Bliss Stage
Love is Your Weapon News
Love is Your Weapon News
Love is Your Weapon News
We’re going to Fanime 2013! We’ll be hosting a panel on our games, including Bliss Stage: Love Is Our Weapon, on Saturday at 9:00 PM in Panel Room 1; and another on Space Combat and Realism in science fiction on Sunday at 1:00 PM in Panel Room 3. Not only will we have information on the new demo build at the Saturday panel, but we’ll be announcing other games as well.
Most of the Permotion Games staff will be present from Friday to Monday at the con, and we’ll also be holding demonstrations of tabletop Bliss Stage and other tabletop games in the Open Gaming room this year. Come by and talk with us!
by Bliss AuthorityI will be holding demonstrations of the original tabletop Bliss Stage by Ben Lehman of TAO Games at Games of Berkeley, a legendary Bay Area games and hobbies store at the corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, California. If there’s enough interest, I might even make an ongoing tabletop campaign out of it.
If you’re in the area and interested in the tabletop game that our Visual Novel project is based on, then I urge you to come by any time between 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM on Saturdays to see the game that got all of us so inspired!
by Bliss Authority
It’s been a long time since I last updated, for which I apologize. We had a bit of a rough spot November of last year, but now we’re back on track – scripting like mad, flowcharting everything out to the endgame, and polishing our art and animation assets until they shine.
In fact, I can say with confidence that we’re on track for a massively expanded and polished public demo release this Memorial Day weekend – in time for Fanime, only the biggest animation convention on the West Coast.
We’ll be making our way to the San Jose Convention center this Memorial Day weekend to show off the demo, sell things at the Artists Alley (with any luck), run tabletop games, and host panels. We’ll be reprising our panel on scripting and game design in Ren’Py from last year, as well as doing panels on Love Is Your Weapon and other games we have in the works and perhaps a panel or two on Plausible Spaceship and Mecha Combat (now why would Perpetual Motion be studying that? Curious).
I will try to keep this blog more reliably updated. For more off-the-cuff and personal comments, I recommend you visit my personal tumblr at blissauthority.tumblr.com – where I post art and other snippets.
by Bliss AuthorityName: Sara Hildegarde Smith
Rank: Lieutenant and Pilot, ANIMa Corps
Age: 14
DOB and Sign: February 13th / Aquarius
Sara Smith is the tabletop game’s iconic Innocent Sweetheart. I knew early on that she was most likely to be the romantic lead of the game – her statblock in Final Act was designed to set up a love triangle between her, Joshua Preston, and Keenan Caine. I also knew she needed to defy the expectations of her Archtype. ‘Innocent Sweetheart’ conjures images of a sweet and gentle person. Sara Smith can be sweet and gentle, but I wanted to make it very clear very early that she was also a Pilot, a warrior, and one that could teach Joshua a thing or two about combat at that.
We count ourselves very lucky to have the vocal talent of Juliet Cesario to bring her to life. That’s one of the reasons, in fact, that she will be another player character. That’s right – in the full game, you will be in the shoes of Sara Smith and Joshua Preston, alternating viewpoints between scenes and missions!
by Bliss AuthorityName: Meredith Odetta Baker
Rank: Captain and Anchor, ANIMa Corps
Age: 16
DOB and Sign: November 24th – Sagittarius
The Anchors in the tabletop game were unnamed; cyphers for the characters to fill in, using details from people they admired and crushed on when they were growing up. The rules even suggest that Anchors share a first name (and only a first name) with an unrequited crush. Meredith’s character is, in that tradition, a composite character based on women that I knew and admired for their intelligence and bravery when I was younger, most of them Jewish, Black or both.
by Bliss AuthorityName: Joshua Castellano Preston
Rank: Lieutenant, ANIMa Corps
Age: 15
DOB and Sign: August 15; Leo
The Joshua Preston of the tabletop game was a very vague impression of a characer – by design. He was a very simple person for a player to impress themselves on, and with simple, relatable hooks: father issues, an unresolved love triangle. He was also statted as an Eager Young Soldier, the gung-ho one who was in it to kill aliens.
(more…)
We’ve got a video of the combat system animation demo to show off. You can see the final version of the Gawain, Josh’s ANIMa, showing off some of its equipment as it attacks a drone. We’ll have another backer demo shortly and an updated public one sometime after that.
Plus a look at the Waypoint system toward the end.
Article source: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1041711353/bliss-stage-visual-novel/posts/306123
by AnarchCassiusTo everyone who downloaded the original demo release: Thank you, and thank you again for your patience and your bug and typo reports. Though there were a number of bugs that managed to get into the demo release we’re busy squashing them. A lot of it was specifically my, Bliss Authority/Tsunderelightning’s fault due to unfamiliarity with the file repository system, and I humbly beg your pardon.
We’re working on a new release, which we’ll run past the Kickstarter backers for testing before releasing publicly. It will feature a completely revamped GUI in and out of combat, a new title and menu screen, more and better art, more content (including two or three scenes we intended for the original release, but somehow didn’t make it; see also my apology above) and a couple of Dream Eggs. Er, Easter Pearls? Whatever.
Thank you again. Watch this space for future developments, or ask me questions on my Formspring and Tumblr.
by Bliss AuthorityFans of tabletop Bliss Stage, this VN, and TV Tropes may have noticed that the main article for the tabletop game at TV Tropes went missing for a few days.
When I found out the reason why, I was… well, I wan’t shocked, but I was disappointed. It seems that an overzealous moderator had misflagged many, many works – including Bliss Stage – as pandering to pedophiles in violation of TV Tropes.org’s administrative policy. Most of them were since restored, including the Bliss Stage page, with the apologies of the administrators – who I would like to sincerely thank for being reasonable about the whole thing, and for stating their concerns politely and rationally.
I was disappointed, but not shocked, that this baffling misperception of Bliss Stage keeps coming up over and over again in defiance of the facts. It just mystifies me that someone could misjudge Bliss Stage so thoroughly. In my less charitable moments, I ask: “I wish the next person to object to Bliss Stage would rail against it, just this one time, because it’s explicitly about child soldiers in realistically grim circumstances.”
I didn’t want to write this. But TVTropes.org is such an important cultural institution on the Internet that I felt I had to address the removal of it’s Trope page to the public, in the same way that I addressed it to the moderation staff of TVTropes. I convinced them that this is a game worthy of inclusion on their website; maybe I can convince others who are on the fence.
Let’s be clear: Bliss Stage, the tabletop game and the visual novel, is about the lives and relationships of teenage soldiers. It’s a coming of age story that necessarily addresses their budding romantic and, yes, sexual impulses. And I wrote the Visual Novel that way to tell a serious, emotionally realistic story – while at the same time doing my best to avoid pandering to pedophiles.
I have more thoughts about this whole thing, but they’re intensely personal and not appropriate for the Perpetual Motion website. If you’re really interested in hearing a personal rant on the issue, I’m putting it up on my personal Tumblr.
by Bliss AuthorityWe now have a public demo availible:
Mac: http://www.mediafire.com/?af6bqaa80uq84fw
Windows: http://www.mediafire.com/?0zbabnccbp5f6bk
Linux: http://www.mediafire.com/?s9u74xp6e7a70ja
We’ll be making updates and fixes to this over the next week or two before going back to focusing on Backer releases.
by AnarchCassius