Hello once again, everybody! As you are no doubt aware, it is not the end of October quite yet. Then why am I posting this update now, you ask? Well, I'm posting it now because...

The investigation phase for the first case is finally finished!

That's right! It's been a long and rocky road, but the investigation for the first case is finally done! And what an investigation it is! In case you don't know, I play through scenes in Danganronpa Team right after I make them. Part of the reason for that is that I want to take a cursory glance over everything. See if there are any glaring issues that need to be dealt with immediately and get a feel for the other sorts of things I'll need to fix later. The other part of the reason for that is because I'm timing how long it takes me to go through these scenes. At what I would consider an average reading pace (not too fast, not too slow, and processing everything that's being said). This allows me to get a vague idea of how long Danganronpa Team is going to end up being.

As you would expect from what I just said, I timed how long it took me to go through the investigation phase of the first case once I had everything all finished, and it turned out to be twice as long as I originally intended for it to be. Not that that's a bad thing. It was just surprising. I mean, you usually hear about games where a game dev promises it'll be so long to go through it and the game ends up being shorter than they promised. Right now it's looking like Danganronpa Team is on track to go in the opposite direction, being longer than I originally said it'd be. Funny how things work out sometimes! We'll just have to wait and see how long the game as a whole is once all's said and done.

So now that the investigation phase is finished, what comes next?

It goes without saying that the trial comes next! The trial will probably take a decent amount of time to make, but since I'm in a period right now where I don't have much school work, I'll continue working hard on Danganronpa Team to get this first chapter done and out to my beta testers as soon as possible! Off the cuff, I'm estimating that the first trial will take an hour, hour and a half to go through (if you see all the dialogue, pressing every statement during a rebuttal/cross-examination. You could probably whiz through it if you didn't care about any of that extra dialogue). But I guess we won't know how meaty it'll actually be until it gets made! Who knows? Maybe it'll be the opposite of the investigation phase and turn out to be shorter than I'm expecting.

But no matter what happens, the first trial is going to take some more work than the investigation phase to make. Not only am I writing up dialogue and everything, but trials are where the actual gameplay comes in. Not only will rebuttals and cross-examinations be more complicated to make than your run-of-the-mill scene where people are just talking (without any interactive elements), but I have to mess with stuff in trials depending on the difficulty level you choose at the beginning of the game. That'll take a little bit of time to work out. Plus, while I've made up most of the graphics for trials already, I still have to animate them, which will take a little bit of time to do.

After the first trial is finished we move on to the proofreading stage, where I run through the entirety of the game so far, fixing up grammatical inconsistencies I find, changing up wording, adding/removing dialogue as I deem necessary, and fixing up any other things I notice. Once I've given everything a pass, I'll hand off a copy of the game to my beta testers, who'll run through the game themselves and point out anything I might have missed. Hopefully by the end of the process, Danganronpa Team will be a game of pretty decent quality.

But wait, there's more! There's one more feature I've decided to add to the game that I hadn't considered before! If you've played Ace Attorney 5 or Ace Attorney 6, you might be familiar with the "Revisualization" mechanic. Basically, it's a mechanic that pops up right at the end of the case when Phoenix & co. are backed into a corner. You can read about it a little bit here if you don't know what it is, but like the page says, it's basically where Phoenix & co. review their thinking to come to a startling discovery that turns the case on its head.

I don't know why but I was thinking back to this other game I made earlier today, which had a murder case/trial in it that utilized this "Revisualization" mechanic. It's pretty easy to do, so I was thinking about whether or not I could add it to Danganronpa Team and realized that most of the cases in it have one of those moments where you review your thinking and make a startling breakthrough. So I thought "wow, this would actually be perfect!" Unlike Ace Attorney 5 and 6 I might not necessarily have the mechanic pop up towards the end of the trial. It might pop up midway through a trial. I'll use it when it's applicable is what I'm trying to say. So I hope you look forward to that.

With that, I have upheld my end of the bargain (from the last blog post). I do not have to throw away Persona 5 (yet). I will continue working hard to ensure that I never have to throw it away. I'll put up a blog post when I've finished the first trial, regardless of whether it's the middle of November or not, and I guess in the same vein I'll throw up another blog post when I've completed proofreading and sent the first chapter of the game out to my beta testers. We're making progress, guys! Slowly but surely, this game is becoming a reality!

I just wish it could become a reality faster...