KENT KENTSON, son of KENT

Age: 22
Level: 58
Class: Berserker
Occupation: None
Place of Birth: Winter Town
Special Skills: Dual Wield

Hobbies: Taming animals
Likes: Peace and cookies (with milk)
Dislikes: Fighting

Kent Kentson, son of Kent, was born in the north, a land where the only thing harsher and more frigid than the temperature are the clans who make it their home. Despite this, anyone who spends a short time with Kent reveals, with his jovial laughter, optimistic outlook, and steadfast desire for peace, that perhaps rumours are best not to be trusted.

Anyone who spends a long time with him, however, might start to take that reassessment back...

Up until attending Hero Academy, Kent had spent his entire life in his home town learning the ways of the world from his father, the chief. They did everything together - though getting specifics from either one of them on what 'everything' was reveals wildly different results - and the only person Kent might love more than his father, is his trusty companion Foxy.

Kent's efforts to become a Hero came from his wish for world peace, and he finally left the town of Winter to attend Heroes Academy. After that his father sold told him to assist a friend of the family, Erwin Gates, in defeating the Evil Overlord. Kent obliged, and has been travelling with the party ever since.

Occasionally he still accompanies his father on envoys of peace in the north, especially enjoying their trips to the Utopia Makers (A council apart from the governments of the world tasked with making fair decisions to unite opposing countries under a banner of peace.), though never seems to remember the details of those missions.

--

Progress
* CGs: DONE
* Bust Movements: DONE
* Emotions Set: DONE
* Final bust count: 236
* Sound: 100% bgm, 50(?)% se
* Dev mind state: my pillow calls to me

I wanted to get more of the sounds done today than I did, but I can be awake no longer.
psst, still looking for testers

By popular vote (and by that, I mean 2), here's the next character countdown!

GUNN ROSE

Age: 25
Level: 80
Class: Priest
Occupation: Priest
Place of Birth: Perk City
Special Skills: Group Healing | Concentration | Heal+

Hobbies: Drawing and Singing
Likes: Charity Work
Dislikes: Con-Artists

Even at a young age, Gunn put considerable effort towards helping his parents around their church. He started developing his healing skills early in his life and was always more than willing to cure any explorers who visited, any townsfolk who got hurt on the job, and especially any of the orphans who live in the church if they injured themselves while playing. His enthusiasm for healing others was maybe a bit too strong.

He had little interest in becoming an adventurer at first, and it wasn't until meeting Erwin, a young boy that spent considerable amount of time at the church, that he started to realize the true joys of traversing the land, fighting monsters, and taking treasure:

Your allies get hurt. They get hurt a lot.

When not shuffling along behind the party saving the world, Gunn can be found in the basement of his parent's church. In the dim candle light, he works hard at perfecting his other passions - drawing comics (under the alias Rose) and his unique blend of Religious Hymns and what other worlds may know as Rock.

Someday, he hopes his parents let him perform at a service.

---

Gabby will be next! If anyone has a character they'd like us to do after that, let us know!

Progress
* CGs: DONE
* Bust count now up to 226
* Bust Movements: DONE
* 80% Emotions Set
* 10% Sound
* Dev mind state: oh god that route

I am happy to report that all text is now edited and in game. Barring the last-minute edits that are sure to crop out despite the fact the script has been through three people and four edit rounds, I can share the final statistics:

The game contains 3,166 dialogue blocks, containing 56,648 words and 297,263
characters, for an average of 17.9 words and 94 characters per block.

Art progress continues at Maki's usual lightning pace and remaining CGs have been cut in half to a measly 9! The next 48 hours should see drastic leaps towards the finished game as they represent our last two work-free days before release. The goal is to have a build finished by the end of that time to have ready to start testing on Saturday.

Finally, tomorrow we will be starting a countdown towards release which will feature one character each day.
Let us know which characters you would like to see first.
(Sorry, tomorrow is already spoken for.)



Oh, and you might have noticed I tweaked the css a little bit yesterday. I'm still not very good with it and it's not all that exciting, but I think I'm happy with what I've managed to do with the page.

Hey all!

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who has expressed interest in this project so far! We were't sure how people were going to feel about the art style (it's pretty far removed from that fancy bishounen style a lot of Otome games use), so I'm quite pleased to have received such kind words about both the style and character designs.

I just wanted to make a blog post talking in more detail about this project than the summary does, since we've kept this pretty much entirely under wraps since we started development in January. (There were a couple of people who the project was mentioned to, but they were sworn to complete secrecy.)

April was a Fool (AwaF) is the direct response of Rach and I playing a certain Otome game together and me going on a tirade when the characters turned out to all be rude, disrespectful jerkwads to the player character. The best idea when something makes you that angry is to put that energy towards making something yourself! So that's what we've done.

Originally, AwaF was intended to be a joke game (thus the very April Fools related themes and April 1st release date), but as the characters and story started to take shape, it became clear to us both that I am completely incapable of writing joke games. Soon we were knee deep in 50k+ words, countless CGs, and the ever-so-exciting realization that this game wasn't going to take us only a month to make.

I'm happy to announce that despite that, we're still very much on course to have this game completed by April 1st of this year. :) Maybe it will have some rough backgrounds in place though! At least they are pretty nice sketches.

As we get closer to the release date, I'll be posting some more blogs dedicated to highlighting each character in our diverse little cast of fools. But for now, I'll clear up something that I answered in the comments, but was confusing from the summary.

Yes, there's a reason only five of the original Heroes approach May. April, the sixth Hero, is currently unavailable. May happens to look exactly like April, and that uncanny similarity is exactly what the other five Heroes need for something. The details why are in the game, or you can find them in specially marked boxes somewhere in the comments on the game page. ;) (aka, spoilers)

I'll leave you all with one last thing before I cease my 4am ramblings:

*No, you can still cannot date the Dragon in game.

Thanks for reading! And if you have any questions about the game, please don't hesitate to ask!