It Won’t Be Long Now: June’s Progress Report!

We’re getting down to the very last assets of our game everyone! Here’s a list of all we’ve completed and what we have left before you can play The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot!

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Everything Completed in the Month of June:

1. Recorded and Coded in Lines for our LAST characters:
   1. Julie
   2. Sylvia
   3. Nancy
   4. Alexandra
   5. Edgard
2. Touched up ALL  40+ Backgrounds!!!

 

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(This is barely half of them!)

     3. Began work on Character Sprites!

Goals Left to Complete:

1. Character Sprites for:
   1. The Banshee
   2. Police Girl 1, 2, and 3
   3. Young Delilah
   4. Young Lem
   5. Cloe
   6. Justin
   7. Paul
   8. Edgard Bejerot and Alexandra Bejerot
   9. Mr. Seagraves
   10. Ferdinand
   11. Female Nurse 1, 2, and 3
   12. Male Doctor
   13. 4 Secret Characters
   14. Tad
   15. Julie
2. Polaroids
3. Customized Menu
4. Credit Scenes

 

I predict that we’ll only need a couple months until our game is complete! We’ve worked so hard and come SOOO far. I’ve never had a single class in coding, but in the end Youtube, Google, and my stubbornness to create something I’m proud of allowed me to accomplish what we’re doing today! I know that the story I wrote may not be perfect, but it comes from a very personal place in my heart, and I’m excited a story I wrote 2 whole years ago will finally get to be told! I obviously couldn’t begin to create the game without Marty. She has been a strong editor for the story as well as an amazing designer and artist. I’ll save a big accomplishment speech for the big release date, but for now, I’d just like to say thank you for supporting RockTheClock and our strides to complete our very first game, The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot!

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May’s Progress Report!

Hi everyone! As you know, we’ve been doing mostly video updates, so I’ve complied all our video updates for the month here. I’ve also added a list of things completed in the month of May and our goals for June!

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May 9th – Week 1

 

May 16th – Week 2

 

May 23rd – Week 3

 

Everything Completed in the Month of May:

1. Last Background Art Base
2. Lem’s Lines (Completely coded in)
3. Grace’s Lines (Completely coded in)
4. Lem and Grace Noises
5. Gabe’s Lines (Completely coded in)
6. Mr. Seagraves Lines (Completely coded in)

Goals For June:

1. Record Lines for Julie, Slyvia, Nancy, Alexandra, and Edgard
2. Code in Julie, Slyvia, Nancy, Alexandra, and Edgard’s Lines
3. Touch up all Backgrounds
4. Create Customized Menu
5. Begin Working on Character Sprites

 

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Thank you for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot! If you aren’t already following us on Twitter or Facebook go ahead and click all those links so you don’t miss any updates! And if you haven’t played our game already, our fully voice acted and free demo is right here!

Postponed Release Date

Last week, we had a play test of our full game!

The Banshee’s Case

The players solved the cases of The Banshee and The Adventure’s of Moosa Lisa! However, they were only able to receive two out of the four endings. I am so ecstatic that not only were the mechanics of The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot fun and exciting, but the story was as well!

We received so much great feedback that Marty and I have decided we need more time to implement all the comments and criticisms to make an even better game. Our new release date will be this Summer 2018! Thank you for being patient with us!

I also know that I haven’t been as active on WordPress, Twitter, and Facebook. I’m super sorry for that!!! This is largely due to the amount of school work I’ve been receiving from my teachers. I will be posting as often as possible, but our regular Wednesday posts will not be occurring until the school year ends. Thank you for understanding and thank you thank you thank you for your continued support!

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If you aren’t already following us on Twitter or Facebook go ahead and click all those links so you don’t miss any updates! Our fully voice acted and free demo is right here!

I Got The Religion!

As my accounting professor says, when you understand cyber security and implement the controls necessary to protect yourself from hackers and have a disaster recovery plan, you “have the religion.” A lot of people ignore the importance of cyber security and they won’t implement controls until they get hacked themselves.

Backup

Over these past few weeks, I’ve backed up all of the game files data on to an encrypted flash drive which are super cheap by the way. Office Max had them 60% off a few weeks ago. This is really important, but for the average person backing up data onto the cloud is just fine. I use to back up everything on to the cloud before I got the flash drive, but I realized the amount of time it would take to individually drag all the art and voice assets back into my game folders would be a hassle. With the flash drive, everything is already in its rightful place and it only takes about 4 to 5 minutes to update the file on the flash drive and download it on to my computer if I ever have to.

Passwords

So my accounting professor also scared us with how easy it is to hack into someone’s web browser and get their password. If you store your password on Google Chrome, which admittedly I use to do, your password is not safe at all. But if you use a free password manager app (LastPass is a very popular one) that basically does the same thing Google Chrome’s browser does, you’re fine. The difference is that password manager encrypts all your passwords and they’re less easy to get to.

Of course, because it is only one password that is the key to all your other passwords. If you use Google Authenticator than even if someone gets that password you’ll be fine. If you ever signed in to Facebook or Twitter and had a text message sent to your phone and had to put in a second code, that’s basically what Google Authenticator does. Plus, even if a hacker duplicates your phone, they still can’t get to your personal Google Authenticator because it’s an app. Where as the text message they could.

ANYWAY

I’m happy that my accounting professor is teaching us this class because I can rest assured that our game files are safe just in case. We’re not super popular though so I doubt any hacker would care. But I wanted to use this week’s blog post to share the information I know because cyber security is really easy to do and FREE. So please protect your data! 🙂 Next week, I have a big midterm coming up, so there may not be a blog post, but I’ll try my best to write up the progress I’ve made for this month.

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As always, thank you for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot!

If you aren’t already following us on Twitter or Facebook go ahead and click all those links so you don’t miss any updates! Our fully voice acted and free demo is right here! Go have fun! Love you guys!

Why So Many Backgrounds?

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that I sat down in one session and finished all of Delilah’s lines! I’m currently feeling a bit burnt out as far as coding in lines goes so, in between Lem’s lines, I’m creating backgrounds! OMG more backgrounds?! I hear you.

Current Progress On A Background I’m Working On

In your average visual novel, backgrounds are usually limited to 4 or 5 settings. It’s expensive to hire a  background artist and even Triple-A games struggle to create multiple environments sometimes. I’m looking at you Dragon Age 2. Anyway, it’s been my experience as a gamer that when a game lacks multiple environments, I feel trapped. Video games are supposed to be explore worlds or ideas that we can’t in reality. And I refuse to create that feeling in The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot.

In The Cold Case, I (Caty) am creating all the backgrounds and then Marty goes in and puts some extra artist magic to really make them pop. I understand that creating backgrounds takes a long time. If I have enough time to create a background in a day, it’ll take me at least 8 hours to complete one. I understand smaller budget games not having as many backgrounds, and I’m definitely not hating on them. I get it. Backgrounds take a ridiculous amount of time to create. And some of my backgrounds (like the one below) are only going to show up for a barely a second in our game!

WIP Background (Time to Create: 1 Week; Time in Game: Barely A Second or Two)

But as I’ve mentioned in other blog posts before, I want this game to be something I’m proud to call mine.

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Thanks for listening to my little rant today, and thank you for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot!

If you aren’t already following us on Twitter or Facebook go ahead and click all those links so you don’t miss any updates! Our fully voice acted and free demo is coming soon, but if you’re impatient and want to play it without the voices, you can download it here!

January Progress Report!

Sorry for the late post everyone! Yesterday, I had a lot of school work, and things just piled up to the point of me procrastinating on all of it… But the important thing is, I’m here now!

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So what did Marty and I finished this month?

Well, as you may already know, the beginning of January we coded in almost all the main characters sprites! George, Delilah, and Lem are completely finished. Grace is finished up to the point of her 3rd costume change. (We still have one more to go for the very end of the game). And Bernard has his date outfit, but we still need his police uniform.

Voice acting wise, all the voices for the demo (except Herbert) are completely recorded and coded in! We should have the free voice acting demo update ready in about two weeks!

We have the majority of all the lines recorded almost all our characters except a few small side characters and our voice actor for Bernard is working on recording lines as we speak! This February, I will be working on trying to code in all the lines and get 5 characters voices in. And Marty will continue working on the remaining character sprites!

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Thank you so much for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot! Follow us on Facebook or Twitter so you don’t miss any updates! And if you’re eager to play our game without voice acting, it’s right here!

Thank You For A Successful Kickstarter!

Hi everyone!

As you may know, we completed our kickstarter campaign with 104% of our goal completed! Thank you to everyone who donated!

That being said, we understand that not all of you were able to support us financially, and that’s ok! We want to reward our entire fanbase by releasing our free demo fully voiced! I predict that this will be out around the middle of February, so look forward to it!

Voices I’ve added so far are the bus driver’s, robber’s, police, minimum wage worker, Grace, Lem, Sanjay and Maxine, and I’m currently coding in George’s lines!

The lines left over to record are only Delilah’s and Herbert’s!

Sorry the post for today is pretty short. I have a project and/or test in all of my 6 classes, so I’ve been very busy! :’D

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As always, thank you so much for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot! Follow us on Facebook or Twitter so you don’t miss any updates! And if you’re eager to play our game without voice acting, it’s right here!

Only A Few Days Before Kickstarter Ends!

Currently, while writing this, we’re only $68 dollars away from our goal! We have 3 days left, and I’m so excited to meet our goal! Thank you everyone for getting us this far. You can still donate here: Kickstarter and get rewards for your donations!

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We’ve accomplished a lot this week, and you can probably tell I’m crazy busy with only school and the game because I haven’t been as active on, you guessed it, Twitter. Haha.

But! I’m really proud to announce that by tomorrow all Lem’s lines will be recorded!

Grace’s lines are already finished. Friday, we’re recording George’s lines, and this Saturday, we’re recording Bernard’s lines. Next, weekend, we’ll have Delilah’s lines in, and that’s all the main characters lines!!! 😀

After that, we only have about 7 small characters left to record. Some of which only have 3 lines. Recording in the lines, of course, is way faster than coding in the lines into the game.

So far I’d estimate that there’s only around 10% of the lines actually in the game as we speak.

(Don’t worry, this is just a placeholder background.)

As far as art assets go, Marty has finished Gabe, and I’ve coded him completely into the game! She’s now started on drawing Bernard! Bernard has two outfits, his regular police uniform, and his date outfit! Ooo lalala ladies~ Promise you’ll want to stick around to see that! I know I’m excited for what Marty will design.

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And as always, thank you for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot! Follow us on Twitter or Facebook so you never miss an update!

What’s that? You haven’t played our free demo yet? Download it here!

Game Plan!

Heheh… get it? Game plan? Cause we’re making a game, but it’s also a plan… Oh no… I’m Delilah. ANYWAY… the school year is starting again, and it’s time for Marty and I to go back to college! So how do we plan to get good grades and still give some TLC to our game The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot? By creating a flexible schedule that will allow us to have rest days, omg I have to study for this exams days, and you know what? I just want to be pantsless in my dorm room and watch Netflix right now, ok?

You’re not in the game Bernard! That’s what’s wrong!

January

The plan for January is to try and finish all remaining character sprites (This is a very optimistic goal seeing as how we have eleven characters left. Not including the ones I’m forgetting cause I always forget one or two haha.

• Bernard
• Gabe
• Grace(In her fourth outfit)
• The Banshee
• Cloe
• Justin
• Paul
• Police Girls (3)
• Doctor
• Nurses (4)
• Mystery Character 😉

Realistically, I think all these characters will be done in the beginning or middle of February. While Marty draws these sprites, I will code in all the voices that we recorded over our winter break, as well as record lines with the characters we have already cast and those we have yet to cast.

 

Reference Picture

Background That Caty Does

Touch Ups That Marty Does

February

Backgrounds. Backgrounds. And more backgrounds. I still have 5 backgrounds to finish on my end. Each background takes about a day to finish, and then, I give them to Marty and she makes them look shiny and well polished. I expect that this will only take a week or two depending on how much school work we have to balance.

Towards the end of February, I hope that all voice acting is either done and close to done, and I’ll be working my booty off coding in all the remaining assets. By this time, I hope that Marty will be finished or close to finished with all Polaroids. If you played our demo, Polaroids are the pictures that showed up when you solved the case correctly.

To comma, or not to comma… That is the question.

March

Marty’s spring break is in March! When she comes back into town, we plan to ask the same University to play test the full game again! The first two weeks of March will be all about play testing, fixing bugs, fixing grammar, and tying up all loose ends!

By the end of March the game should be finished, and we’ll be letting the press play our game before our official release date on April 21st!

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Thank you so much for supporting The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot! As always, our free demo is here and please support us on Kickstarter!

The Cold Case’s Post Demo Plans!

Now that we’ve released our free demo on Itch.io, it’s back to work! So what are our future plans?

1. Coding!

Now that I have a ton of character sprites to work with, I’ve been coding in our characters sprites from the time that the demo ends to the ending. Still haven’t reached the ending yet, but I’m currently coding in the restaurant case sprites and the restaurant case if the halfway point of our game, so I should be done in a few days.

2. More Character Sprites!

However, even when I do reach the end, there are still some character sprites that Marty’s working on while I’m coding. These sprites are either extra characters, Bernard, or extra expressions that character’s like Grace or Lem don’t have yet.

3. Promotion

Marketing is harrdddd. A few hours a day, I take the time to send personalized emails to media sites big or small, and yes it hurts not getting responses back but! I have received a few emails back, so get ready for more fun reviews and let’s plays of our demo! 🙂 And you guys already know I’m on Twitter 24/7. Except when I’m sleeping… or do I sleep?!

I think it’s working though! In only a week we’ve gotten 140+ downloads and our Kickstarter is 58% funded!

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Anyway, work over here is going pretty well! We have good days and bad days, but your support keeps us alive and kicking! Thank you so much for your kind words as we develop The Cold Case of Noella Bejerot!

Don’t be shy and follow us on Twitter or Facebook! And our free demo is available here if you missed it!