Coppélive releases today! In this devlog I'll share some possibly interesting stuff about the project and it's development.

What is Coppélive?

Coppélive is a project I started and finished during the month of March 2021 for submission to the visual novel game jam NaNoRenO2021. I didn't have much time to prepare so I went in with only a vague idea in my head about a modern retelling of Coppélia. The main twist is the reimagining of Coppélia's titular doll as a VTuber.

Haha, believe it or not I don't actually follow any VTubers and aren't that familiar with VTuber culture. But I do follow some Japanese let's players and Yukkuri voice-over playthroughs (ゆっくり実況) on YouTube and Niconico.

Regarding Coppélia

Coppélive isn't a faithful retelling of Coppélia for various reasons. Besides the modern setting, the lack of ballet, and the addition of truckloads of sex, much of the plot structure has been changed. However, I believe the spirit of the story—Swanilda winning back her love—has been faithfully conveyed!

Why did I pick Coppélia as the basis for this project? Actually, I have no idea. 🤔 I might have listened to Coppelion's OP or thought about Princess Tutu around the time I started brainstorming.

Feature Development

The skin color customization feature was something I wanted to implement in a project for a long time. A past idea I want to revisit sometime is a desert island survival + love sim where the heroine's skin tans over time.

In Coppélive I implemented skin color customization using layered images. Each image featuring the character is made up of at least two layers, one with the skin at its lightest, and another with the skin at its darkest. An alpha transform is applied to the overlapping layer with its value controlled by the player via a slider. To ensure the transform continuously updates, it's coded as a transform function.

Each layer has a ConditionSwitch determining whether to show a censored version because I considered publishing Coppélive on DLsite, and also because I wanted to release a censored version on pixivFANBOX for my art account's FANBOX supporters.

I anticipate developing censored versions for all my projects eventually, so I decided to code that now.

As you may expect, the addition of the censorship + skin color variables means extra permutations to prepare, check, and bug test. This took up a lot of my dev time. 😞

Missing Features

Those who've played my past projects may notice certain features missing: the codex and gallery! In the case of the codex, I decided to not implement it this time because Coppélive doesn't really need a codex—the story takes place in a modern setting so nothing about it needs to be explained or expanded upon.

Also note the lack of a CG Gallery. It's gone because I coded minor animations for many of the event CGs. I'll try to code an animation gallery in future projects!

Special Thanks

Thank you for checking this project out!

Thank you if you have or decide to download/purchase/play Coppélive!

Thank you to everyone who supported me on my art account's pixivFANBOX and Gumroad while I worked on this project!

Thank you for reading!

Here's a Twitter Moment with my daily progress reports that I tweeted during the development of Coppélive!

https://twitter.com/i/events/1368060498961457152

Feel free to post bugs you encounter in the comments below or in the comments section of the main page. Until next time, stay cool!