At long last, Jurassic June is once again upon us, meaning that I feel more excited and motivated than ever to continue working on our dinosaur-themed murder mystery GENBA no Kizuna! And given that we’re planning to finish it up this year, I think it’s also the perfect time to really start spending more thought on its release and to take the whole marketing side a little more seriously.
If you didn’t know yet, the Steam page for our little VN project is actually up already, which also features a trailer, so if you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check it out and add it to your wishlist!
With a proper store presence and a now much more precise idea of what the final product is going to be like, I’m currently in the process of slowly editing things everywhere accordingly, such as on the Lemma Soft Forums where the GENBA topic, at long last, now also displays the updated feature list, trailer and new screenshots. An update that was long overdue, to be honest…
This type of stuff, including all the social media shenanigans, really isn’t my thing at all, but somehow, we gotta gain people’s attention, so I’ll be trying harder from here on out, using our social medias more often and finding new places to spread the word. And on that note, it’d be greatly appreciated if you could help in this endeavor, even if it’s through something as simple as a Retweet!
Of course, our primary focus will remain on the actual development of the project, as that’s the most important, so with that in mind, let’s get into this week’s progress report already:
Natsu has continued with her coding duties and about two thirds of the penultimate chapter are basically playable now.
Meanwhile, I’m still busy wrapping up the final set of investigations routes, which I really want to have done by the end of this month to finally check off chapter 4 as complete! We’ve been chugging away on this one for a while now, so I think it’s about time I share a bit more about it and give you some stats, so that you can get a better idea of why it’s been taking us so long to finish it up…
First of all, since the beginning, I’ve always talked about GENBA consisting of a total of “five chapters”, but as I’ve mentioned on a few occasions now, the term “chapter” isn’t really all that adequate anymore. Instead, I think it’s best to describe the structure of the game as “five phases”, each of which contains a number of chapters. So, essentially, the overall structure goes like this:
Preparation Phase > 1st Investigation Phase > 1st Confrontation Phase > 2nd Investigation Phase > 2nd Confrontation Phase.
Now, there are also what I refer to as “Social Phases” and “Intermission Phases”, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s start off the with “Preparation Phase”. As the name suggests, it’s the first part of the game in which you are introduced to all the characters, learn about the case and get ready for the actual investigation. If you add the prologue to it, it’s about 50,000 words long.
Then we get to the first actual “Investigation Phase”. Here, you can choose between four “Investigation Routes”. Each of our four main characters has their own tasks to tackle. Keiichi interviews the witnesses and Himatsu the suspects, while Rei investigates the scene and Shinketsu examines the body. You can tackle these four routes in any order, but they all need to be completed to advance to the next phase and further progress the story. This next phase is the first “Social Phase”. It’s a relatively short segment in which you get a chance to talk to your fellow investigators and learn a bit more about them. This “Social Phase” is mandatory, but not all of them are. Sometimes, you can just skip chatting to your teammates and move on with the investigation, if you wish.
I see the “Social Phase” as a conclusion to the first “Investigation Phase” and therefore count it as one unit, which I previously referred to as a “chapter”, but really… the four investigation routes and the conclusion following them can really be seen as five separate chapters. But either way, everything together amounts to around 60,000 words!
We then move on to the first “Confrontation Phase”. Here, you confront the suspects with your findings and see how they respond. It’s all about unraveling mysteries, coming up with theories and providing evidence to back it all up. By the end of it, there is another “Social Phase”, allowing you to check in on your teammates once more, but this time, you may choose to skip that and go directly to your supervisor for a final scene that wraps this part of the story up. The shortest one, by the way, amounting to about 28,000 words.
Now we get to the second “Investigation Phase”, the one we are currently still working on and by far the longest part in the game.
Whereas the first “Investigation Phase” only consisted of one set of investigation routes, this one consists of multiple!
You begin by being able to choose between all four investigators again. After clearing all of their routes, you enter the next “Social Phase” which is actually quite a bit longer this time, as it represents a core aspect of the entire project. There are difficulties and the investigation comes to a halt, so you need to talk to your team members and figure out a way how to fix their individual issues and continue on. Once this is done, you get another set of four routes, one for each investigator. Complete these and what follows is a lengthy scene that wraps this part of the investigation up, which I call “Intermission Phase”. It’s not about getting closer to your team this time, it’s about everyone putting their heads together and formulating a new strategy as to how to proceed. Which leads us into yet another set of investigation routes, but this time only three. Since the medical examiner can no longer contribute through the examination of the body, he joins up with our forensics expert. Finish up these three routes and there is another “Intermission Phase”, which leads into the final set of investigation routes, this time only two, as more characters team up to share a route.
Finally, once these two routes are complete, you get one more “Social Phase” to conclude this very long second “Investigation Phase”, before moving on to confront the suspects one final time and lay to light the full truth of the case.
So, with all that said, I hope you can now see why this “penultimate chapter” (as I’ve been referring to it thus far) takes so long to complete. If you count every “Investigation Route”, “Social Phase” and “Intermission Phase” as a separate chapter, then… we’re actually talking about essentially seventeen chapters here!! Now, that might sound shockingly high, but please keep in mind that some of these are shorter than others, with a couple being no longer than 2,000 words or even less. Furthermore, there is a lot of background investigation going on here, so I’ve written tons of commentary for when you click on various parts of the backgrounds to examine them, and not all of it is story-relevant.
Honestly, I will be curious myself to see how long it will take to play through the whole second “Investigation Phase” and what the differences will be between just doing what’s necessary to move onwards and reading all it has to offer.
Anyway, it’s not completely done yet, but, as of right now, it’s 80,000 words long, bringing us to a current total of 218,000 words!
I can’t really give you any estimates on the final “Confrontation Phase” yet, but I can say for sure that it’s going to be a whole lot shorter again, probably around the same length as the first “Confrontation Phase”.
So yeah, hopefully, this gives you a much better idea now of the scope of the game, its structure and why it’s been taking so long!
I will share some more info in the upcoming weeks, but for today, I think I’ll leave it at this and get right back to work, so…
As always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
