There she is! Our grumpy little detective as she will appear in our new project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair!
Mar 15
Weekly Update #553: GUI Progress
A little while ago, I gave you a first WIP-look at the textbox design in our new project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair.
And today, I can share with you the updated and final version of it, so… here you go!
Mar 13
Spring Sale 2025
Today, the annual Spring Sale begins, lasting for exactly one week until March 20, 10:00 AM PST! In other words, you get yet another chance to grab both our murder mysteries (and their complete soundtracks) at a discount and enjoy the beginnings of spring with lovely moments of murder and beautiful bouts of despair, as you mull over myriads of mysteries!
If that sounds like your kinda jam, then head over to Steam or itch right away and fill up your digital cart! GENBA no Kizuna and its OST are available for 20% off and SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair and its OST for 50%!
There’s also a soundtrack bundle available for both games, allowing you to save an additional 10%!
And if you’re unsure whether either of our VNs is for you, why not check out some player impressions? You can read people’s thoughts on SHINRAI here and on GENBA here!
Mar 08
Farewell, Xolf
Today’s blog post is going to be a little different. About a week ago, I received the incredibly sad news that Xolf, a fellow VN dev, mod for the Mystery Gamedev community, and a very good friend has unexpectedly passed away on February 22nd, 2025.
If you’ve been around the English VN community for a while, chances are that the name sounds familiar to you. Xolf not only supported a number of VN developers as a fan and financial backer, he eventually became actively involved in many a project as a beta-tester, proofreader and even a developer himself.
He helped out with many of ebi-hime‘s projects, for instance, and as a member of NoBread Studio, worked as a co-writer and coder on Blankspace and The Elevator Game with Catgirls. He also participated in itch.io‘s 2023 Spooktober Jam as part of the Mystery Gamedev team, contributing to the creation and success of Reaplaced, which ended up winning third place.
You might have also seen his name pop up in the credits of our very own project GENBA no Kizuna, as he supported and partially funded development through his Patreon contributions and helped us out as a proofreader and tester for the demo version.
Therefore, I’ve decided to skip our regular weekly update today and instead dedicate this post to him.
Mar 01
Weekly Update #552: Plans For March
Once again, I’m shocked to realize how quickly time flies by. Not only are we into the third month of 2025 already, but it’s also been half a year now since the release of GENBA no Kizuna! Originally, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect a bit more on it, especially since we’ve received a little wave of feedback again recently.
However, I’ve decided to hold off on that for a little longer, partially for reasons that will become clear in a couple of days and partially because, today, I’d just like to focus on SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair again. Last night, I’ve made some pretty significant progress on it, after all! Namely… writing the final lines of script before the credits roll!
Feb 22
Weekly Update #551: Script, Sprite & GUI Progress
This past week has been a rather productive one in regards to our next VN project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair!
As mentioned last time, I’m still primarily focused on the script and have finally wrapped up the longest and most complex scene of the project now (the one I’ve teased to have a bit of a mystery element to it). With that taken care of, there are actually only two more convo scenes left before the story concludes. That said, though, I also still have some stuff to go back to in the earlier part of the story, which I couldn’t quite finish until getting a better idea of how the later stuff is going to play out.
Nevertheless, we’re getting closer now to the point where the writing tasks can move a bit into the background, while the focus can shift to other things, such as art assets and GUI design. Two areas I’ve also did a bit of work on this week!
Feb 15
Weekly Update #550: Another New Character!
Say hello to Misaki, another new addition to the SHINRAI cast! You may remember hearing her name in Broken Beyond Despair a few times. Originally, she was supposed to make her debut in Withering Without Hope, but you will now get a slightly sooner introduction to her in our little in-between project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair!
Feb 08
Weekly Update #549: Chara Intro Card Preview
Although I still haven’t fully recovered yet, this past week certainly was a lot more productive again than the previous one!
As you might remember, last week, I talked about picking a new resolution for our next visual novel project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair and we’ve now settled on dimensions of 1920×1080, so quite a bit larger than GENBA no Kizuna‘s 1280×720!
Based on these new dimensions, I’ve already started working on some assets, including the character introduction cards.
You may have already seen me post a little preview on social media, but of course, I wanna share it here as well, so…
Feb 01
Weekly Update 548: Another Quick Progress Update
This past week, I’ve unfortunately been struggling with some health-related issues (and currently still am), so progress has been a bit slow and I didn’t get nearly as much done in terms of writing as I wanted to, since I’ve just been unable to concentrate. I did, however, tackle some other tasks that didn’t require that much brain power and have at least finished up another base sprite!
Well, more or less. There might be some details that still need to be fixed, but that’s always easier to tell after having distanced myself from it for a bit. But anyway, if you’re a 5$+ patron, you can now check out this new sprite preview right here!
Other things I’ve thought about and played around with is the new screen resolution. With a new project, we have the opportunity to once again adjust things a little and, as much as I personally hate it, screens and monitors just keep getting bigger and bigger, so I guess we need to really go with the times, as even GENBA‘s resolution has been outdated for a pretty long while now it seems…
But yeah, gotta settled on the resolution first before we can work on things like the user interface, so it’s an important decision!
That’s about all I can say at the moment, though. Feeling like I got run over by a Gallimimus stampede and headbutted by a Pachycephalosaurus, but I’ll try to get a few more things done before I once again rest.
I hope you find yourself in much better shape this weekend and can enjoy it to the fullest! Until next Saturday, take care :3
Jan 25
Weekly Update #547: Quick Saku Progress Update
Work on our next VN project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair continues, with the primary objective still being to get the script done ASAP. Thus, I’ve dedicated most of this past week to writing again and have gotten pretty far into the story now, with the total length of it currently being ~26,000 words.
Going by my outline, there are two more major parts to tackle, before this little tale comes to a close, including the little “mystery segment” I’ve teased a couple of times before. And since this next part is going into that kinda direction, it’ll probably also be the most challenging and intricate to write. I do hope to get it done before the end of the month, though.
In any event, once these last two parts are written, I still need to make some adjustments to previous scenes and fill in some gaps I’ve had to leave in the script for now. Nevertheless, it’s getting very close to being fully readable, at which point development can finally shift more to the asset-side of things.
Speaking of assets, though, I did also do some side work on the characters again. Last Sunday, I published a Patreon preview of the base sprite of one of our newcomers, Ritsu Asatsui. And now I’ve moved on to working on the sprite for his sister Shizue.
So yeah, even though I still don’t really have anything to publically show, progress is going pretty well!
I actually hope to get a bit more done today, which is why I’ll call it quits here and return to work.
As always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
