Artemis One Year Anniversary!

- More crossovers?

I love crossovers in any medium where it makes sense. Though I've read on dev forums and seen some readers say we only do this for marketing and nothing more. And that's not true, at least speaking for me. I love seeing two or more characters from different IPs interact. More so when there are stakes involved and characters are working together to accomplish a goal using whatever talent they're known for. That's exciting stuff.

That said, special guests are canon in Artemis. And if I do another, I would love for them to be part of a sub-story I have planned. Should a dev be okay with the sub-story of course.

- Are you flying solo or is there a team behind Artemis?

I'm flying solo and for the foreseeable future. I've had pretty bad luck getting involved with groups. In high school, I was asked to be in a band and most flaked before the first practice. And even now things continue to be problematic where I was involved in a game jam and a majority lost interest before any conceptualization started. So all that said, I didn't want to take chances with Artemis and decided to fly solo.

- What were your inspirations in terms of visuals (This question mainly aims to discover other cool looking stuff I can look at :)

The biggest inspirations I draw from are the Metal Gear Solid (Metal Gear Survive, not you) series and Mass Effect series.

- How many chapters do you think this story will be in the end?

I've mapped out about 16 chapters with two additional which are epilogue chapters. There are two due to the number of Love Interests. So, five books. Four books for the main arc and a final book that will have the epilogue.

- Have you spent any time thinking about possible follow up projects? If so, are they more likely to be set in the same world as Artemis or something completely new?

I have thought of a few stories. I love creating stories that exist in other worlds I created. I haven't thought of anything though that would exist in Artemis' world. The next story I've been contemplating involves anthropomorphic species and humans (similar to Mass Effect, Star Wars, etc.) and would be a lot more sci-fi than Artemis (space travel). I also have a very old project I started to write back in high school. That setting would be more of a modern setting with fantasy elements, similar to  Final Fantasy XV. Where you have magic and creatures mixed into a modern-esque world.  I hope to make the switch to Blender by then. Which would open up a lot of options, I think.

- How did you learn to create VNs? (links to tutorials/resources would be appreciated)

As far code goes. I did a lot of it as a hobby back in high school. I'm still no expert by any means. A good place to start is the Ren'Py Discord server https://discord.gg/Phanap6uMh or the forum https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/ 

Visuals. I've always been interested in art and I spent most of my free time back in high school playing with 3D software. Trial and error with the tools provided. The same goes for CG animations. I took an animation course back in high school. While the tools have greatly evolved since then, the methodology still applies.

Also, YouTube offers a great source for tutorials. I would start learning how real world photography works and those techniques can apply directly to 3D software.

- How does your tech stack up to look like in terms of hard- and software?

When I started, I had a 2080 graphics card and 16GB of ram. Since then I upgraded to 128GB of ram (very helpful for the various Adobe software I use.) and a big thanks to you guys and Pandaman from Pandaman Games who sold me a new 3090 at MSRP late last year. 

Software, I use Photoshop and Premiere for post-work and video creations. Adobe Audition for sound design. Atom for coding. And DAZ Studio for the renders and animations. Blender and Motionbuilder for OBJ file editing and help with animations.

- which Artemis song is your favorite so far

Hard to say. I can say which one isn't and that's the one titled OMW. I think I took it out of the game before releasing CH1. And only because when I was testing the game, the INK house exploring had a few bugs to work out. So I constantly had to reload that and every time I was presented with "O-M-W. On my way to you." for several hours. Sure, I could have played on mute. But I endured, haha.

Actually, I really enjoy the main menu songs the most.

- what would you do, if you didn't make video games?

I still work my day job at the moment. I work in the IT field. I was at a crossroads 17 years ago; stay in my home city and get a degree in technology. Or move to San Francisco California to pursue a degree in animation. Online courses weren't as available as they are now and moving to San Francisco would have been very tough for me financially. So, I went in the other direction. However, I'm finally deciding to leave my profession behind to pursue working on Visual Novels full-time, once I reach 1,000 patrons. Sure, I'd be taking a significant pay cut. But creating is where my passion is and working on Artemis doesn't feel like work at all, even with the long hours it demands.

- Where does Kindras place come from? It seems too small to have been built by her parents as a flat and is not cut out to house a family with a young child. But it's directly connected to their underground bunker... Was it originally used for some other purpose? Then who designed and build the remodel? Does Kindra have a secret group of designers/builders hidden somewhere? Is Kindra secretly the leader of some secret construction worker organization?

Funny you bring this up. This is answered in CH4! :)

Huge Thank You to everyone for helping Artemis grow from where it began just a year ago. Lots of long hours, frustrating evenings of debugging, re-renders, database rebuilding, and so on. But it's a helluva lot of fun and I ain't complaining at all!

Cheers everyone! 

- digi.B

Bonus trivia: Kindra is a character who is loosely based on a character for a story I wrote 10 years ago. Her name is spelled K-I-N and not the traditional K-E-N because she and her brother were to have this kindred spirit thing. I dropped that whole idea but kept the name the same for the old story.