So, first of all, I’d like to direct your attention once again towards our Patreon page, which we have launched just recently.
If you haven’t checked it out already, please consider doing so! It would be greatly appreciated!
I said a few more words about it in last week’s blog post, but the main reason we have decided to do this (aside from the fact that we hope to eventually increase the size of our team as well as the quality of our projects), is to hire a new composer for future titles.
In regards to SHINRAI, we were lucky enough that I was born in a family of musicians. So when I told my father about our project, he immediately offered to compose the soundtrack for us, which I am still very grateful for.
The music has always been the greatest of our worries. Natsu and I can both take care of a lot of things when it comes to the creation of a visual novel: drawing, writing, coding. But if there is one thing neither of us can do, it’s composing music (and I actually tried doing that myself as well, but the results were… inadequate at best lol).
Music is another very crucial aspect of a visual novel, however. It plays a key role in creating atmosphere and evoking emotions in the reader/player, so you definitely don’t want to leave it out. Unfortunately, if you can’t compose yourself, and you’re a new indie dev on the block with a budget of 0$, there isn’t much you can do. So I felt really fortunate to receive my father’s aid, and I truly think that he did an incredible job.
Sadly, as mentioned on our Patreon page, he has little time nowadays to actually compose music. Outside of his job, a lot of family-related issues take up his time. So while he did tell me that he would continue to create music for us, he barely gets around to it. I’ve talked with him about the first few tracks back in May and he still wasn’t able to actually start working on them (though, to be honest, I also don’t really want to burden him with that anymore on top of everything else).
So yeah… seeing as my musical talents haven’t evolved at all over these past three years, all of this means that we are once again in a rather tough spot music-wise. And this time, we have no choice but to hire a composer for our next two projects. Something which can become quite expensive, especially when talking about full-length soundtracks akin to SHINRAI’s.
I already have a couple of people in mind actually, but I won’t be getting into any details just yet. Either way, that’s basically the rest of what I had wanted to mention last week, but omitted to keep the posting a little shorter.
If you want to help us out, please check out our Patreon page. Right now, you can get access to the first art poll (where you can decide who will be featured on this year’s Halloween picture) as well as the first Patreon-only blog post (introducing a new character for our next project GENBA no Kizuna). Of course, simply sharing the page would also be really helpful and greatly appreciated!
I’m already preparing something else for patrons which will be up in the next few days. Another early look at a new character. Because, in actual update news: I’ve been working a lot on sprites over this past week (despite feeling pretty lethargic due to sickness orz”). I also might say some more about that in next week’s blog posting, so…
Until then, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and take care! :3
