Hey, everyone! It's the end of September, which means that it's time for another progress report!

So unfortunately, I was not able to make my goal of finishing the first chapter of Danganronpa Team by the end of this month. Big surprise. Failing to meet deadlines! Delays! Game industry in a nutshell right there! But in all seriousness, exams and school in general have proven to be a pretty sizable obstacle in the making of this game. Also, I was pretty sick for a couple of days last week. And I've been spending some of my free time playing stuff like more Ace Attorney 6 and VA-11 HALL-A. (It's good to take the time to do other things so I don't burn myself out on Danganronpa Team. It's rare for me to be able to work on it for long periods of time without the quality of my work diminishing.)

So where are we now? We're at the investigation phase of the first case, that's where! (It's about time, too.) I actually would have gotten to it sooner, but there were a decent number of scenes I had been planning to put after the first trial (that were still part of chapter one) that I decided to move right before the first investigation phase. So I ended up putting a little more work on my plate before the investigation phase. But that means that once the trial is done, the chapter is basically done. So there's that.

For now I'm going to take the dreaded approach that everyone and their mother hates and say that I no longer have an estimate for when chapter one or the game itself will be done. It'll be done when it's done. I know that's a cop-out answer to the question of "when will this be finished" but at this point I honestly don't know what my rate of work is going to be or how long the rest of the game is going to be (some parts of chapter one are turning out to be shorter than I imagined, but whatever. The game will be as long as it needs to be. I'm not going to pad it out with unnecessary stuff.)

But one thing I can say with certainty is that winter break will be a very good time for Danganronpa Team. I get a little over three weeks for winter break, and I won't have anything in particular going on then (besides a Christmas party here and there), so that'll be a really good time to crack down on Danganronpa Team and belt out as much of it as I can (without burning myself out). As of right now, I'm going to say that I hope to be at least up through chapter four or five by the end of winter break. If I can have the majority of the game finished by then I'll be happy. And chapters five and six are not going to be quite as difficult to write I think (because most characters will be dead by then! So less characters to write dialogue for/worry about! Yay!)

Chapter one has been particularly difficult in that respect, because I've had scenes where all sixteen characters (plus Foxy) were in a room at once and I had to try to balance out their dialogue so that every character gets a chance to speak. It'll be much easier doing scenes in later chapters where the number of characters is halved (or more).

I think I had better leave it there. I'll work on the investigation this weekend. Exams are just ending for me, so I'll have some free time I can use to try to belt that out. The investigation won't be too terribly long, so I might be able to get that all done this weekend. We'll see. I did already take care of drawing up the first corpse and some of the evidence. Actually, speaking of which, I might as well throw everyone a bone and show off how I'm handling the evidence.

So how the evidence was handled before was that I basically just had pictures that I pulled off of Google that I was using for evidence. Like if a key was evidence, I just googled a key and used that. But I thought that didn't really match the style of the game all that well, so I decided that I'd do something to match the style instead. So for instance, let's take this piece of evidence I've prepared...



This is what you'll see when you get a piece of evidence. Y'know, when the bullet flies by and all that. (There's a video on it in the media section if you don't know what I'm talking about.) So this is just an example of a piece of evidence. And it should be pretty obvious that it's done in the style of some of the other stuff that you can see in the game's images and stuff. I think this looks a lot better than just pulling images off of Google, so I'm rolling with it. Corpses are also being drawn in the same style. So they'll stand out pretty well from the background when you see them in-game (plus they'll have that cool hot pink Danganronpa blood all over 'em, which ought to draw your attention to them pretty fast).

Also I suppose I ought to mention (didn't I say that I was going to end this blog post like three paragraphs ago?) that I've been thinking ahead to the trials a bit. As you may know from reading the game page, the prosecution team is going to be different in each case. I've been thinking over different combinations of characters that would make for good teams in each case. It'd be nice to have teams made of characters with good chemistry, that can play well off of each other's personalities. It's also good to put characters on teams that are more invested in some cases than others (like say one the victim of a case was a close friend of someone on the defense team). So this is just something I've been thinking over now that the first trial is coming up in the not-so-distant future. Funnily enough, I haven't decided on who I want for the defense/prosecution in the first case yet, but I know who I want for the second case. But we'll see how it works out. I want to try to give most of the characters a chance to shine on the defense or the prosecution, and I want to play with some interesting combinations. Hopefully it'll all pay off and make the trials more interesting.

Alright, now I'm going to end this blog here. Hopefully you guys aren't too mad about me being a slowpoke in making this game. And hopefully you're all still interested in playing it. Either way, progress is being made, slowly but surely. And it'll come out...eventually! Don't give up hope!