Shining Song Starnova: Idol Anime Themed Visual Novel!

The Year of Starnova
over 6 years ago – Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 01:05:37 AM

Happy New Year, from Love in Space! May all your wishes come true in 2018.

While 2017 may have seemed a quiet year for us, an unprecedented amount of work has been done behind the scenes to create Shining Song Starnova. When we first set out to make Shining Song Starnova, all we had was the lofty idea that we wanted to make something which could have been released during Japan's golden age of visual novels. Well, it turned out that due to various reasons, making huge visual novels like that require unreasonable amounts of resources, but we're still hanging in there.

The game is now largely finished, and with just a little bit more work, I think we will be able to release a creation we can be truly proud of. (With the caveat that the final 10 percent of game development is always the hardest part of the development cycle.) Creative software like visual novels are feats of both artistry and engineering, requiring the combined dedication of many talented individuals. As much as we wish there was a button we can press to turn an idea into a product, in reality, the process of making the end product is worlds detached from the experience of using it. Due to the end user's subjective taste in both literature and art, there are no objective benchmarks for the product to clear, beyond that it runs when you press the play button and the basic UI functions work. All in all, a surprising amount of troubles can occur while developing visual novels. These issues are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to visual novel development, to get a taste of the creation process.

However, while reading all that may lead you to believe that we have hit "unexpected production troubles" and whatnot, the game is so far progressing on schedule and mostly on budget. (Breath of relief.) Unfortunately, it has become increasing difficult for developers to share information about the visual novel creation process due to the chance of the information being misinterpreted. With that in mind though, Shining Song Starnova has been an incredible experience for us to create. We've never quite made a product like this before, so we're all very pleased with how things are shaping up. Thanks to everyone's hard work, I feel like it will now only be a matter of time until you too can experience what we have created together.

Finally, it is ultimately you who keep Love in Space going. At the end of the day, visual novels are a niche within a niche with a still small fanbase. We hope that you too do what you can to help the girls of Starnova. 2018 will truly be our year of Starnova, and we are really counting on it being your year of Starnova as well!

Stretch Goal Cleared: $60,000 – Bonus Girl’s Night Scene
over 6 years ago – Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 12:27:19 AM

Hi everyone,

We continue to be blown away looking at all the support you've all given us to date since launching the Kickstarter as well as those of you who have been encouraging us since we started development of Shining Song Starnova. We are now happy to announce that the final milestone is now unlocked for the additional girls only onsen trip content in the final build.

For the purposes of keeping it a surprise we're not going to reveal anything more than the teaser text that was last posted in update #13 right now but you can rest assured that you'll be in for a treat when you get your hands on it - that is if you can find the unlock mechanism...

It has also been a while since we last gave you a progress report so here is where we are at this moment in time:

• Aki's route is currently in the process of getting added to the current build.
• The remainder of the Aki CGs are getting cleaned up as part of the process of adding her route to the build.
• Concepts for Natsuki's CGs are currently in progress.
• Natsuki's route is currently undergoing editing and Sasami's route will soon be entering the writing stage.
• We're still on track to start the additional voiced parts early in 2018.

See you all in the next update!

Stretch Goal Cleared: $55,000 - More Voicing
over 6 years ago – Mon, Oct 30, 2017 at 01:04:32 AM

Hi everyone,

Back in September just before the main backing period ended for Starnova we revealed that Backerkit funding would continue to accumulate towards the stretch goals. We are now happy to announce that since going live it has raised $5,351.00 which means we have successfully cleared the first of these goals for additional voice acting from our cast of professional seiyuu.

With this milestone we can now reveal that we are planning to introduce full voice acting for pivotal story scenes to help bring those moments to life while maintaining the partial voice acting for everything else. The details of which scenes are not yet finalised due to outstanding QA work however the aim will be to start recording these scenes in early 2018 so that we can have them integrated into the game not long after.

This also means that now we are at $56.7k raised support for Starnova so we have just over $3000 to go until we hit our second goal of adding a new scene currently titled 'Girls Only Onsen Trip', the Yuri fans among you may soon have something else to look forward to in the final release. 

$60,000 – Bonus Girl’s Night Scene! 

Whew, with this much money, the girls are gonna ditch their producer and head out to the onsen inn to celebrate by themselves! It was after the fourth round of drinks when Mariya crumpled on the floor, weeping about the missed opportunities of her youth. “It could have been like LoveLive!” Her tears soaked the tatami mat. “But now, I’m 26 years old! Nobody’s gonna like a dinosaur like me!” Julie put her arm around her onee-sama. “Aah, don’t worry! There’s technology these days to make you look younger!” Mariya pounded the floor. “That doesn’t make me feel even a tiny bit better!!” Julie sighed and poured down another shot of sake into Mariya’s mouth. “Shh, shhh… Onee-sama, I’ll make you feel better…” Meanwhile, Mika leaned against the wall, rocking like a bobblehead. “Uoaah… T-The elixirs of the adult world are quite strong indeed… Hic…” Before she knew it, she lost her balance and tumbled straight into Aki’s bosom. The red loli protested in words, but not in action. “E-Eeeh? W-What’s Chuuni-chan doing?!” Mika merely giggled as she rubbed her face into Aki’s chest, her mind obviously in a different place. “Ufufu… What a cute figurine… I must make money as an idol and buy it at all costs!” Catching the mood, it was only a matter of time until Nattan became intent on weighing Nemu’s boobs as well. “Ooohooohooo!! These big watermelons be ready for the picking!” Only Sasami remained normal, looking at the others with disapproval. “Mou, we’re all supposed to be idols! And yet all you girls do is fool around like this…!” Julie looked at Sasami. “Tch, as expected of the lamb of Starnova… Come on, drop your goodie two shoes act! I know you want to join in too!” She reached into her bag. “Anyways, I brought something good from my collection…” Sasami’s eyes widened upon seeing what Julie had brought. “T-This is…!!” 

Thanks again for all your continued support during the development of Shining Song Starnova and we look forward to bringing you new updates soon.

Backerkit Invites + Progress Updates
over 6 years ago – Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 10:17:35 PM

Hey everyone,

Backerkit invites were sent out recently, so please check your email for a link to your survey, and be sure to fill out your shipping information and answer any questions for your pledge. We won't be able to ship your items to you if you don't fill out your Backerkit survey, so please finish it as soon as you can!

If you're new to using Backerkit, please be aware that when you purchase addons to go along with your pledge, your credit card won't be charged right away. Instead, you'll be charged when we lock down Backerkit. We don't yet know when that will be (we generally leave them open for at least a month or two) but we'll post an update on both the Sekai Project and Love In Space social media before we do, so you'll have a heads up before it happens.

If you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign, don't worry! You're able to pre-order most of the goods from Backerkit too, even if you weren't part of the Kickstarter. Check out the pre-order store, but be aware that you also won't be charged until lockdown.

The rest of the designs for the dakis are also completed, so you can view those on the Denpasoft Tumblr (beware - clicking that link takes you to a page with nudity) or on Backerkit itself. Here are some previews of the front sides of the Sasami, Natsuki, and Nemu dakis.

With that said, here's the latest progress report from Love In Space on the progress of the game:

Common Route Part 1: Done  

Common Route Part 2: Done  

Nemu Route: Done  

Mariya Route: Done  

Mika Route: Done  

Julie Route: Done  

Aki Route: Done

Natsuki Route: In Progress  

Sasami Route: To Do  

Final Quality Assurance: To Do

The Natsuki route is just about done being written, and then will be sent in for editing while the Sasami route is written. Once Sasami is written and edited, everything will be integrated into the engine and final QA will begin once there's a finished build. Recording for the voiced parts should happen early next year, as well. We hope you're looking forward to the finished version of Shining Song Starnova!

As always, thanks for your support.

Update - Netshow Episode 3 and The Quest for True 1080p Performance
over 6 years ago – Wed, Oct 04, 2017 at 09:05:26 AM

Hey everyone,

We hope you've been doing well. Thanks again to all who have supported and shared the Starnova campaign project! We've still got a long way to go, so please keep spreading the word! If you've been playing the demo, tell us what you think! Who's your best girl?

Today, we're excited to share the third episode of the Starnova Netshow, where the girls announce the first stretch goal! If we surpass the initial funding goal, even more of the game will be voiced, resulting in a much more immersive experience! That's not our only stretch goal though - stay tuned for more! And check out the new episode below:

In addition, we have another special update from Love In Space. This one is a bit more educational, and goes into detail on how Starnova maintains such crisp visual fidelity throughout the whole game. It's more complicated than you might think!

The Quest for True 1080p Performance  

One of the interesting technologies working under the hood in Shining Song Starnova is a complete re-design of the way the game engine displays the characters. Based on our experience with the Renpy Engine, we knew that we would have to rework the way graphics are presented to provide the highest possible visual quality while still ensuring the game runs on low end machines.

So how does our custom display system work?

Everything starts with the resolution of the base characters. If your character visuals are not HD resolution and are basically being upscaled by the game engine onto an HD screen resolution, then you don't actually have HD visuals - you have blurry upsampled SD visuals.

 Thus, to provide the greatest level of visual clarity in our game, we went with near 4k resolution character illustrations. This means that the characters you see on the screen are in reality much, much larger than the bounds of a 1080p monitor.

However, 4k resolution graphics comes with draw backs. First, the Renpy Engine is not designed to fully utilize the power of high end PCs. Also, many visual novel players do not even own high end PCs. Thus, when you're showing seven girls on the screen, each at 4k resolution, things are going to get slow.

Second, the open GL renderer also has issues with *down*scaling 4k assets. Since the graphics are so huge, 90 percent of the time, the game will be downscaling the assets. While conventional wisdom may be that downscaling produces better graphical results than upscaling, the open GL renderer produces artifacts when you downscale assets heavily.

 Graphical engineers have no doubt poured decades of research into the art of down scaling images, and now applications like Photoshop can basically down scale all you want without any loss of quality. However, it appears that the open GL code in the Renpy Engine assumes that most developers will be upsampling images (*cough*) and so the display code has been optimized to make upsampled images look as decent as possible, at the cost of reducing the quality of down scaled images.

And so, we went all out and coded our very own custom display system to get all the advantages of 4k assets without the downsides.

The first step we took was to produce three versions of each character in the game: the 4K version, the 1080p version, and the 720p version. Depending on how big a character appears on the screen, our display engine will automatically decide by itself whether to utilize the 4K asset, the 1080p asset, or the 720 asset. Many AAA 3D games utilize the same technique, where an object's poly count and texture resolution automatically scales depending on how close the player is to that object. All we did was to make the VN equivalent of the same technique.

So in a situation where a character's far away, an pre-down scaled 720p image is shown on the screen. This way, the game does not run into memory crashes and fps drops associated with loading 4K assets, as well as avoiding artifacting due to the open GL renderer trying to down scale a massive 4k image.

On the flipside, when a character's really close to you, the game will display a cropped 4k image. As you can see from the display area, the vast majority of a 4k asset is actually offscreen, so this pointlessly wastes the player's memory usage loading graphics which the player cannot see. By the game automatically not loading parts of a 4K asset which is off screen, we eliminate out of memory crashes and fps drops.

The above image demonstrates how our code works in practice. When Sasa-chan is standing close to Producer-san, the game displays her in full 4K resolution, with the bottom half of her body cropped out. When she's standing just a regular distance, the game loads her 1080p resolution image, and when she's really far away, the game loads her full body 720p resolution image. The sub 4K images are already pre-scaled, meaning you will not see any artifacting due to downsampling. Further, since the game doesn't loads large parts of sprites which are off screen, the user experience is improved via less memory usage and less lag.

Our display system also has a bunch of other features under the hood, but those other features are mostly to speed up coding and doesn't affect the end user much. (Aside for the game not taking three years to code, I guess.) The most noticeable feature for players is that the girls will always have the highest level of visual crispness, with minimal lag.

Thanks to the enormous effort of our art staff, Shining Song Starnova has quite an incredible look, so it's up to us coders to ensure that their art is done justice in the end product. We hope that the next time you play the game, you notice just how crisp and sharp everything looks, thanks to everyone's combined efforts.