Hello everyone!

First things first. No, this isn't an update on progress in regards to Chapter Two. In fact, Chapter Two hasn't been touched yet. But there have been a lot of developments in regards to Danganronpa Team over the past month or two, which I'd like to share.

I put out a call for beta testers two months back or so and the response was great! I got some new beta testers on the team who are really enthusiastic and are just wonderful people in general to talk to. In addition to that, I have one or two people lined up to help me just with the final editing pass. That final editing pass will take place after the whole game is finished. That way I don't have to ask my beta testers to play through the whole thing again (I respect their time a bit more than that), and I get a fresh perspective; one of people playing through the whole game at once rather than in chunks. Which will be interesting.



So as I'm sure everyone is well aware of, Danganronpa V3 just came out. Originally the plan was to try and get Danganronpa Team done before V3 came out. I now realize that would have been a terrible idea. DR Team would've been totally ignored after V3 came out (no blame there, I would've ignored it too). And with the controversy surrounding V3's ending, I'm not so sure people would be up for another Danganronpa so soon after its release.

Now here's the deal regarding V3. I've played through it myself. Half because I love Danganronpa so of course I wanted to play it. Half because I wanted to make sure it doesn't do anything I do in DR Team. Thankfully there's nothing too similar between the two. However. There are some changes that have been made to parts of DR Team in the past two months. And as a part of that, I am changing the recommendation prior to playing Danganronpa Team. Before playing Danganronpa Team, I now recommend that everyone has played through all three main Danganronpa titles, including V3. Keep in mind that playing through V3 is a recommendation. I will mention this again once the game releases, but I have no plans at this time to explicitly spoil anything from V3. But I do think there are certain things in Danganronpa Team that people will appreciate more if they've played V3 beforehand. Along with that, I am now taking advantage of V3's release for Danganronpa Team. That means I may use certain music tracks or other things from V3 at my discretion. That plays into my recommendation to play V3 before DR Team.

Now back to Danganronpa Team in particular. As you may recall before, I said I'd rather not give out estimates or anything of the sort for when Danganronpa Team will release, since I miss every single date. Well, I'm breaking that rule (sorry past me) by saying when I REALLY want to get this done by. I'm really hoping to have Danganronpa Team finished sometime before the end of next summer. So that's my current personal goal. I think it coming out about a year after V3 would be ideal. By then, all the hype around V3 should have died down and people will (probably) be starved for more Danganronpa. There are a couple other reasons I'd really like to get this done by the end of next summer, but I won't bother getting into them here.



So what exactly have I been up to since announcing Danganronpa Team is back in development? I'm currently in the middle of going back through another editing pass of everything I've done thus far. There are a couple reasons for that.

Firstly, I've added more sprites into the game. Before, Makina, Angie, Kyou, Bacon, and Yukari all had just one sprite. That makes them look incredibly static. The reason I didn't have multiple sprites for them before is because their sprites were a pain in the ass to get ahold of. Or at least, I thought they were. In Bacon's case her sprites are stupidly easy to find and I just wasn't really looking. But in Angie's case I had to upscale her expressions from the DS sprites. And in Makina's case I had to basically extract the sprites myself, which I won't get into the specifics of. In any case, all those characters now have a variety of sprites/poses/expressions/what have you. So I have to go back and implement all of those into everything I've made thus far (or at least for however long each character survives).

Secondly, I've decided on some grammatical/stylistical constants in regards to Danganronpa Team's writing, which need to be implemented into everything thus far. For instance, I wasn't aware that ellipses should probably have a space after them until one of my beta testers pointed that out to me. And it really does look better. So now I have to do that for every single line with ellipses in it. In addition to that, I replayed part of Danganronpa 1 before V3 and I noticed that in order to place emphasis on certain words in the text, it would color them like so. I've chosen to implement that as well into my style. I think it looks much better than doing something like *this* to put emphasis on words.

Thirdly, one of my beta testers pointed out that they don't like how you change evidence in the game. And admittedly, it is rather clunky. I'm planning on changing that system to make changing evidence during rebuttals/cross-examinations a liiiittle smoother. It's going to require a bit of graphical voodoo for me to implement, and some more work besides. But I'm hoping it'll end up being a beneficial change in the long run.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I personally could just use a refresher on everything I've made thus far. Just so I can remember how to write each character, what's happened so far, quirks of each character's speaking patterns, etc. In fact, I should have done this beforehand, but I have a document I'm making up where I'm compiling certain things that should be constants throughout the game. Like the nicknames Rintarou/Makina give different characters and the honorifics Yukari uses for each character. Those should pretty much never change. I'm also taking notes of things like names Rintarou gives to different "operations" and every single thing TK says in the game, because I don't want to repeat any of them a single time. Just as every case should be new and interesting, so should the dialogue. And I'm going to lengths to ensure that.



There are a couple other things I want to mention in this update. For one thing, I haven't just been editing things in the sense that I'm fixing errors. After playing V3, I came to realize that the case I had envisioned as the 5th case of Danganronpa Team was not up to snuff. It just was not good enough. The 5th cases in Danganronpa 2 and V3 were brilliant. They were complex. Full of twists. Full of powerful moments. The 5th case I had made for Danganronpa Team was none of those things. So I made a very difficult decision and I scrapped almost the entire case. I'm remaking it from the ground up to be something a little more befitting the penultimate case of a Danganronpa game. And I'm really glad I did that. While the details haven't been hammered out yet, I have a general outline of how I want the case to go and what I want the major twists to be, and I think it's a much stronger case now than it ever was before. I'm really looking forward to making it.

That's not the only major change to the game that's been in the works. There's one other one, which I'm not willing to spill the beans on. Suffice to say, if you like some of the bonus modes that the other Danganronpa games have, I have a little something in the works that you might enjoy. Although it almost certainly won't be what you expect (I'm not even giving my beta testers any details on it).

Another thing. It's been bugging me for a long time that the screenshots I have here on this page are not at all up-to-date. Since I put up screenshots and such on this game's page here on RMN, text has been edited, character's sprites have been cleaned up, changes have been made to backgrounds, and so forth. So the screenshots and such that are available here aren't really indicative of what the final game will look like. So I've taken the liberty of going in and taking some fresh screenshots of Danganronpa Team. Some of the same places in the game as were in the old screenshots. Some new. So there's a little eye-candy for you.

And one final thing before I get back to work. I've implemented mouse support into the game, but I honestly think the mouse support is garbage. I'm going to get some opinions from my beta testers in the next release before I make a decision on it, but I wouldn't get your hopes up for mouse support in the final release. You're likely going to have to play with a keyboard or a controller (in conjunction with a program like DS4Windows or Xpadder).

That's all I want to say for now! Until the next blog!