End of Summer Update

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening everyone. As the same has been for many of you, this year has been more difficult than most. That being said, we have not stopped working on Full Hearts, in fact, a large amount of work has been done on nearly every front of the game. For writing, the below list shows the progress on each girl’s route. For those with 85% completion, all that remains is the bad endings, H-scenes, and final review.

Chioko: 85%

Mikka: 30%

Masuyo: 85%

Kameko: 85%

Rina: 30%

Heiwako: 65%

Many more backgrounds have also been made; you can see two examples below as well as a handful of others on our website to help give you an idea of all the different places you’ll be visiting while attending St. Ibarazaki’s. We’ve also been making strong strides towards a complete soundtrack. Below are two tracks that one of our composers, Froad, has been working on. Alongside a little explanation for his process behind each piece.

Heart – I wrote this one about a year ago; finishing a piece for a music box reminded me that there was a game out there called Full Hearts that might still need a composer. I reached out to them and it turns out they did :^) I don’t know where we’ll put it to use, but I think it sounds kinda neat.

Reconstruction – I wrote this one as more of a catch-all background piece for when our boy Hayato is just chilling and thinking about life. It was chock-full of instruments before, which made it kind of distracting. It was suggested to me by a few other team members that I should strip it down to its bare components (piano and bells), which ended up being a pretty great idea! It’s still not entirely done yet, and I’m probably going to add another section to keep the song from being too repetitive, but this is what I’ve got for now.

Mikka Vibes – This is the one I’m most proud of. I tried to encapsulate Mikka’s quirkiness by starting with a funky little bassline in 5/4 (which is a strange time signature to write in), and building on it with a hyped up, jazzy drum pattern. Also dog barks. A minute in, it breaks into the next section where I attempted to evoke a sense of childish adventure / play by using the sounds that I (and I assume a lot of us) grew up with: Gameboy Advance soundfonts. I will definitely have to figure out a way to swap those out with something else though, since I don’t want to be the reason we get sued by Nintendo. For Pokémon Emerald trumpets nonetheless. When I get the chance, I’d like to mix it a little better to take some of the OOMPH out (you’re still gonna have to read over all of this noise). I’ve gotta wait a little bit on that though, since I can’t have speakers in my dorm, and that’s how you really fine-tune all of your tracks. Overall, I’m pretty enthusiastic about being the music guy. Let me know if you have any questions!

Lastly, we have been making good headway with the redesigns for some of our characters, with Kameko seeing another update in design. Main aspects are an update to her body type as well as what type of leg braces she wears (when she uses them) This leaves the designs of the main girls almost finalized. It may take some time for the sprites that we use in our game to reflect these changes, so please keep that in mind.

Thanks for sticking with us through this past year, it’s been tough for everyone, and we hope you are all staying healthy. We can’t wait to show you what’s in store for you down the road.