So, today, it’s been officially seven whole years since our murder mystery SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair was first released.
Which means that it’s been ten years since we started turning a story into a visual novel, that I have written twelve years ago!
I could start ranting again about the quick, unrelenting passage of time and honestly feel very much inclined to, but… let’s not!
Instead, I just want to focus on one simple yet very rad fact. Namely that I have finally begun work on the final chapter of our upcoming visual novel project GENBA no Kizuna!
With this kind of topic and occasion, I always feel an urge to address why our second project has been taking so incredibly long, when the first was completed in just three years. However, for the time being, I will continue to hold off on that and save it for a proper deep dive in a post-mortem once GENBA is actually out. A reality that’s, excitingly, no longer that far off!
This past week, I’ve taken care of the last few things regarding the final investigation phase. Just yesterday, Solo also sent me the newest BGM track which was the only thing missing to complete the zip package for Natsu. In other words, I can finally send it to her for coding! It’ll take some more time for her to actually get there, however, as she’s still busy making the previous investigation routes playable. Still, my work on GENBA‘s “penultimate chapter” is now done, which is why I’ve moved on to the grand finale!
Over the last few days, I’ve dedicated myself to script work again, translating the keywords from my outline into actual dialogues. Keiichi and the other members of the investigation team are now facing our group of suspects and have begun to lay out what truly transpired at the Kaseki residence. So we’ve got a very similar situation going here as in SHINRAI‘s “Revelation” chapter.
There’s still a lot of work ahead, of course, but I’m stoked to have finally reached this point! The moment when all the investigating is done and it’s all about getting to the answers, determining the killer and learning about their motive. I can’t yet say how long it’ll take to finish this final chapter, or even how long the chapter itself is gonna be, but I will have some more clarity on that very soon.
I was honestly hoping to be able to give you a release date today, for this special occasion, but yeah… we’re sadly not quite there yet, so sorry about that! Things are progressing smoothly, however, and despite the usual delays, I still don’t see any reasons as to why we wouldn’t be able to achieve our goal of finishing this game before the end of the year!
I’m also sorry for thus not really having anything all too exiting to actually celebrate SHINRAI‘s 7th anniversary. Originally, I wanted to at least do some sort of special artwork again, but I ultimately decided against anything taking away time from GENBA, even little things like that. Not only to further ensure we will finish it this year, but also because, the closer we get to the end, the more motivated I am to keep working on it. I mean, after all this time, I really can’t wait to finally cross that finish line, as you can probably imagine!
Anyway, while there’s nothing to celebrate SHINRAI‘s anniversary per se, I thought I should at least share with you a few new little glimpses at the later parts of GENBA, which we’ve most recently worked on!
So there you go! As mentioned many times before, it’s become increasingly more difficult to find anything to share that’s not super spoilery, so this really is about the kinda stuff I do feel comfortable showing. At least publicly. If you’re a patron, you’ll be able to see some more stuff very soon, including some late game CG previews.
(Also, on the topic of Patreon, I’ve just released a new post there a couple of days ago (available to all tiers) in which I give a general progress update on GENBA and dive a liiiiittle bit deeper into topics such as a potential release date and the next demo release.)
This about wraps it up for today, though. We’ll celebrate properly when GENBA is gonna be released, but for now, I’m gonna get back to working on its finale! In the meantime, I hope you’re having a thoroughly enjoyable weekend! Until next Saturday, take care :3
