As the title of this post already gave away, this past week, I’ve been primarily concerned with testing GENBA no Kizuna and refining it!
Basically, I’ve started to go through the entire game from the beginning again to check if everything is in order, both on a technical level and regarding the script. I also had a list of things to retroactively add, remove or change, which I’ve compiled while working on the last two chapters. You know, stuff like foreshadowing or hinting at a reveal that happens later in the game, or removing dialogue from the earlier chapters, because it made more sense for the topic to be discussed in the later ones.
One of my main goals here is also to bring more consistency to the writing and characters. For instance, some members of our cast developed certain speech quirks only later on in the writing process, so they aren’t present in the beginning of the story, which is something I obviously wanted to fix.
Another major goal is “precision”. I’ve looked at certain details regarding the case and the mystery and rephrased them in order to ensure that there wouldn’t be any ambiguity. Sometimes, a single word can have an immense impact on the overall meaning and implications of a sentence after all. And with a long and complex murder mystery such as this, it’s really important to pay close attention to the details, so that players have a good and fair chance to properly figure things out and won’t get unintentionally led astray by poor wording.
Anyway, I’ve gone through the first three chapters now, but that was really just the quick and easy part. Given that I’ve never actually played the final two chapters myself before, this is where the real work is gonna start! And I already know of a bunch of things that definitely need to be adjusted a bit more…
Still, we’re well on our way now to finally get the full game ready for our beta-testers! I can’t say how much longer it will take, but I’ll try my hardest to get this done ASAP. I mean, it’s almost Jurassic June now and we’re SO CLOSE to the end…
As such, I’m gonna get right back to work now, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
