. So far it's going really well. We were able to add a lot of missing functions from the original game. Here's a list:
• Basic VN functions such as save/load everywhere, log function (press middle mouse to enter, right click to cancel) and so on.
• 720p, 16:9 display instead of 4:3 ratio. Meaning it's great for widescreen monitors!
• Animation functions
• Music layering and so on!
• Goatjesus has been proofreading and rewriting parts of the script to be more cohesive and interesting. He also did the grunt work to optimize all assets to avoid performance issues. Great work as always!

We'd love to update more in the future but thank you for following the development of Bluebird's Illusion!

~Team Autumn Bird

BBIR Team needs your help!

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!

Meeting Ends

Hey there everyone! This is AutumnBirdsCircle, some of you may remember me as BluebirdsCircle until my google account was suspended and I had to make a new one. Copyright be darned! So, my deadline was the 29th, and there's a lot been going on lately. Me and my good friend and editor Alex have been working night and day to get the translations done for Bluebird's Illusion. He's been so fantastic!! Give him a hand everyone! 


I have to say, this passed month has been intense. Waking up only to know you're going back to the exact same line of duty sure gets to you every once in a while. Tomorrow is my 17th birthday (the 29th) and there's nothing more I want more than to say thank you! You guys have given me the greatest present of all, the will to keep at it. Every, "YOU CAN DO IT!!" Makes me feel like episode 63.


To be honest, I want to hate this game since it's consumed my entire life, but I find the will to keep going and going. Anyway, I'm happy to announce it looks like we're on scheduled for the most part! 90% of the translations have been finalized and we're back on track! There's the Search I still need to do, but I can get that done in a little while. Also, thank you Archeia for taking my BS every day~~ ;_; My only regret is that I couldn't finish in time... Blue screen of death is my fiend.

So, thank you. From me to you! 

AutumnBirdsCircle 

Battles In BBI II

Since the RPG option is winning by a large margin, I suddenly have a brain blast from thinking of what we can incorporate, so here are some things that might interest some people gameplay wise. I would also like to add one thing...I might actually change the GUI/Hud/System graphics the game had due to not being able to emulate the exact same style and I need to make new system graphics for this RPG inclusion. Rest assured that it won't be terrible! ...I hope.

Free-Time Related Gameplay

• Remember how in BBI where you can go to certain areas and talk to people? At one point, there are no scenes in these places and most of the time, it's just Edward just saying nothing to do here and stuff. Here's the possibility of incorporating a gameplay in it. To strengthen the Alchemy of the Playable Characters, you can do requests from certain people in the army or from the city. So what does this mean?
• Falman would like to see a material that is made from X. From here you can do some research, or maybe just some small chitter chatter with the random dudes from the military to think of ways to do Falman's request.

• Did you know? In FMA, Edward actually incorporate people's alchemic techniques for his benefit. One example is major Armstrong's earth spike that he uses in battle. Edward also started doing this AFTER he saw it. He used it mostly on the Greed Battle.

• So what does the above thing have to do with this? Well you can discuss some alchemic achievements by other state alchemists so you can use them in battle too. In a sense, Edward is a learning student :)

• This new feature will also open up new character scenarios and add-ons that the original didn't have. And since we removed the Ocean-X cameos since we thought they contribute absolutely nothing to the story, we can use them to give you guys quests/tasks/requests instead, in case none of the army needs one! 

Character Related Skills

• Edward Elric
• If you guys played the GBA games of FMA, it would be something similar, if not, lemme do a very quick summary. What Edward does is that he combos cards/elements to do a specific alchemic type of skill/achievement. This can range from healing, attack, support and debuffs/hex/cursing the enemy. Another good example of this type of battle system is Legend of Legaia from the PS1.

• So his style of gameplay in BBI is mostly this. You guys can combine many different type of elements and discover new alchemic endeavors. Once discovered, they will be freely available anytime on your skill subset so you won't have to input the same thing over and over!

• Edward is also a Jack of All Trades from what I noticed with his Alchemic Skills. So he can also influence his surroundings to make a specific Alchemic Skill stronger in terms of damage.

• Alphonse Elric
• Alphonse for the most part in The GBA version a physical attacker and let's cats do his bidding. After he collects a specific amount. The same thing goes here for the most part except he can also affect the field to make Alchemic Skills stronger. But you must be wondering, if Alphonse doesn't do much alchemy as Edward, what is this for? Which brings us to the next point:

• Roy Mustang
• The dearly beloved and hated Flame Alchemist. His skills are mostly focused on fire, fire, fire and fire. So what does this got to do with Alphonse?

• Did you know? It's revealed that Roy Mustang isn't really that incompetent under the rain or being drenched in water. But it actually makes his alchemy powers STRONGER after he does some alchemic magic. This is revealed in the manga when Risa Hawkeye said, I just assumed you were useless when drenched in water. We will also have to research back and read the manga to remember the explanation, but for now, let's ride with this one recollection.

• And in BBI, Alphonse and Roy are together when fighting, this is why I thought the two should cover each other's lacking in alchemic...accessibility...that Edward has.

And that's it for now, some things might subject to change depending on your feedback guys, so please keep us updated if you guys would like to add some things or dislike or aren't sure about!

Battles in BBI

This is a very important question to y'all so you better listen. *gets tomato'd*
Either way, I'm pretty sure everyone knows the card battle BBI had right? After recalling and rechecking the script, we noticed it only appears 4x in the entire game and it felt very insignificant and useless. So here's a very important question for you guys! And we really need this input right now because it will affect the development and how we will write the script. Here are the choices:

a.) We add some RPG Elements to BBI so the battles would make sense. What does this mean? Meaning that you will have more character interactions, items and so forth. It will also mean more story battles. We will discuss what the battles should look like, but if you're familiar with Shin Megami Tensei/Persona/Etrian Odyssey and so forth, we might go that route.

b.) Retain the old battle system. The very random and lucked base card battle system that can take you upto 3 hours depending on how many times Roy/Lust/Bradley/Gluttony heal themselves and how many offensive attacks you can get. Honestly, I am not a big fan of this battle system, at all. None of the team is.

c.) Completely remove the battles. Which means very story oriented, we'll figure out something to make some choices so you guys won't have to battle.


d.) Other suggestions are very much welcome. We're not doing however another card system that requires complicated coding.


And that's all of it. Thank you for your patronage.

There is Progress! Just not that great.

So instead have an Edward as we work on rewriting and translating the remaining days.

System Update and Why the Engine Change

This was the last thing we were working on until Archeia got an invitation to beta test a newer, faster version of the engine we were using.

We apologize for the wait, but you see, the reason we want to change is that around 0:44, the map system drops from 60 fps to 25 fps. We couldn't find the reason why, but in the newer engine, this shouldn't happen. That's why we're opting to transfer to this new engine. While it looks faster in the video because Archeia did a modification in the code, we just felt that the newer engine would be better for the sake of our sanity.

We're very sorry about this. Please be patient with us, a little while longer.

Archeia says:
If you want to compare it to the original, you can see it below. Just note that is the speed of the transitions of the game and we didn't slow it down or whatsoever.

What happened?!

We're very sorry if things haven't been progressing as of late. And yes, you guessed it, College. Winter break is almost up. Finals is coming nearer and nobody has time to even talk to each other. Timezones makes a huge effect and people having Thesis or Term papers to submit. In short, busy~

Archeia and Renasci has been fixing another issue too. We won't be elaborate, but that ate most of our time. But during one of the few moments we worked on BBI, we DID find a way to make the code cleaner. The only problem with this is that we have to redo what we have done. We also remembered that by default, the engine had text skipping, but it was disabled in this script we're using. We're currently trying to fix this issue. Mostly because the Alphonse cursor won't stay on the end of each message. We'll post a poll later to ask which one people prefer.


We will now leave off some art:

Status Update ~III~

The engine right now is going a major overhaul. Nothing that time consuming, but it's not going to take that long. The change is mostly to make the code cleaner and faster! This is also to avoid bugs suddenly appearing, as seen in the BBI second demo by the testers.

So far, we're thinking of what to do to make the map exploration to stop lagging. But here's some important survery that we want to ask people. We will really appreciate it if you guys take the time to answer them~ It will affect the entire project :)

1.) Do you guys prefer keyboard controls or mouse controls?

• Pros for Keyboard:
• It's faster and easier to code.
• It's also prone to less bugs.

• Cons for Keyboard:
• It won't be true to the original source engine.
• It doesn't feel novelly for some people (but compare it to Disgaea and the rest, I think it's fine~)

2.) Do you guys want the literal English translation and a patch for the original BBI engine?

• Pros:
• In case for some reason, you guys hate our rewrite.
• You like Out of Character fanfictions
• You don't mind ellipses overload (or we can remove them).
• You like a very docile Edward.
• You like the fact Edward becomes Envy's XXX doll.
• You like the fact that Ed and Roy are tsundere for each other in a very obvious way.
• Refer to #2 again.

• Cons:
• It will be a while because the engine is a mess.
• If you hate everything from Pros except #1

3.) The Release Date.

• Please check the Poll to vote~

• Pros 
• for December 25:
• Well...it's out faster. And I guess, best Christmas Present ever?
• for February 3:
• It's Edward Elric's Birthday~
• for Oct. 3:
• It's most likely complete, maybe, and that it's Don't Forget day~

• Cons 
• for December 25
• It's going to be a demo.
• for February 3
• Probably not a full game still
• for Oct. 3
• It's way offs the calendar.

Thank you for reading.

Status Update ~II~

Sent a demo to two six people for feedback on the game's presentation before proceeding to big things (and finding some bugs). Some stuff were fixed and all that. One of the things we noticed:

a.) font must be installed, but I will fix this so that you won't have to.
b.) video card (OPENGL) must be updated. Your codecs must be updated. Or else, the movie file won't play at all. This mostly happens at Windows XP. So install the latest K-lite codec now!

We still can't work on it fully, Faith is sick and unable to send us the script files. Archeia is still flooded with work. BBCircle can't work without Faith and Renasci is contemplating whether to retranslate them.

Sorry for the long wait~

Progress~Progress~ VIII-2

Hello again! Bluebird's Circle here! Okay... Hear me out on this report. Okay? It's sorta' long and sorta' depressing--but you'll rejoice anyway.

So today consisted of me (having had only three hours of sleep) waking up at 7 AM to work on rewriting the terrible rough translations of Day 4 nonstop until I was finished at 8 PM...

OH MY GOD! I've never been more miserable in my entire life... I didn't have a single thing to eat, a single glass of water, or even a little nap on my carousel of self imposed (well...almost self imposed. Archeia and Renasci whipped me a few times to make sure I was still going...) AGONY! And it was all for you guys! *cries*

I hope everyone will appreciate my sacrifice of a whole day in my meek and shorter than Edward life.

Here is an image of me RIGHT NOW with ripped up edits that didn't make the cut to my left:

Anyway, there is some joy to come out of my sorrow and woe. And that's the fact the DEMO WILL COME ANY TIME NOW!!! YOU HEARD ME!! 4 out of the 8 DAYS PEOPLE!

*plays chorus of angels*

It's been a tough journey. The halfway checkpoint is so near. I hope you all enjoy the demo when it comes out. And remember me after I am eventually murdered by Renasci.

I'd like to thank the rest of the team! You guys are amazing people. We will get this done together! And of course, I thank whoever's reading this post. You guys pushed me too!

THANK YOU!

...I'm going to go drink some water now...

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!