Nimbus

Notice: If you made it to this post, you've either clicked a very old link or you've done some exploring on my blog. This project was made when I was younger and more idealistic about writing, and doesn't reflect my current sensibilities; in particular, this fan theory has been debunked by later canon for these games, and I have numerous misgivings with how I tried to tell this story.

This post and project will remain up for archival purposes.

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Nimbus is a visual novel project of mine that I worked on from about Feburary to July 2016. It was created using Ren'Py. It's a work of fanfiction based on Sora, a shoot 'em up created by Orange_Juice. It was inspired by and follows a fan theory I read about on Sora's Steam forums. As such, Nimbus requires readers to have some cursory knowledge of the Sora universe, and it probably isn't meant for everyone; despite this, I tried to write it in such a way that little knowledge of the game is necessary for readers to enjoy it, though some parts proved difficult to write with this limitation in mind.

Nimbus concerns the story of a husband and wife, Yukito and Alte, and their daughter Suguri. In a world dominated by an endless war with no end in sight, the two have spent ten long years trying their best to raise their daughter the best they can. After a surprise bombing raid destroys their town, however, the two have to make tough decisions about how to raise Suguri in their new world. The journey not only take them to the military they've tried to avoid for ten years, but also to the question of how far they will go to protect her.

Nimbus can be downloaded right here. It's about 30,000 words long, and I estimate it'd take about 2 hours to read all the way through. The overall product is a bit rough; I don't have an artistic bone in my body, and as such, there are no sprites for the various characters. That said, the medium is still something I wanted to experiment with, and even without notable graphics, I still feel I wrote something worth reading.

As usual, constructive criticism is always welcome.

I don't think I'll create another visual novel again, owing to my inexperience with coding, as well as the surprising difficulty behind it, but I did enjoy working on this project and slowly learning the nuances of both visual novels and Python.

Some author notes come after the jump, primarily about where this idea started.

The Fallen Sky

 
The Fallen Sky is a novella I started working on in 2011 when I was a junior in high school and finished in 2013, when I was a sophomore in college. I did not release it until now, and while my writing has matured since then, I'm still rather satisfied with the final product. It's a work of science fiction surrounding genetic experiments, shaky alliances, and misguided loyalty.

The Fallen Sky is about two genetic experiments, Gladys and Raoul, and their successful escape from the facility that has housed them since the day they woke up from near-death. Whereas Gladys is willing to stop at nothing to distance herself from the facility, however, Raoul chooses to stop at nothing to get back inside, his goal consisting of an enigmatic girl named "Anna". Gladys reluctantly follows him back, and not only learns more about herself, but also the experiment she had almost never spoken to before, and who exactly "Anna" is.

The Fallen Sky can be downloaded as a PDF in the following formats:

 Complete
     Part 1 - Birth
     Part 2 - Variation
     Part 3 - Selection
     Part 4 - Prosperity
     Part 5 - Death

In total, The Fallen Sky runs about 30,000 words long. Any and all constructive criticism is welcome.

The above photograph is that of the General Animal Research Facility in Kodaira, Japan; I found the image online quite some time after finishing the work, and I felt it accurately represented how I viewed the facility Raoul and Gladys break out of.

Some author notes come after the jump.

Dunc's AlgoMusic

Update, September 2017: Dunc's AlgoMusic now has a home of its own, courtesy of Maramusine, and as a result, this post is now antiquated. It will stay up for posterity.

Dunc's AlgoMusic doesn't seem to have a devoted page of any sort on the Internet, and only ever seems to be discussed on about 4 different forums. So I decided to give this fun little program its own page on the Internet, in case some soul out there wants to find out more about it.

Dunc's AlgoMusic is a program that procedurely generates a music track from a title either given by the user or culled from a built-in seed. Different strings of text yield different results; while capitalisation does change the track, the order of text does not. Inputting "Studio 934", for instance, will have the same results when typed in as "Sutido 943", but "studio 934" will yield something else entirely. The "instruments" used by Dunc's AlgoMusic are WAVs of different musical notes and percussion included with the program, though these can potentially be replaced.  Music compiled with Dunc's AlgoMusic loops ad nauseum.

What this is all about

Hello there. My name is Ben Crow, and this is my small corner of the Internet, Studio 934.

I might be about ten years late to this blogging thing, but I still want a venue to post a variety of different projects and posts. Among the various oddities that could show up include game reviews, stories, general writings, and videos.

There will be an update schedule of approximately "whenever I feel like it".