Hey, everyone!

It's been a good couple of weeks since the last blog post. Approximately three, I believe. Well, I was just thinking that now would be a good time for an update on how Danganronpa Team is coming along. In fact, I'm thinking that from now on it would be a good idea to do two blog posts every month. One smack dab in the middle of the month and another one right at the end of the month. Assuming that I remember to do so. But thankfully I can add notes to the calendar in Windows 10, so hopefully that will help me remember.

So I bet you're all wondering how Danganronpa Team has been coming along. I'm gonna be honest, it hasn't really been coming along lately. I partially blame Ace Attorney 6 for that (which has been pretty dang good so far by the way). I also blame myself for getting caught up in other stuff. Like VA-11 HALL-A. And Trails in the Sky. And school. But on the upside, I haven't felt like doing much in the past few days, so I'm going to take advantage of that general lack of motivation and work my ass off on Danganronpa Team up through this weekend. Although I'll also continue playing Ace Attorney 6. Because I must.

Now, I'm sure the question on everyone's minds is: 'How much is actually done as of right now?' Well, I kind of have good news and bad news there. The good news is that we're into chapter one. The 'pre-murder' part of it. I don't have too terribly much planned for chapter one 'pre-murder', so I should be able to get into the investigation and hopefully even into the trial this by the end of this weekend. The bad news is that I need to go back and add some stuff to some older scenes. And let me explain what I mean by that.

Up until the last scene or two I made, all of the game's text was either dialogue or Bacon thinking to herself (kind of like how Phoenix thinks to himself in Ace Attorney in blue text, if you've ever played one of those). That's all well and good, but I realized a little while ago that this was really limiting me. So I started slipping in narration as well, which allows me to describe a scene or a character's actions in more detail without trying to awkwardly stuff that stuff into dialogue. I noticed how much better scenes flowed almost immediately with narration now in the picture, so I'm going to go back through scenes from the prologue and add narration as necessary.

I have other bad news as well. I think. Those emotion thingies that pop up (I made a video on them) I've been implementing since I showed them off, and as I've put more and more in and tested more and more scenes I've come to realize that they really tend to lag. So do the animations when you get evidence. And it seems kind of touchy. Like I'll save right before getting some evidence. Then it'll lag as I get the evidence and the animation plays. So I'll load up my save again and get the evidence again, but this time it works just fine. I don't know what exactly the deal there is. I put in an anti-lag script which doesn't seem to have helped too much (even as I've fiddled with it for a few hours). It could very well just be me. It could be that my laptop is just a piece of crap. But in any case, I'm probably going to add a way for you to turn off the animations for the emotion pop up thingies. Because I can see those getting annoying if they keep lagging for you. Maybe I'll have one for the animation that plays when you get evidence, too. Any other animations in the game are kind of essential though, so even if they lag you just gotta deal.

Anyways, enough with the downers. Let's go back to speaking about cool stuff. Like New Danganronpa V3! You all saw the trailer that just came out of TGS didn't you? It looks really cool! I can't wait! But here's the thing. It's coming out in January in Japan, right? And while we don't know just yet how long localization is going to take, it couuuld possibly be coming just a few short months after it comes out in Japan, like how Ace Attorney 6 only took a few months. Much as I love the prospect of a new Danganronpa game coming out early next year, I don't want it stealing my thunder! I don't want to release Danganronpa Team in the same sort of release window. New Danganronpa V3 would just slaughter Team. Let's be real. It'll be way better than anything I could ever make. Heck, in the worst case scenario V3 might even pull off some of the same twists/kinds of murders as I wrote into Danganronpa Team, undermining Team's story!

So for the sake of not falling prey to whatever V3 has in store, I'm making a personal, totally unreasonable, never-going-to-hit-it goal of finishing Danganronpa Team by the end of December. That's not a hard release date by any means. It's a totally unrealistic release date that I'll try to meet anyways and feel super bad about when I don't meet it. On the off chance that I do meet it, I will officially have no life. But that's okay! Whether I meet it or not, it's good to have a goal to try to reach. So let's see what happens.

That's all I have in store for this progress report. The next one will be September 30th. By then, I will hopefully have chapter one completed. If I don't...yeah that goal I just set probably isn't going to happen. But for the sake of it happening, I GOTTA GO WORK ON THIS RIGHT NOW. SEE YOU IN HALF OF A MONTH.