Hello there, everyone! This is Jasmine Cooper, the composer for Studio Namapaa’s Ciel Fledge. I’m here to talk a little bit about Ciel’s soundtrack! Having worked with Studio Namaapa before, I already knew that their vision for the music would be something unorthodox and out of my element. Cue: Excitement!

Ciel Reference Tracks

A lot of references have been pulled from late 70s/early 80s anime, 70s disco, and future funk, just to name a few influences! Here are some examples:

1. Dog Fighter (Superfortress Macross)
2. Galactic Funk (Casiopeia)
3. Dance in the Memories (Kimagure Orange Road)
4. Always You (Votoms)

(And a reference playlist for those interested in this style of music: Ciel Reference Playlist)

Soundtrack Ideas

With this being a daughter raising sim, ideas have centered around different styles associating with your daughter’s age range. The first link, more posh and refined, would be for adulthood, Casiopeia, a more renegade style, for the teen years, and boppy, synth pop for your daughter’s younger years! As she grows, so does the music.

Preparation

My time has been spent listening (as intently as possible), researching chordal structures, recreating pieces, and trying to get an idea of the sounds I want. Synthesizer timbres, looking for live musicians to play, experimenting with guitar timbres, bass playing techniques, hall sizes and re-creating mixing styles – A whole slew of exciting nonsense that I hope translate over well in the final product! So far, my first venture has been trying to create a theme for the character creation page.

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Whenever I write music, I try to roleplay as best as I can. I attempt to immerse myself in the world of the game, whether that be ask for descriptions of the times, read notes, study artwork, as well as listen to references. If I want to evoke a sense of an environment (let’s say, rain), I’ll find a soundsource, put it on, and try to compose with that environmental sound playing in the background. I attempted to put those practices to use as I worked on music for the character creation screen.

The Making of the Character Creation Screen

(Disclaimer, all excerpts are W.I.Ps and do not reflect the final version)

For the character creation screen, I wanted to drive home some of the underlying currents of the story behind Ciel that the player isn’t cognitive of, but also give the player a sense of mystery. They (or you!) are entering a world they know little about, albeit having been a component of that world for many years. The goal: Give the player a sense of the setting while also exuding a heavy influence from the musical styles linked above. I had two initial ideas for the character creation screen..

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1. Character Creation #1 

(Inspired by the ending [1:31] of the first link posted above. GORGEOUS, RIGHT?!)

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2. Character Creation #2 

.. and they were both flops. Although Alfi liked #2, Riku, Walt, and I felt that the theme was too cheery, and we unanimously agreed that #1 was too serious.

I tried for a third attempt, taking into consideration the period, time, atmosphere, and a small idea sparked by this piece (primarily from the section at 4:47): Beautiful Dreamer

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3. Character Creation #3 

This one was much closer to the emotions I wanted, although a couple agreed that it was still a bit too cheery. Knowing that, I pushed out another idea, or a section iteration, to see what the guys thought. Riku gave me a fantastic mood reference with a Pokemon track: Welcome to the World of Pokemon

More netrual. K, gotcha.

A bit more tinkering and I came out with this:

4. Character Creation 3 version 2 

And ended up having a rather robust ending! After a couple more intense listenings, I felt that any resize in tension or emotion should be saved for a scene fitting such a need, i.e., not the character creation screen. The consistency of the snipper clips soundtrack drove that home for me: Snipperclips Main Theme
I felt that I pivoted and built a *bit* too much (at least for this particular version), so I opted on trying ONE MORE tangenital idea and…

5. Character Creation 3 version 3 

I ended up with what will now be the official “sketch” of the Character Creation theme (minus a few minor, but major sound edits and some mixing)
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Well, I apologize for the unapologetically lengthy post, but I hope seeing the ins and outs of one composer’s techniques enlightens, or even comes off as mildly interesting, to some of you!
Thanks for reading/listening, and look out for the next Ciel Fledge Post!

Last but not least, don’t forget to follow me on twitter and check out some of my other work here!

Hi, it’s num. Back again with Ciel Fledge bimonthly devlog with me.

Building shop menu to buy/sell items and equipments

For the last two weeks we are working to build shop menu where you can buy/sell items and equipments. It’s nothing fancy but we are trying to make it as simple and intuitive as possible. Basically before you go “shopping” you pretty much have to schedule your daughter to do it in advance from the schedule menu (which is pretty much the most important menu of the game where your decision is made there).

After that, in the automated turn, you will be presented with another interface where you can select which shop your daughter will visit and what item do you want her to buy. Pretty simple really. Aside from the simple usual shopping system, we decided to add “haggle” mechanics. Taking advantage of your daughter stats that you can train such as ‘Charm, Charisma, and Math’ she can haggle the price of any items/equipments and make it cheaper for her.

Another aspect from the shop menu we want to implement is item/equipment stocks. Each shop will have limited stocks of everything depending on their rarity and value, some items are abundant while the others might be scarce. At the moment this is still work in progress, but I think you got the general idea of this supply/demand system.

Here’s the animated gifs of shopping in action!:

Before we move to another topic, you can also check and read the details of this shopping in action on the post at our thread in tigsforum here! Do visit and say hi to us there!

Redoing and polishing the interface (yet) again

One of the biggest gripe of this game for me is to come up with the interface that is simple enough that even a 5-years old can understand instantly and intuitively without any guide or dragging tutorial. Considering the actual complexity of the game (despite of its cutesy appearance) and the need of so many interface and visual cues it’s proven to be really hard to do.

The schedule menu interface is the biggest offender of the “too complex interface” so far. Currently it looks like this:

In this menu you need to select player activity, weekly meal plan, and 7 days of your daughter activity. All lined up at the list on the right side, while the wide, window selection at the left is the available choice corresponding to what you are currently selecting and set up in the list at the right side. The colorful button at the top of the left side is the sort/filter button, to sort the selection based on its categories. Pretty confusing right? Especially considering the overload of information with so many descriptions and buttons at once on screen. This is the second iteration of the schedule menu revamp, it used to looks like this before:

Even more confusing right?

Anyhow this will be a tough homework for me. Hopefully I can come up with better design that is nice to look at and easily understandable at a glance.

Next is the slight change on the interface such as icons, buttons, and windows. At the beginning of the development, I actually fell for the Flat UI meme only to realize it looks horrible with the artstyle we are going with, and is too unsophisticated. So I decide to change it slightly and give it more character and depth with emboss and outline effects:

Now at least the interface is not as bland as the top flat UI anymore. Although the interface style might change again since these are all still quite early- actually middle way in development.

Well, I think that is all from me. Hopefully this devlog could inspire you, see you on our next Ciel devlog!

If you are craving more for Ciel Fledge do visit our side tumblr. Hey we also had Instagram page too if you are into that!