Hello, once again everyone! Happy Valentine's day and a hopeful February to you all. I have a half-decent bit of news to share in this update, and I'm extremely exhausted at the moment after working on Danganronpa Team for the past five hours straight or thereabouts (it felt much longer, granted I should have been tucked in bed and asleep four or five hours ago), so let's get right into it.

Firstly, regarding general progress, I am pleased to announce that the very long and arduous editing pass (which was heavily delayed due to the ungodly amount of prep work I did for school mode and so forth) is finally finished. That's right. Everything written thus far is finally in half-presentable shape.



Me ^

I'm not sure if I've mentioned previously, but I do have some new beta testers on hand. Partially because one of my beta testers (and a good friend of mine) had to drop out due to simply being too busy. But also in part because I wanted to push out a new beta release to commemorate this occasion, especially considering that some major changes had been made to the prologue and chapter one in particular, and I needed some new people who were ready and willing to play through it.

Thus far, they've been pointing out more mistakes than I expected. As I always say, you can never have too much editing. Case in point, while some of these errors were things I simply missed, some were errors that I made while I was editing. So, yeah. Always something to be fixed.

That being said, the Prologue and Chapter One are now two steps away from being done. For good. The first of the remaining steps is of course to fix anything my beta testers going through now pick up on. The final step is for after the entire game is done when I do one final editing pass. There are a few things I need to implement on that editing pass, along with trying to pick up on any lingering errors. I will have one final new beta tester with me for that pass to assist me (who is already on board and everything).



Also me ^

That said we now approach quite possibly the most difficult part of this game's development, depending on how things go from here. It has been... What, nearly a year since I last wrote anything new for the game? Though I've re-read everything and feel like I have a good grasp of all the characters and their mannerisms and so forth once again, I still can't help but doubt that I've still 'got it'. Getting back into the groove of writing is going to be difficult indeed. Then again, I believe it felt the same way every time I started writing a new scene for this game. Every single time I felt like "oh, this is the scene where it's all going to come apart and I simply won't be able to write anymore". But once I got a few lines into each scene, that fear dissipated and I felt confident once more.

Let's hope nothing has changed between then and now.

But as I've mentioned before, there's a larger issue at hand. I've forgotten how chapter two's murder plays out. In particular, there is one major twist that baffles me. I fail to remember how it's supposed to go. How it's supposed to make sense. So I've got to re-figure that out now. Which is... quite anxiety-inducing, honestly. I'll attempt to think it through while I'm at work, seeing as I've naught better to think about for eight consecutive hours each work day. Hopefully that'll be more than enough time to figure it out again. And hey, maybe I'll think of a way to improve the twist in the process! It's happened before!

But that will have to wait at least until tomorrow. Considering that I will be going into work tonight on a meager amount of sleep, I won't exactly be in prime shape to think things through. Better to do it once I've gotten a good night's rest, eh?



Yes, I'm running out of ideas for pictures to use for this blog post, but this one is actually relevant.

Some other miscellaneous things to note. Along with adding new poses and expressions throughout the entire game thus far for Angie, Bacon, Kyou, Makina, and Yukari, I've taken the liberty of making expressions for Okabe. It was bugging me that of the few characters remaining who do not have multiple sprites, Okabe was one of them. But it's not as though multiple sprites existed for him. There was only the one. So I made him a variety of new sprites simply by fiddling with that one sprite. Of course, with the limitations of that, some of his new expressions are more subtle than not, but I feel that suits him well. Suffice to say, what I've got on hand now is a huge improvement over what I had before.

With that, the only characters remaining who do not have multiple sprites are Charles, TK, and Foxy. And I'm fine with that. Charles is... well, he's a real person, so there's no way for me to have multiple sprites for him with any real consistency. TK doesn't even have a face to show, so we're not missing out on much by only having a single sprite for him. And Foxy is different enough from the rest of the characters that I don't feel like it detracts terribly from his character to only have one sprite.

So in short, I'm pretty happy with the sprite situation as it is now. And thank God for that. Going back through everything and putting in expressions and such for characters who only had one sprite before was a giant pain.

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I don't even have any more pictures to show and I'm far too tired to scrounge up any more, so let's just pretend that those three dashes are a meaningful way to break up these paragraphs.

One final thing before I sign off for this update. I don't have anything to show at the moment, but as you're all well aware, I am the sole person working on this game. Aside from the beta testing, I've been doing everything myself. That's changed very slightly. I've enlisted a friend (who is a pretty good artist with her own style) to help out with two pieces of art for the game.

The first is Danganronpa Team's box art. That's right, we're getting cover art. I can finally be rid of that garish logo at the top of the game's page. Not that I dislike that little header image all that much, but I think a much better image to represent the game is in order. And what better way to represent a game than through cover art? The second piece of art I'm having my artist friend draw is the game's final title screen. I believe I have mentioned at some point before that the game's title screen image changes throughout the game. What I'm talking about is the final final title screen. The one you get after completing not just the base game, but school mode as well. The final send off, if you will.

I haven't asked for either of these pieces to be finished by a certain date for the time being, as the game itself doesn't have anything remotely resembling a deadline and is still far from finished. But I would certainly like to get the cover art sooner rather than later for display purposes and whatnot. So we'll see whether or not I feel like pestering her about it in the upcoming months.

A few words of warning though regarding the cover art. The design is already laid out. I know what I want and it's all pretty clean cut. Not a lot of room for it to deviate from my mental image of it. Do not expect this to be like other Danganronpa games' cover art. The other Danganronpas had relatively straightforward pieces of cover art. They showed off all the characters. They were stylish, often colorful, and overall pretty cool.

I thought about different variants of that as I was conceptualizing Danganronpa Team's cover art. Different ways I could shove the whole cast into one image without making anyone seem insignificant. I considered all the different perspectives and settings that could be used, but none of it really felt right to me. And then I finally struck upon what did feel right and it totally defied my expectations. It doesn't feature the whole cast. It's not straightforward (in the sense that you'll be able to look at it and immediately understand all of the different pieces of it). It's not particularly vibrant or colorful. And it's not really complex. In fact, it's quite simple. I know I'm being quite the tease with this, but it really isn't at all what I was expecting it to end up like.

So that being said, perhaps it would be best to not expect much? Expect to be disappointed, depending on how much you liked the other Danganronpa games' covers. But in spite of how contradictory it is (not putting the whole cast on the cover of a game emphasizing the team, for instance) I do feel that it's the best fit for Danganronpa Team. And though you won't be able to wholly make sense of it at first, I guarantee that you will be able to by the end of the game.

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And now I've talked for far, far too long. I must get some sleep. Wish me well as I dive back into chapter two. I honestly don't know how things will go from here on out, so I can't make any promises. Not that I've been good at keeping my promises thus far in the first place, so perhaps that's for the best. But do wish me luck. I've got some thinking and some writing to do.

See you all in a month or so.