Hello once again!

Things are rolling along. Once again, not as quickly as I would like, but they are rolling along. I've been basically doing prep work for the past two or three weeks, and I'll explain what that means. I mentioned an update or two ago that something was in the works for those of you who enjoy the bonus post-game content the Danganronpa games have to offer. I'll spill the beans on that a little bit right now, but I'm not going to get into it very much until the game is out. I want to keep it largely a surprise.

So there's going to be a School Mode in Danganronpa Team. But it won't quite be like the School Modes from past Danganronpas. I plan on working on here and there to give myself a break from working on the main game. It should help me loosen up a bit and prevent me from burning out on working on the main game. On top of that, I don't have to keep School Mode quite as grounded in reality as the main game, so it gives me a chance to get a little more silly and do some really absurd stuff. That being said, what I have planned for it is somewhat expansive. And as it is a different beast than the main game, pretty much everything it uses is unique.

As such, I basically started from scratch. I've spent the past few weeks gathering/creating all the graphical things I will need for it as well as gathering up all the music I need for it. Might as well get the busy work out of the way now rather than later, right? Along with that, I made up the credits for everything I use in the main game as well as in School Mode, which took way longer than I expected. So now if I add anything to the game, I can plop the credit(s) for it right in the game. Nice to have that all set up.

While I was in 'busy work' mode I went ahead and converted all of the songs in the game to the .ogg file extension. Unfortunately, that also took far longer than anticipated. Originally, I tried to batch convert them, but for some reason they came out bigger after I converted them. I knew that couldn't be right, so I tried converting one individually, and it came out smaller. So I ended up converting every single song in the game to .ogg individually. It was a painful process, to say the least. But at least it's over and done with.

Now, I still have some graphical prep work left to do for School Mode, but I'm nearing the finish line as far as that's concerned (thank God). To give you an idea of just how much work has gone into that... I said in the last update that the game had about 1,650 pictures in it and 125 songs. Yeah, both of those numbers have gone way up since then. We're now sitting at approximately 2,250 pictures and 235 songs. Music-wise that's pretty much it. One or two songs might get added between now and the final product but 99% of it is right there, already in the game. On the other hand, I've still got plenty of pictures to make and add to the game. I imagine by the time I'm finished with my prep work that number will be more like 2,450 pictures. And then there's whatever I have to make in the future to consider.

So yeah. The game's gotten big. But I cannot emphasize enough how nice it is to have so much of it done and ready so I don't have to worry about any of this crap later.

Speaking of how big the game's gotten, I just compressed the game data to get an idea of how big of a download it'll turn out to be once the final game is completed. Considering that pictures take up much less space than music, we're probably looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.15 GB to 1.30 GB (it's sitting at 1.04 GB right now). Not terrible for a game with so much freakin' music and so many friggin' pictures.

Now after all that, you're probably thinking "holy heck what the heck is so special about School Mode that it has so much unique stuff devoted to it?!" You'll have to wait to find out. But I do want to emphasize that even though it has a lot of things made/used just for it, it's going to be significantly shorter than the main game. I know that kind of goes without saying, but I think I should just re-emphasize that in spite of the large volume of materials it uses. It will be decently meaty. Probably around 4 to 10 hours long depending on you (how much of it you want to do/see). But that's nowhere close to how long the main game is shaping up to being.

Also, I want to say that the scope of this project is now locked down. School Mode has become a pretty sizable undertaking in its own right, so I want to say for the record that the game isn't getting any bigger than this. There's the main game, and then there's School Mode. That's it. I'm not going to go "well, actually the game could use one more chapter and another bonus mode". Everything has been planned out and finalized. Once both of these things are done, the whole thing's done and I'm finally free.

But real talk, I just hope this ends up being as much fun to play as it has been to make. It's been a struggle from time to time, but I'm doing my best to make this something that lives up to the Danganronpa name.

Now then, the next time I update, I had better have the School Mode prep done as well as the editing I was doing before I switched over to doing prep. This whole part of the process has been going on for way too long. I'm dying to get back to writing new content and making sure that I haven't lost my touch. But I guess we'll see, because I told myself that an update ago, and look where we are now. But in all seriousness, I really am finally nearing the end of this long process. Just gotta push a little more!

Until next time!