Holy shiznits, it's been that long?

Ever since OMORI, RPG Maker and VNMaker consumed my life, I only find myself working on this game during December ~ January every year. And that's only because it's a self imposed "vacation"...and before I knew it, it's been 5 years. Time flies so fast.

After a long time of not being able to finish your game because you're too busy making and fixing everyone else's game, you start to go into a spiral of insanity. I think people who have similar experience as me will know that after a long day's work, you just want to chill at the support forum or something and then just give feedback to other people. It's less brain work than your own project.

I want to say I made a lot of progress, but that's a half truth. As years passed by, tastes change, your skill improves, and you'll notice old mistakes in your work that is just unforgivable to the new you.

Don't get me wrong, the VX/A RTP is great. I enjoyed making assets for it. I'm super thankful that it helped me get out of the asset making space and to actual game development. I learned a lot about feature creep, programming, project management and a whole load of game design. And I think most importantly of all, what kind of stories I want to write. The RTP was a great tool to actually make a game and understand what I want out of my own games.

So even if people were disappointed that I stopped making 100% custom assets for my projects, I wouldn't have met amazing people such as rhyme, Liberty, Decky, puddor, Yanfly, Dr. Yami, Kaliya, MaskedPlainview, NicoB and so on. There is no regret.

But as all good things must come to an end, the RTP is still limited for my vision. I want to create environments that fit my tastes. It becomes increasingly impossible for me to make consistent assets and evoke the atmosphere I set out to do since the inception of this project.

I finished a lot of custom game assets; as big as the RPG Maker DS Resource Pack itself. But as I improve further and refine my tastes, they're all useless to me and needs remake.

And that's not all, I've been practicing a lot on my anatomy, background, improving my pixel skills, picked up the violin and all that stuff. But I'm also a realist and if I want to be alive to finish this game, I would have to hire some specific people that can keep up with me. That's why for the past few years, I've been working 16 hrs a day with 2-4 hrs of sleep just to get enough money to hire some people that will help make this game a reality. It's still not enough.

I want to thank the people that support my Patreon (You guys know who you are!) especially since it helps me pay for my composer. And you guys and gals are probably the most quiet and most understanding supporters someone could ever have. You don't even complain that I'm a slow worker. <_<;

I especially want to thank Marimo for being patient with me and have to listen to my rambling and complaining about how I have no time to do what I want. Seriously the small arts she would give me would calm the raging storm within my soul.



And most likely, after the 15th, I will stay silent again until the "ber" months of 2019, but I want to try at least make small progress here and there.

Here's how my brainstorming sessions happen lately, I dunno how much people care about this but here you go.


Here's how I commission my composer and so far I have 15/30 tracks commissioned. He's been kind of busy. But his tracks are the reason I can keep going with this project. It's like you know you can make what you want with that music.



Here's also some of the tracks if you are curious:







Since I scrapped most of my work, I'm reworking the graphics with my partner on the art direction + colors I want for the entire game. It's nothing substantial but you can see our first test here. The graphics are not final and are there for test purposes.



I'm still debating to myself if I want 8 directions or 4 directions. Because I don't want to spend an eternity just making characters and stuff for this game. Especially when I have this much body type variation:



I admit having 8 directions feels amazing when you play it, but I don't have enough time and money for these kind of things.

And finally, let's have a final art update. I don't like it when games only have facial changes for characters. I understand it's budget reasons, but I refuse to back down after all and ended up having this made:



Also here's how concept art is made now:



Also shameless plug, if you wanna buy my stuff I sell resource packs over here!

And that's it. Good night.