Winter Blossoms

[Yato]

STORY​

Gerda and Kai have always lived peaceful lives next door to one another in their rural town of Middenstad, their rooms connected by a tiny rose garden loft their parents built. While reading a book together that once belonged to Gerda’s grandmother, something strange happens to Kai. He becomes increasingly despondent and frightened, eventually locking himself in his room for weeks at a time.
On the first snow fall of the season, Gerda finds out he has run away from home early in the morning. With the help of her friends, Hansel and Gretel, Gerda finds him; but a mysterious woman who calls herself the Snow Queen has taken something precious from Kai who is now hateful and callous. He wants it back.
His three friends vow to help him, hoping the journey can also shed some light on his shifting personality.

Based loosely on the Hans Christian Anderson tale, The Snow Queen, Dragonfly Studios is proud to announce Winter Blossoms, an RPG with charming characters, item-based gameplay, and our usual showcase of custom artwork!
 

CHARACTERS

Gerda Roosveld
Gerda is a sweet and innocent young girl with a large interest in Botany, taking flowers to make different healing salves and poisons. She and Kai have been childhood friends for far longer than she can remember, and she cares about him very deeply. She will always do her best for her friends.

Kai van der Vorst
Kai has always been fascinated by Chemistry and is especially skilled at mimicking monsters' attacks with different types of bombs. He’s a bit of a coward and is easily bullied into doing things when his cowardice is pointed out to him. Lately, he has been acting strange and showing great resentment towards those around him.

Hansel Baumhauer
One of two twins born to a woodcutter family, Hansel is quite skilled at craftsmanship and smithery. He is a very cautious boy and worries deeply for the safety of his friends, though sometimes they think he dotes too much. Quiet but strong, Hansel is easily the most mature of the group.

Gretel Baumhauer
Much like her twin Hansel, Gretel takes interest in smithery, working together with her brother in the shop. Loud, brash, and playful, she’s the polar opposite of Hansel. Gretel always seeks to push her friends, and herself, to be better and better and can often come across overbearing in her ways.

GAMEPLAY

SCREENSHOTS
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CREDITS​

Developers - Racheal and MakioKuta
Graphics - MakioKuta and DS / DS+ Resource Pack
Scripts - Racheal, Acezon, Fomar0153, Galv, Ice Dragon, Neon Black, Nicke, Shaz, Tsukihime, Vlue, and Yanfly
Music - diamond16

 

[Archeia]

This looks fantastic !

 

[NPC]

Love it, just by looking at it!

 

[senpoRiot]

wow! this is kind cool to play! looking forward for the demo! keep it up

 

[Liak]

It looks really good! Your cast seems pretty interesting as well.

 

[Ikari]

This game looks pretty amazing, I love how the characters are drawn.

And then there's Kai, with epic-looking glasses.

 

[T.Bit]

@Rachael: Is Makio working with you on the game? Y'all are such an awesome team.

 

[Milennin]

The art is very nice, but is it wrong if I thought Gretel was a guy before I read her description?

 

[Yato]

Thanks for all the support guys, both now and from the beginning of the month. Progress has been slow because Makio realised earlier this month that she had a convention to get some new prints done for at the beginning of August, but pretty soon we'll be back to full swing.


@Irili:

Developers - Racheal and MakioKuta


Graphics - MakioKuta and DS Resource Pack

: ) I don't think I could ever work on a game without Maki. I'm not sure that I know how.
@Milennin: Gretel gets that a lot, and we haven't fully figured out why. She DOES wear boy clothes and could care less about the feminine role in society, but she wasn't meant to look like a guy or anything like that.

 

[Volrath]

New Team Dragonfly project, hell yeah! (Do you guys still go by that name?)

 

[Subaru]

This game looks pretty neat. I'm just really hoping you can take on errands for people and craft stuff or beat monsters up for the NPC that gives the request. Those kinds of things really keep me hooked lol.

But still, whatever direction you take, I'm looking forward to it!

 

[Lunarea]

I'm keeping an eye on this. It sounds absolutely charming!

 

[djDarkX]

Holy crap!  That's really nice!  Love the art design as well, very cartoon-comic but with flair.  I'll be watching this closely.  Also love Gretel already.  She looks like she could whoop some ass! >=D

 

[Vexed]

This looks utterly adorable! I love the art style and Gretel sounds like an ace character. All the character designs are brilliant too [Kai's neckerchief~ So cute!], but I think Gretel is going to be my favourite. <3

Can't wait to hear more about this.

 

[Yato]

I'm quite happy with the amount of attention this is receiving fairly early on. I can't wait until we have something playable for you guys. <3


@Volrath: Yeah, we go by some variation of Dragonfly still. We did use "Demonfly" for Halloween Flop because of the nature of the game. This game was actually originally discussed before that one, but it needed more time for the ideas to brew before we did anything with it.


@Subaru: I don't think the townspeople are going to send a bunch of teenagers to beat monsters up for them, but they might request items of you. We are currently kind of flip flopping between whether there will be a proper quest system or if you'll just have people who want stuff. The game is certainly set up in a way that a quest system would work well, since everything occurs around a central town, but it might not be something that is necessary for the game.


@djDarkX: It really has been amazing to watch Maki's art style evolve from a strictly anime style to something a little more western-influenced.


And so much love for Gretel. <3 It's been fun to watch her evolve as a character, though that is true of most characters for us.


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The convention that I mentioned in the previous post has come and gone and this should mean that production should be back to a more acceptable pace. I must say I'll be glad to work on something that is not minor scripts/rough database.


To commemorate this, I posted a blog about one feature of the game. I'll try to do this semi-frequently. If you have a question about the game or a feature you'd like explained, just let me know. I'm pretty willing to ramble about any gameplay aspect of this project.

 

[Yato]

It's been a month. Sounds like a good time for another update.


So I've never been fully happy with the look of the battle screen. I played around a bit today, and I like it more, but I'm still not 100% sold. I'd love to get any critiques or suggestions. Some important information: party members will end up with approximately seven skills each by the end of the game. They can also equip up to nine items for use with skills or on their own. Originally you could flip between skills and items with Q and W, but I wasn't really a fan of that control scheme. Now you select your items by selecting "Use Item" at the bottom of the skill list. Names, descriptions, and icons are very placeholder.


Before

Spoiler

After

Spoiler

Since I'm asking for critiques on the battle menu, I'd thought I'd ask for them on the rest of the menu screens as well. There would have been a lot of images, so I made a short video instead.




Please excuse the video quality, but I think it shows off what I'd like opinions on.


[Edit] Oh, I forgot to mention. The eNames in the equipment menu are to show that the item is currently equipped to someone. It will most likely be replaced with an icon at a later date.

 

[djDarkX]

"Arrow: Shoot them" LOL!  Love it.

This looks pretty good!  Nice work on the menus and the facial expressions are top notch as well as the art design.  Love Gretels expression in battle.  She's obviously going to kick some ass.  Keep up the great work!

 

[Yato]

Maki always gets a kick out of my temporary placeholder text. I often start off serious and end up getting zany by the end. Menus are pretty tedious to code, but I enjoy making them for some reason. I did a large bulk of this one in a day or two. And Gretel really is a fun character. She, more than any other character right now, took on a life of her own.

 

[djDarkX]

I am legitimately excited about this project.  I hope you finish it because I will definitely pick this up and play it.  Seems like it'll be fun, yet serious.  Good luck!

 

[Yato]

There's quite a bit of work to be done, but there is no doubt in my mind we will finish this. Seeing as tomorrow is the first day of fall, I somehow don't think we'll have a demo out by the end of summer like I would have wanted, but that was a optimistic goal to begin with. I'd rather have a polished demo than something rushed anyway. We haven't even started to discus what we're going to do sound wise! That's always been a difficult area for me.


We've been getting some critiques on the battle screen over on rmn and I've made a few changes. I don't think it's final yet, but it's certainly getting there.

Placeholder names and description, blah blah. The "help" side of it needs some, well, help. It moves up and down with the skill you have selected presently.


This is the max skill list size. We have discussed adding a "wait" skill for everyone that would have some sort of character-specific effect just to even it out to 9 "skills" and 9 items.