itch.io

Hi! No discord here, I'm afraid. Responding to the 2 or so comments this page gets in a given month is a comfortable amount of interaction for me. And, considering any updates I push tend to be more substantial and with longer wait times between releases compared to a typical monetised project, I see even less of a reason to jump into that arena.

Perfect Pitch is a low stakes hobby for me, and I like it that way.

Oh jeez, I didn't make this obvious at all in my reply, but I will never put puzzles in this game...

Hey there, super cool to hear from someone developing a project of their own! That doesn't happen very often around here. You'll have to keep me updated on how that goes.

As far as Lessons in Love and its impact on the game, yeah, it's definitely there in the architecture of a week-based class schedule. Though I will say that I haven't actually played any visual novel whatsoever since 2022. Early covid days gave me way too much time at home, and that's when I found and played through what existed of LiL circa winter 2020. To be honest I don't know if I had ever heard of visual novels before that point. So, early in the comments section of Perfect Pitch, I certainly do make reference to Selebus and appreciate the initial spark which got me thinking about what kind of project I'd be interested in building.

These days, as I mentioned, I don't have much of an interest in actually playing through other's games myself. Initially this was an intentional choice so as not to simply mimic what others were up to. Now, I feel like I've gotten to the point where I can trust myself to brainstorm a scene and along the way figure out how to realize it in koikatsu, often with the help of peripheral multimedia tools and patience. I'd stop far short of recommending the act of cloistering yourself away from AVNs as a method to discover creativity as a dev, though. That's just the extent to which I prefer to be involved and spend my free time.

And no, I haven't ever been a professor. Funny enough though, some faculty in this game and their actions/behaviors are based on my own first hand or second hand encounters with real music faculty from different places around the country.

Hi there! Thanks for dropping by and for the vote of confidence.

I'm always appreciative of those who decide to dip their toe into a game with such a prominent focus on classical instrumental music when they have no previous connection to the medium. It's a good reminder for myself to approach new hobbies and interests with the same curiosity and open mindedness. I admire that. 

As for the project, some good news— Perfect Pitch will see another update in this calendar year.

Wow, I really admire your careful attention to detail in some of the smaller moments in this game, especially considering the large gap in time between your comments and the game's last update.

Broadly speaking, I try not to be terribly on the nose about my own feelings and experiences as an author to the story. For instance, Willow gets teased a lot in this game for the foods she consumes and preoccupations with her carbon footprint, but my own eating habits and grocery store principles are probably most closely aligned with hers. I like (and prefer) to write not with a particular end goal in mind so much as an open-ended reporting on how the characters might interact in my mind. That makes for a writing experience that is a lot more fun, instead of worrying about how I'm going to connect loose plot threads written years ago.

Anyhow, this is simply to say that I won't and can't really confirm or deny anyone's hypotheses regarding what inspired the choice to write this or that. I'd argue that the important thing is just you managing to derive some sort of meaning and substance from this project. I've likely made the assertion before somewhere in these comments, but once I click that publish button and folks like you download the game, it's no longer "mine" in a sense. You imprint your own experiences and biases into the game, creating a mental framework for Perfect Pitch that is entirely your own and distinct from the one I carry. That's something to celebrate, I'd say.

Hey friend, thanks for the kind words and for checking in! I've been enjoying some time away from developing at the end of last year. Writing and building a little, each day but mostly exploring other hobbies and interests. That has been great for me. 

Now I'm getting back into the rhythm of development at a healthier pace than I managed during the band camp release. v0.9 is looking good so far, making headway on a multi-event of maybe an hour's worth of playtime. Beyond that next release is a smattering of disparate events and ideas which are going to take a lot of time figuring out how they tie together. So far it has been interesting and fun to approach writing from this new direction— we'll see where it goes!

Hey friend! I appreciate hearing that this project inspired you to explore a musical side of yourself that you haven't connected with in some time. Music is really interesting in the way that we can recall with perfect clarity a tune we heard a decade ago, while at the same time being hardly able to remember what we had for dinner last night. Important to remember that the musical and creative sides of ourselves are always there, even if we haven't had a chance to consciously and intentionally interact with those parts of ourselves for some time.

As for the troubleshooting question, I'm thinking this might be something that I patched at some point down the road but never made a formal announcement for. Based on the description you provide (assuming it's a copy paste) what's missing is as follows in bold and underlined:

"images/Buttons/config/temp/galalexisleepoverh.webp"

In my working file, that is located at line 12498 of the file called screens.rpy. I don't know what would happen if you updated that line of code in a live, unpackaged version of the game, but conceivably that would solve the issue. Of course that could also mess it all up irreparably. I'm not knowledgeable enough about coding to do much besides follow basic instructions on ren'py forums!

Hope that helps, and if not, at least by the time v0.9 is released the error should disappear.

Oops. Found the error two weeks ago in the v0.8 code, made the update, but forgot to acknowledge it here.

Thanks for pointing this out. Just a simple mistake on my part of omitting a jump statement at the end of an event. Looks like I already had it corrected in my working file of the game but it wasn't fixed in the v0.8 release. This error will be remedied in the next update.

And thanks too for the positive feedback on the project! I'm glad to hear that you found meaning in the music and the story.

I'm not seeing any dead giveaways in the code for this error, but that could be because I am looking in the wrong spot. What exactly do you click on to trigger the error? Is it "Visit Jenna's Office" after school? Or is it somewhere else?

Another question to help me troubleshoot: are you able to replay Here There and Everywhere from the bottom of the band camp main event menu? Jumping to the brief exchange in Jenna's office requires the variable hereThereEverywhereDone to be true, and if you're able to replay the event, then this indicates that the variable is true.

I've just made an account on the Visual Novel Database and began a thread in the Perfect Pitch discussion section. In the event that things go south, fans of the series can continue to get in touch with me there.

https://vndb.org/t23714

While I don't want to pretend that Perfect Pitch is safe from harm on itch, keeping my game free to play does work in my favor— because no payment processors are or will be linked to my account, it is less likely that I will be beholden to their policies. 

That's a reason to be optimistic for the project page's viability at least in the immediate term. The VNDB communication channel will be utilized as a stop gap solution in the event that I need to pivot platforms and approach to distribution.

Hey, Chronox.

A very big thanks to you and to guy2022 for alerting me to this development. I make it a conscious point to remain unplugged from these sorts of things to the degree that I am able to, but these changes merit some action on my part.

The rest of this comment is intended both for you and anyone else who has happened upon this page.

For the time being I will continue to keep this itch page current, but I will also begin hosting content on mediafire as a redundancy measure, at least for now:

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/g1g7hl9km2sux/Perfect_Pitch_Distributions

I am very fortunate to be the author of a project which does not accept payments or donations to sustain itself. That said, even projects like this one cannot be totally insulated from the fallout. 

The implications of this kind of change amount to an existential earthquake for the AVN medium and countless others adjacent to it. This has a chilling effect on the creation of new works, regardless of their themes, and may dissuade countless others from ever dipping their toe into development in the first place. The ham-fisted erasure of current and future works in order to appease individuals without any connection to the visual novel community is a profoundly disappointing thing to see and experience. But I am preaching to the choir.

I would like to encourage those reading this comment to help amplify the creations of other authors who may be displaced by this change. Donating is one obvious step, but simply spreading the word about a project you found meaningful or trying out a new game you wouldn't otherwise have tried matters more than you can imagine. 

These are still the early days of this situation, and more definitive information is sure to come in the weeks that follow. If and when I learn anything new about the viability of the Perfect Pitch itch.io page, I will communicate that on here and/or through notes uploaded to the mediafire folder.

Work continues daily on v0.9 of Perfect Pitch. But know that I am still allowing this project to take a back seat to some of my other priorities and interests. That change of development pace after the conclusion of v0.8's release has done me much personal good. Spending too much time with my nose buried in development took me away from the things that gave life to Perfect Pitch in the first place. I am glad to be making concerted efforts to reconnect to what matters, and also, to discover new points of creative connection.

Yes! But slowly. The v0.8 update gobbled up the better part of my non-work hours for the past two and a half years. I missed my non dev hobbies and other important pieces of my life. This project still gets some good attention every day, and still a joy to develop, but I am taking things deliberately slow.

Thank you very much for the shout out and the extremely heartfelt message in your rating summary— wow, that was a moving read! In some ways it was even more satisfying considering this has been your first touch with that goosebump-giving quality of music, at least when it comes to purely instrumental tunes.

I've probably written it somewhere before, but that's the precise sensation which fueled this work for me. It's something a person can discover for themselves in music regardless of their own creative medium. Thinking historically, poets inspired artists who inspired novelists and sculptors, glassblowers, basket-weavers, and so on. Developing visual novels is a little bit of all of that, with exceptions being perhaps the glass and baskets.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience with this project. I may be focused on other more important things this year, but Perfect Pitch is still alive and ongoing, if perhaps a little slow...

This was very moving to read!

Reviewing comments like this is a surreal experience for me not just as a hobby VN developer, but as the developer of Perfect Pitch specifically. And I say this because so much of the impression you've shared above reflects in near identical fashion that which inspired me to create the project in the first place.

I think it's in our nature as human beings to chase rich, visceral emotional experiences. That's probably not only the foundation which undergirds the development Perfect Pitch, but maybe even the thesis for the game itself. Perhaps it would sound strange to a player to hear me say, but having completed the production of this update, I've also had the experience of a profoundly hollow feeling accompanying me this past month. A very natural, very human consequence of traversing the 2-year liminal space I found myself in when writing this update.

You've drawn attention to a number of personal connections you've made with characters and events in playing the game, and I really admire you for sharing that. When I put this project out into the world, there's really no way of me knowing what the impact will be. Comments like this show that the solitary hours typing away at my computer can create profound moments for others in ways that others have done for me.

Hey, thanks, friend! I'm glad that the effort I make to showcase the culture of musicianship, even if it's through my own imperfect lens, is evident to you in the writing of the events. I want characters to feel authentic, flawed, and relatable when I write. It's why most events receive around 6 to 7 revisions before settling into the state you would see them in game. 

It's easy to assume that the developer knows their characters best, but in some ways, I feel like you all might know them better than me. Or maybe it's better to say you know a less fluid version of them than I do. Many times it's tricky to uncover a character's role within any given event idea, and in those moments, characters can feel murky to me. But that gradual discovery is part of the fun of writing, I suppose.  

Thanks so much for the support and for the encouragement with this project. It has been a long two years of chipping away at progress on the update, but I'm glad to hear it has made such a positive impression on you. 

Does it happen as soon as you begin that event, or is there a certain point in the event where the sound is triggered? And is it in the full event only or does it also appear when replaying that room from the blueprint screen?

If it started more or less at the beginning, then it may be bleed over from some other event. In that case, I'd try completing some other event first to clear the audio channels.

If it still persists, try using your device's speakers or a different audio output device and see if that changes anything.

Wow! What a thoughtful post, and thank you so much for sharing it.

There are many complimentary statements in your message, but what I appreciate most is the degree to which you feel invested in the characters and their lives. Especially to the point where it's making a yo-yo out of your sympathetic nervous system. That's an uncommon experience for any sort of media, and I can certainly speak to just how rich that type of thing makes a story feel to me. So to be on the receiving end of that fills me with gratitude.

I also appreciate your statement about wanting to explore new avenues of self-expression. Despite blue's clues and sesame street drilling it into us, I don't feel like folks often make it a point in their daily life to be creative for the sake of being creative. Sometimes it's for fear of failure, or a fear of producing something that's terribly uninteresting. Heck, I struggle with that more days than not. In fact it's one of the sources I draw from when I consider how MC views his own poetry writing.

Anyhow, thanks again for your message and for spending however many hours it took you to make it through the game. I'm glad to have created something that you found to be particularly meaningful.

Oh, that's a bummer! The issue you're seeing is a result of the ren'py engine opting to use these big, bright and colorful emojis by default with one of their releases in the last year. It really messes with appearance of the dialogue when including a heart or other non-text shapes, so I turned off that option in the code.

Unfortunately, if I went back and switched that out it would affect all tablet and desktop users. And you're right, I really never built with mobile in mind.

I'm not sure if this would throw some other error entirely, but if you used a source code editor (Notepad++ is free, for instance) you could simply use that software to open "screens.rpy" and then delete lines 8115, 8121, etc from the code and see what happens. I'm obviously no programmer though, so maybe save a back up of the game somewhere before poking around in the guts of it.

Hah, thank you! I was sure the first comment I'd get about that was someone wanting to be snarky about how little effort I put into the thumbnail. Hope you enjoy the update.

Hey! I really appreciate hearing how much you've been anticipating this release. I live with this game every day, building bit by bit, so I never really had the hiatus experience that players did. But I'm glad to know it made enough of an impression on you to keep checking back in every so often. Have fun!

Thank you very much! Very surreal to get the product of a little over two years of my life published. Hope you enjoy it.

Also, be sure to stand up and stretch every so often with this one. It's a whole lot of content.

I'm always given pause when someone holds such passion about Perfect Pitch that they suggest supporting the project in this way. Thank you very much for expressing that desire— I do not take the sentiments behind it for granted.

In the absence of some catastrophic occurrence that leaves me destitute and starving, I am certain that I will never solicit, accept, or otherwise allow folks to contribute financially to Perfect Pitch. I really do not like the idea of attaching monetary value to this game. It's a similar feeling to another inquiry I occasionally receive about creating a Discord community or any other forum for this game outside of the Itch comment section.

I'm not trying to make money, garner attention, or do much of anything at all except remain creatively connected to music. At this point in my life where I no longer teach nor perform, I'm simply grateful for this outlet that adds value and richness to my life.

Hey there! I'm doing very well, thank you for asking. The roller coaster I had mentioned further down in these comments several months ago has smoothed out quite a bit.  My life outside of the game has settled into a much better version of normal than before it, and I'm very grateful for that change.

I also have a bit of exciting news to share regarding progress on the next update. At this point I can say with a very high degree of confidence that v0.8 will release later this year.

The next update's play time and file size has significantly exceeded my initial expectations. v0.8 will add about 10 hours of play time and clock in just shy of 10 gigabytes once unzipped (8gb comes just from this new release). It's very exciting to be transitioning into the phase where I'm tying up loose ends, crossing t's and dotting i's, and all that fun stuff. 

I'll tell you now, we're still easily over a month away from launch. But for now I am focusing in on the remaining tasks on my rapidly shrinking to-do list— and boy does that feel good.

Hey, thanks for that! Unfortunately, this is the only social media presence I maintain. You're always welcome to drop in and check on the game or the developer. Couldn't help but notice the Riley thumbnail, by the way. Is that fan art? Very cool!

Excellent catch! Thank you for noticing and taking the time to bring that to my attention. Little details like that make or break events for me, so I really appreciate you lending your personal experience in that regard.

Hey Sim, good to hear from you again! It's always interesting to reflect on where I was with this game when I last wrote you, and to see how far things have come.

Right now I'm in the midpoint of what is likely the most intense, time consuming event that I may ever develop in Perfect Pitch. Beginning to end, I'm guessing this one single event is going to take me a month and some change.

Once this one is done, I'm betting a big psychological weight will be taken off my shoulders for completing the remainder of the update. I won't say I was dreading this one, but I knew it would be the doozy to end all doozies.

Lots still to do afterwards, though nothing quite like this. And I still want to impress upon players the likelihood of a post-2024 release.

I appreciate you saying so. Being able to build characters that come alive to the point where players have visceral, emotional reactions to their personality (especially negative, to be honest) is one of the most flattering comments a visual novel developer could hear.

Hey there, thanks for dropping by again! Things are going well here. Wrapping up yet another event this week in the last large grouping of them, and I'm starting to think I might see a pin prick of light at the end of the tunnel.

The development time of what's left is hard to predict because I've never attempted something like what I'm trying to build with these last handful of events. Thankfully, I gave myself opportunities to practice some of the techniques in a few of the events leading up to the final few.

And yes, that description is vague and probably won't mean much to anyone until they play v0.8, but suffice to say I'm trying pretty hard to make something special.

Hate to break it to you but this isn't it. Still, there's an interesting first hand account into Riley backstory for folks who care about that sort of thing. She gets the spotlight more than a couple times in the next release, but I'd stop far short of calling it a "Riley Update". 

Hey, thanks! It's just as much of a discovery for me every time I sit down to write. Very proud of the v0.8 progress so far, and there sure has been a lot. We're clocking in just shy of 10,000 new renders at this point*** , and that's to say nothing of the various animations, video, and other mixed multimedia that accompanies it. 

It's the type of update where you need to keep your head down and focus on rendering frame by frame to make any progress. Like standing on the roof of a tall building, you just have to keep looking ahead or else your palms start getting sweaty.

***My math's not so great. We're around 6000, not 10,000.

Time flies, doesn't it? Almost a whole calendar year since the last release! And sitting courtside to the evolution of these characters across that year has been so much fun.

The massive checklist for v0.8 continues to be chipped away at. Just last week I finished all renders and music for one of the largest events (~20 minutes) in this series, and that felt like a great milestone. 

Thanks for checking in again. I'm sure some of the folks who occasionally lurk around here waiting for updates from the dev appreciate your consistency in reaching out, seeing as I usually do respond.  

Thanks for approaching the long development timeframe with that mindset. It's a much more fulfilling experience to build in a deliberate manner rather than to rush half baked ideas out of the door as fast as possible. And that's one of the benefits of keeping this game free to play— I don't feel like I owe anyone anything. I can choose to spend two or more years of my life to developing a big update and not have to make any justifications for it.

Thanks for saying that. I'm really itching to share what I've been up to, too. It has been consuming all of my non 9-5 hours for a very long time. In fact, this isn't really a spoiler, but I finished the dialogue for the very first v0.8 event way back in September 2022— probably about half way through my work building renders for v0.5. Needless to say I've been working on this update for a while.

Out of curiosity I took a look through my word documents to see where I'm at with event writing + screen directions, all of which are done thankfully, and the total number of MS word pages for v0.8 (and only v0.8) is around 375. It certainly feels like I've been writing a dissertation, or at least what I imagine it would feel like.

I think most people recognize that writing a book is a multi-year affair, and even though I'm not going through quite the same editorial rigors that a well-published author might, it's still a lot of text and a lot of visual materials to match. I realize most of my comments lately are contextualizing my busy-ness, but my goodness, this update sure does keep me busy.

Hey Sim!

Life outside of Perfect Pitch has been a bit of a roller coaster lately, and I'll leave it at that. Even so, I'm managing to keep up with development at a respectable pace despite it all.

One of the upsides of the roller coaster is that I'll be taking somewhat of a brief sabbatical (i.e. vacation) to western Europe where I plan on visiting some of the sites important to the world of classical music. A few concerts, a few museums, a brief bit of time spent living where it all went down— I'm really looking forward to that.

As for the progress of the game, again, not much news to share at the moment. I've been dedicating a lot of time to understanding and iterating on animation within Chara Studio, which has led to some great breakthroughs for the upcoming release, but obviously it's also a time investment. I think when the update finally does go live you'll agree it was time well spent.

Thanks for choosing to adopt a perspective of patience as you wait out the next release. It's easy as a player to feel like each update is comparing apples to apples-- as though one update is more or less equivalent to any other update. Perhaps for some developers who operate on consistent release schedules that might actually be true, but it isn't for this project.

For context: this next update, from v0.7 to v0.8, will be the gameplay and event quantity equivalent of about seven and a half new releases of Perfect Pitch. Essentially, we're jumping straight from version 7 to 14. That's one of, but not the only, reason why the next update is such a doozy.

Fixed overlapping ren'py screen issue preventing players from saving using save blocks. No more pressing escape key needed to reset screens and unstumble from the limbo.

This fix will go live in the v0.8 release.

Hey, friend. Smooth sailing here still, though I'm afraid I don't have much additional news to share about the update. Lots done, and lots still to do. Keeping a good pace in light of the update's play time and quality of that play time. I'm excited to share it with you once it's ready.

Hey, Sim! Great to hear from you again.

Just want to make it clear though that the next update is definitely not coming out in January. I'll likely post an addendum to my "Not dead; just busy" dev log in the new year with a little more info, but v0.8 is still a looong ways away. Still on track and going well, but the update is enormous.

Hey friend, I'm touched that you would be so insistent on compensating me for my efforts on this project. It's obvious that this game has made some significant and positive impact on you for you to say so. Thank you very, very much.

What I'll say to you and anyone else wishing to support this project, beyond just downloading the game, is this: offer that money instead to help fund the creation and performance of music in your own community, if at all possible. 

Attend a concert with local performers, buy a t-shirt or other merch from your favorite band/musician. The type of support matters far less than the spirit of that support.  Having this game result in a small group of people becoming patrons of the arts in their community would mean far more to me than $5 in my pocket.

And if you can't or don't want to support music locally or otherwise? Choose another small developer making these sorts of projects and offer them your money instead. That would also feel very fulfilling to know I'm indirectly supporting those with whom I share a common medium. After all, this game wouldn't exist without the inspiration I've found from the work of so many others on Itch and beyond.