Weekly Update #258: Plans For August

Alright, first of all, let’s start off with a little reminder that the extended GENBA no Kizuna demo is now available to patrons for beta-testing! If you have pledged to the 10$-tier, you can now download it here. We have already received some very useful feedback! If you’re also up for helping us out with catching some bugs and typos, correcting writing and grammar issues, and generally fine-tuning the experience, we’re all ears and would very much appreciate your feedback and suggestions!

The public demo release is planned for August 26 (which also happens to be the anniversary of SHINRAI‘s release).

Originally, we were planning to release the demo on Steam, but after thinking it over for the past couple of weeks, we have ultimately decided against it. We’re going to hold off on that until we have a better idea of when this project will be finished.

Right now, it’s unfortunately hard to tell, but it will, at the very least, take one more year. A demo release on Steam will make more sense once we’re closer to the release of the full game. There’s a number of reasons why I think that way, and I might go into them at some point in the future, but for now, I’ll leave it at that.

That said, the demo will still be released on itch.io and through a download link on MediaFire once the 26th hits!

Until then, we’d like to add as much polish as possible to the demo, so that’s what we will generally focus on throughout August. There are some tiny things we’re already aware that need to be fixed, but I’d also like to add a few more things to improve the overall presentation. Outside of that, it’s also time to update our Patreon main page description and get that Discord server going!

We will definitely have our hands full with some more preparations, but despite that, I’m also eagerly at work on the next tasks.

Now that the extended demo is basically done, I really want to focus on script writing and finish a first draft of the full story as soon as I can. That will also provide me with a better idea of the overall length of the game than my key note document. Consequently, asset-related work will kinda take a backseat for now. Which doesn’t mean I won’t be working on anything of that sort. On the contrary, I’ve already started sketching the next backgrounds and CGs, and I have even begun working on the base sprites for our two witness characters, which have not been introduced yet.

I mainly want to focus on the writing, though. So all the art stuff I’ll be working on is going to be heavily tied to that. I mean, I can’t write the investigation scenes for Rei, if I don’t have a clear image of the areas she can investigate before me, right? Same goes for Shinketsu. It’s going to be much easier to write the autopsy scenes when I have the CG of the dead body in front of me, haha.

So that’s the basic plan for not just August, but the next couple of months, I guess. I really hope that, by the end of the year, I will have a good idea of when GENBA will be finished. But for now, all I can do is try to make as much progress as I can as quickly as I can, so let’s see how things will go throughout August!

Now, as always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care! :3