What about the future of Milk ?

After the first episode of Milk, some of you may have asked themselves : what is she trying to say, does the story have sense, had she taken drugs (answer : no, it’s my natural state, thank you) ?

Answers won’t come straightaway, because it wouldn’t be as funny. As you have to eat some teenage slice of lifebefore the epic mecha mart in Muv-Luv, you have to begin on Earth before travelling to the stars (yes, the title has a meaning).

One of the new tracks from Milk’s OST, composed by Roganis

During episode 1, Tarô Caligula met the cows that the mysterious deity divinity placed on his way and he had to deal with their personalities until a UFO crashed in his garden.It wasn’t just a gag to end the episode with something abrupt but a major shift in the story. Because now, here come the new (real ?) main character : Khzi, the alien ! As I said in the game summary (rewritten since then, you can read the new version), she will help Tarô discovering who are the heirs of the past between the cows, thanks to a few clues. Well, if she agree to.

Khzi

Khzi

Khzi is an albino woman with long white hair and red eyes who works as a mercenary for the Interstellar Travellers’ Society. She claims she came on Earth because of the breakdown of her starship but with her mischievous and unpredictable personality, who knows… And why does she seems to know Tarô and the others so well ?

Starting from here, Milk will narrate Khzi’s adventures in space to complete a mysterious task the Society gave her. She have to travel on a planet made up of islands with Eastern characteristics but she won’t go alone ! To help her, there are three others mercenaries. Including Freyja.

Freyja

Freyja

Freyja is a saturnian, a woman with blue skin and dark hair. She has been a mercenary for quite a long time, so that she has multiple scars and lost one of her arms in a war (she has a bionic one now). Always serious, she tends to smoke when she’s nervous and can’t stand Khzi’s unpredictability at all. Will she be able to deal with it ?

And then, along the way, Khzi’s group comes across Aluwo, an Earthling that has been enslaved. He’s frail, almost like a girl, and constantly abused by his master, but meeting Khzi will change his fate…

Aluwo

Aluwo

So, that what will be the next episodes of Milk. No more good old harem ? Or maybe not. To understand the link between Khzi and Tarô, you’ll have to wait a while.

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Work in progress of the temple

Meanwhile, here are some pictures. The characters’s concept art are from  Laniessa, who’s very talented, colorization is from Koko-chan and the backgrounds are from Elairin, our new members. I hope you’ll like their work ;).

Ambre “Making Of”

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One of the first drafts for the main menu

Since the game has been released, two months ago, it’s a good time to talk about how this project was made before moving on to Milk Episode 2 (we’re working on it and it will be a hell of a ride, I’m telling you !). Spoilers ahead so don’t read my post if you didn’t finish Ambre.

Romantic comedy versus zombies

The rough idea came when my roommate and I were talking about books he has been reading lately. The one he described was a zombie one (I forgot the name) : in a chapter, the narrator interviews a little girl who survived a invasion and lost her parents. Her testimony is really touching but then, the author reveals that the one talking is a very old woman trapped in her past. She believes she’s still a child going through the tragedy over and over again. I found that twist really interesting and I wanted to use it in one of my stories sometime.

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Heroine’s sketchs

During that summer, I had to take the train to go to Paris for the Epitanime event and I saw the same film poster in every station I was. It was an ad for a new romantic comedy about a happy couple flickering when the woman suddenly lose her memory in an accident. Unable to remember the one she loved, he had to seduce her once again to regain their lost happiness. Wikipedia told me it wasn’t a good entertainment because it was too convenient (happy end, yada yada). No matter. The fact remains that I asked myself what would become of my partner if I woke up, one day, not knowing who he is, and how I would act. Since I really changed since I was young, the result is always surprising.

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First draft of the “swing” CG

Combining this two elements, I had a premise of what Ambre could be, but I was missing a lot of pieces. I know what kind of twist I will use and a rough idea of the plot, but I had to fill it and to find a reason for the heroine to go out of her mind. The story could have died inside my head if I hadn’t come across a surprising source of inspiration.

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First draft of the GUI chibi

Cinderella ate my daughter

I sometime watch That Guy With The Glasses’ podcasters, at random, and I stumbled upon a review of  Nicki Minaj’s Moment 4 Life. I really don’t know a thing about celebrities, I’m not interested in this subject, and the only thing I heard about her was my friend rambling about how her music is “shit”. But this song marked me because it’s a display of the modern Cinderella syndrome, a subject that fascinates me.

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Test placing sprites on the background

Every trope is here, in the lyrics as well in the imagery shown. The young woman is talking about her yearning of social ascension, like it’s something owned, about how she’s not lucky but a “chosen one”, about how her new position makes her some sort of queen/princess. And she repeats that she wants her fleeting dream to last forever. The music video is only emphasizing that obsession with an imagery : there is a fairy godmother who’s taking care of her, the “star” is giving a ball in order to show her money and her idleness (big house almost like a castle, lot of guest, beautiful furniture, the scene with the chocolates which is really revealing of what we think luxury is, reminiscent of Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette). But we also see a prince charming, another starlet just like her. The music video is even showing them getting married with fireworks and all, like the endless happy end in fairy tales.

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First draft of the “photo album” CG

Except that there is a lot of small details to ruin the perfect picture : the couple is totally isolated when celebrating, like if being stars, they had to create a vacuum around them ; they aren’t even faking love, their wedding sound so fake (they could pretend for the music video sake but no; it’s really only symbolic, more like a marriage of convenience/business), and more importantly, we’re never show what happened before the fairytale’s happy end. Don’t tell me Nicki Minaj didn’t had to work her fingers to the bone at one point, and I don’t think it was as “aesthetically pleasing” than the fairy tale part. Speaking of which, her body is totally ruined by surgery ! I saw what she looked like before on the Internet and wow, she was cute, she became some kind of aesthetical monster with a twisted look, it’s such a shame (she doesn’t look like a normal woman anymore, look at her eyes, her lips and her breasts).

From Cinderella to Ambre

When I heard this song, I was fascinated, not by the music or the singer, but by what the character embodied. By the fact that someone sacrified all she had in hope to become a new Cinderella with a dream-like life, as shallow and empty she can be. I couldn’t help but thinking that the song’s wish was both incredibly superficial and incredibly human. I really wanted to use Cinderella syndrome into the incomplete story I imagined so that it’ll become the reason Ambre had sunk into madness.

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First draft of the hospital background and alternative nightmare version

Ambre’s plot was very short, so I wanted to keep it to try the Nanoreno contest, but at that time Milk Episode 1 wasn’t even finished, so we had to rush through that before rushing through the Nanoreno almost in one go. There were a ton of difficulties : Roganis, our usual composer left for Japon, leaving us without music, so we had to find someone else really quickly (we had luck Kimino answered our call) ; besides my computer died at that time, leaving me unable to handle the team as easily as I wanted. Toward the end, both graphic artists were exhausted : Melow had fallen sick and Morsy didn’t know whether she would have the time to finish the CGs because of her internship. Hopefully the game didn’t need that much assets, but hurry prevented us from polishing a bit more (the last background, the dead leaves).

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Old street background and first draft of the new one

In the end, the team managed to complete Ambre just in time. Feedbacks were pretty positives too. I didn’t think I would use Cinderella again but I’m quite satisfied with the result, though I had difficulty in writing it at first. I liked to toy with readers’ expectations and I hope to do that again in the future…sorry for those who really believed the story was about a sweet and innocent little girl X’). Now that it’s done, stay lying in wait, there will be more news about Milk soon !

EDIT : the game’s soundtrack is now available here

Nanoreno project release : Ambre !

Menu principal ciel

After a month of hard work, here is our entry for the Nanoreno 2013 : Ambre. It was our first time doing that kind of thing and we were super excited to try, so we hope that you’ll like the result. Since we had a time restriction, the visual novel will not take more than an hour to read

The story is gonna be really awkward to read in the beginning but please, bear with me until the end, it’s not what you think, I swear *running away* Oh, well, I kinda like to mislead people, won’t be the last time o/

You will find a link for the win/linux/osx version on our download page.

gouter

Credits :

Writing / Project Leader : Helia

Art : Melow, Morsy,

Music : Kimino

Programming : Keul

Editing : Orfaen

English Translators : Kono, Neicha

Milk Episode 1 Release !

EP1After almost one year of production, the team and myself are glad to be able to show you the fruit of our labors. Here goes the first episode of Milk, available both in English and French on our download page.

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An in-game CG, drawn by Morsy

Episodic cutting

Since the entire game is really too big and too ambitious (500 000 words written in total), we decided to release it as several chapters/episodes until the common route is fully revealed, then the heroines’ routes in a certain order, if everything goes well. Each chapter/episode will contain the last, so you won’t have to download a dozen of files everytime. We’ll take advantage of this to improve the game gradually.

The amount of work demanded as well as the final size of the product are making us seriously consider the possibility of going commercial with Milk. Being yet unsure of our capabilities, we’re producing content while watching how the team is doing before making our mind.

Anyways, we’ll try to release a chapter/episode every six months starting from now. I hope you’ll enjoy this first episode and that you’ll wait for the next ^_^

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An in-game chib, still drawn by Morsy

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, we’ll be telling the release date of Episode 2 as soon as possible ;). And don’t hesitate to send us some fanarts, we’d be delighted and we’ll gladly post them !