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Jan 04

Weekly Update #281: Plans For 2020

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to the first weekly update of an entire new decade!

As you can tell by the title, this blog post will give you a little overview of our goals for 2020. Before we get to those, however, here’s a little reminder that we have also published a rather lengthy summary of 2019. So if you haven’t seen it yet and you’re curious how last year went for us, and what we have achieved throughout it, be sure to check it out right here.

Now, without further ado, let’s jump right into our plans for the new year!

As mentioned in our retrospect, the second half of 2019 was kind of a mess and, as a result, I could barely reach any of my goals for the last couple of months. Therefore, January will be spent catching up a bit, which I have already started with. As a matter of fact, patrons can already check out the full background artwork for Ryuunosuke’s room. I spent the last two days shading, adding some textures, as well as a few more details. Although this was supposed to be done a month ago, it still feels nice to be able to complete a major asset like this during the first few days of the new year, haha.

(Patrons can check out the full BG without any sprites and textboxes covering up huge chunks of it)

With this out of the way, I will now continue working on another CG for GENBA no Kizuna, which I have already started working on last month as well. There is also the script for the investigation of Ryuunosuke’s Room, which I can finally finish writing, now that the background art is done. So those will be my main tasks during the next few weeks.

Afterwards, I will focus on our major goals for 2020 and start to slowly work towards them. There are actually two things I have in mind, at least one of which I want to accomplish by the end of August: either finish writing the script for the entire game, or get the actual game fully playable until the end of chapter 3.

I’d actually prefer reaching the second goal, which shouldn’t be too hard to do. The majority of the assets are already there, now that the extended demo is done. What we would need beyond that is the sprites for our two witness characters (which I’ve also started working on last year), a couple more sprite variations for various characters, two more backgrounds (one of which is very simple: think the “guest room door” BG from SHINRAI), two or three more CGs, and a couple additional artworks for DPA entries. It really isn’t that much, but it will still take some time to get this stuff done.

What’s going to be the bigger challenge is finishing the script, I think. Chapter two and three are going to be much shorter than the first one, but chapters four and especially five will be tough. Not because I don’t know what to write, but because structuring them will be difficult. I’m thinking particularly about the final discussion.

Either way, I will definitely work as hard as I can in order to reach at least either of these goals by August. There is still some preparation needed before I can get properly started, however, so that’s what I will spend the second half of January on. I will probably go into more detail about this in a separate blog post.

So, what else have we planned for 2020? Well, there are a couple of things I have in mind, but I think it’s a bit soon to talk about some of them. One thing I can mention, however, is that I’d like to pay a bit more attention to merchandise this year. I will work out the details with Kuna and Natsu in the coming weeks, so hopefully, it won’t be much longer until there will finally be some official SHINRAI and GENBA merch!

Anyway, I will talk in more detail about our goals over the next few weeks and months, but I wanted to give you at least an idea of what we’ve got in mind. After 2019 was kind of disappointing, I’m all fired up to make some significant progress this year!

Let’s all work hard to make 2020 a year we can be proud of! Whatever your goals are, we wish you the best of luck in achieving them!

Now, as always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3