All I have to say is wow! I'm really happy to see the enthusiasm for this! Danganronpa Team has twelve subscribers at the time of writing this. Twelve! That might not seem like a lot, but every time someone subscribes, comments, or tweets about Danganronpa Team it means a lot to me. Because the more I see those kinds of things the more excited I get to make this thing. So I guess in a sense you could just bug me every waking minute of my existence and the game will get finished faster. So keep up the normal, non-intrusive enthusiasm!

Anyways, so I'm sure this wouldn't exactly be a very exciting blog if I just ended it there. If I saw someone else blogging just to go "yay, my game is getting popular" and to shill their Twitter account, I'd be going "UGH. WHO CARES? I JUST WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE GAME" too. So let's talk a little about the history of the game, some game design, and about what progress I've made since this has gone live. (This is going to be a longer blog than I was originally planning, but whatever. I have nothing better to do at 1 AM except actually work on the game.)

So Danganronpa Team came about at some point in time that I don't even remember. I honestly don't remember when or how I got the idea for it. I just remember that I started working on it in January of last year. Progress went pretty smoothly for a while. I had all of the graphics made up, the overall story was all worked out, and I had even hammered out the details for the first two cases. I made everything up to the first trial of chapter one. Then I started making the trial and things just kind of fell apart. Things just weren't working the way I wanted them to, I got really frustrated, and I decided to just scrap the whole project. Then fast-forward to like...July. (Crap, I can't even remember when I started making this iteration of Danganronpa Team.) Somehow the idea for the game had gotten stuck back in my head and it wasn't letting go, so I just had to give Danganronpa Team another shot.

For the most part, a lot of what you'll see story-wise in Danganronpa Team is carried over from my original attempt at making the game. The overall story is largely the same. I've redone the first case and I'm working on redoing the second one (more on that later), but those are also fairly similar. Plus, I have general ideas for what I want to do for the rest of the cases that I've carried over. But I'm sure you guys don't want to hear about what's the same as much as what's different. So let's talk more about the first iteration of Danganronpa Team.

The first iteration of Danganronpa Team wasn't even called Danganronpa Team. It was called Danganronpa: Weeb Island. I'm not even kidding. Foxy called all of the participants in the killing game weeabos. It was even in the results screen. Don't believe me? I still have a screenshot of the original results screen saved. Take a look.



It was all very tongue-in-cheek. Now, Danganronpa: Weeb Island was originally a pure Danganronpa game. There was really no Ace Attorney influence in it. It was basically me trying to emulate Danganronpa 2 as best as I could, both inside the trials and out. Obviously that has now changed, and I'm much more of a fan of how I'm doing things in Danganronpa Team, because I'm trying a few things that have never been done before in Danganronpa or Ace Attorney.

Going back for a moment, if you look back up at that results screen you may notice that a few silhouettes are out of place. That would be because I decided to change the lineup a bit between Weeb Island and Team. I'm sure you're interested in hearing who got cut from Team in favor of who, so I'll go through them all.



So first we have Kyouko Kirigiri, who any Danganronpa fan can recognize. Oh, by the way, this is what the trials used to look like. I figured now was as good a time to shoehorn these pictures in as any. I want to talk about the change in the trials visually, but we'll save that for after we go through these character changes. So going back to that, Kyouko is great. In fact, she's too great. I was thinking about her inclusion as I started working on Danganronpa Team, and I got to thinking that I really didn't want to have an ace detective on the lineup. I wanted it to be a full cast of people who had no idea of what they were doing once a murder happened. Plus, I thought that with Nagito already in the lineup, it might be a good idea to swap her out so we don't have two people from the same series in one cast. (Yeah, I know Aigis and Yu are from the same series, but I kinda made Yu into my own character, so I think that's okay.)

I swapped Kyouko out for Yukari, a nice girl who doesn't have any direct detective experience herself (her brother's a detective, so I hesitate to say she has no experience at all), but can still make for a close friend/partner for our protagonist.



Next we have Ringabel from Bravely Default. Again, nothing necessarily wrong with Ringabel, but he didn't quite serve my purposes as I was rewriting a few things, so I decided to swap him out for Battler instead. And believe me, Battler works a lot better in respect to some of the changes I made to certain parts of the story. Sorry, Ringabel. Maybe you'll make the cut in Danganronpa Team 2: Electric Boogaloo.



And finally we have Kupala from Etrian Odyssey. This is one character most people have probably never even heard of. That's not only because she was a character in a niche dungeon crawler, but because she wasn't much of a character to begin with. She shows up for like five minutes two or three times in the game. That's it. But anyways, I decided to ditch her in favor of Tamamo because Kupala was just kind of...there. I took a look at her when I started making Danganronpa Team and went "why is she in this again?" Decided to scrap her in favor of a more easily recognizable and a more likable character. (And if you don't recognize Tamamo you need to go play Monster Girl Quest. Just sayin'.)



Now you might wonder why I just posted a picture of Persona 5. That's because I'm using subliminal messaging to get you to buy Persona 5. I said we'd be getting back to the changes I made to the trial HUD. When I started making Danganronpa Team I did not have any of the graphics I had from Weeb Island saved. I had gotten rid of them. So I had to make everything from scratch again. And for Weeb Island I had considered making the HUD one of the most difficult parts of its short-lived development, because you want something that not only looks nice but is stylish and unique.

So I started making the HUD for Danganronpa Team and I was having a little difficulty. I just wasn't coming up with anything I was satisfied with. But this kind of thing is often borne out of inspiration, so I thought 'what's the last thing that inspired me?' And of course it was watching Persona 5's trailers. If you haven't seen the trailers, what are you doing reading this you need to go watch them right now they have some of the most sleek, stylish HUDs I've ever seen in a game. They really pop. And I decided that's what I wanted to try to do. I wanted to have a HUD that looked sleek and stylish. Something that popped a bit.



And I ended up coming up with what you see in screenshots like the one above. Sure, it's no Persona 5 HUD, but I think it's got way more style than Weeb Island's HUD had. Pops quite a bit more too. So I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out.



While we're at it, I'm sure you've noticed in some of the other trial screenshots (as well as the logo) I use the sort of style shown in the above picture with the...well, I like to call the color pallet 'cookies and cream'. Those were directly inspired by the above picture, which I believe is from an old trailer for Dai Gyakuten Saiban. It really struck me visually, and I was already drawing inspiration from DGS for the trials, so I thought I might as well draw some inspiration from it for the visuals as well.

So there's some insight on Danganronpa Team's visual design for you. I just want to talk about a few other things before I end this blog that has gotten far too long for its own good.

Today I've been working on hammering out the details for the second case, and it's been going smoothly. ...Too smoothly. When I was writing the first case there were places where I ran into a major contradiction and had to rack my mind trying to come up with ways for everything to work out and make sense. I haven't had an issue with that in this case, which troubles me. Either I've gotten better at this, or there's the much more likely scenario where I'm going to think I'm done writing this case and nothing's going to make sense. We'll see how that plays out.

But I just want to say, as I'm writing these cases I'm trying to make them more like Danganronpa 2's cases as opposed to Danganronpa 1's cases. What I mean by that is (and this is all just my personal opinion), in Danganronpa 1 it was real easy to tell who the killer was in like half of the cases. In Danganronpa 2 it was harder to tell who the killer was in most of the cases (with an exception or two). I'm trying to make it like Danganronpa 2 in that you can't tell who the killer is before you're into the trial. And even then, hopefully not until you're at least a good bit of your way into the trial. So I hope I'm able to provide satisfactory mysteries in that regard.

Another thing is that at least with a few of the cases, I'm trying to do some stuff that's never been done in Danganronpa or Ace Attorney. Like, the murders themselves are just really unique and really out there. I want to bring something new to the table so they're not all just run-of-the-mill murders. (Think something like case five from Danganronpa 2, where the way the murder is carried out is like nothing you've ever seen before in one of these kinds of games.) So hopefully that won't disappoint either, although they're certainly going to be more difficult to write.

And finally, I just want to say that I'm trying not to disappoint in any of these cases when it comes to twists. When I was writing the first case I went "y'know this just seems too run-of-the mill. It needs something that'll shock people." So I completely rewrote the ending of the trial and added in a twist that I think everyone's going to really enjoy. For case two, which I'm currently writing, just earlier tonight I went "this murder is nice and all but it needs a little spicing up." So I made it twice as gruesome. I'm a fan of the Danganronpa games as much as the next guy, so I know a lot of enjoyment in each case comes from the discovery of the body and the twists. I'm putting some focus in those areas, so I hope I don't disappoint.

Welp, I've written entirely too much for one blog. I think I've run out of things to talk about for a while, but hopefully those of you who read this have enjoyed it. I'll be sure to post another blog when I feel like I have a decent amount of stuff to talk about again. Until then, remember to follow me on Twitter if you're interested and keep watching Danganronpa 3 to tide you over while I work on this.



Thanks for reading!