Last week, we took a look back at the entire past year in our 2022 retrospect, so, today, it’s time to shift our focus towards the future and delve into our plans for the new year ahead, which we sure as heck intend to make a really successful and exciting one!
As mentioned last time, our major goal for 2023 is to finally release our next murder mystery visual novel GENBA no Kizuna!
Right now, we’re working really hard on finishing up the penultimate chapter. The script is almost entirely done, but there are still some major art assets missing, including a CG and two rather detailed backgrounds. As such, it’s going to take a bit longer until it will be fully playable. I think we’re about as far with it as we were with the second chapter around this same time last year, so hopefully, we’re also going to wrap it up around the same time, which would be somewhere in late March.
Since GENBA is not going to have an epilogue chapter as SHINRAI did, there will only be one last chapter left afterwards.
Fortunately, it will require barely any new assets and it’s also going to be one of the shortest chapters in the game, probably around the same length as the third one.
It’s always difficult to estimate how long things are going to take, so I sadly can’t give a definite release date yet. All I can do is look at how much we accomplished last year and take my best guess under the assumption that we manage to keep up that same pace. Which would mean that I will have a much better idea of the release date somewhere around June/July.
Ideally, it’d be nice to announce the release date (which I actually do have two preferred ones in mind for) during Jurassic June and, from that point onward, only have to worry about polishing, refining, testing and really just gearing up for the release.
That’s the basic idea for the first half of the year. At least in terms of actual VN development.
Sadly, releasing a game requires a lot more than just making it. During the next few weeks and months, I will also have to dedicate time towards the whole marketing side of things and the first goal in that regard is to get our Steam store page launched!
It’s actually mostly set up already. All that’s currently left to do is to edit a trailer together, which is taking longer than I thought it would. Aside from experiencing a number of technical issues (such as the software not working as intended or my editing laptop acting up), it’s just really difficult to choose which footage of the game to include and how to present it in the most exciting way.
I’ll probably talk about this a bit more once the trailer is done and the store page live, which hopefully isn’t going to take much longer.
Even in that regard, however, it’s difficult to give an exact date, since everything first needs to be approved by Valve as well.
I did already go ahead and updated our itch store page along with the GENBA section here on our website! The trailer may not be there yet, but I have added new screenshots and revised the feature descriptions to reflect what you’ll eventually see on Steam.
Now, what else is there to do?
As always, I wanted to draw a New Year‘s illustration, but with everything else on my plate, it needs to be taken care of on the side, so sadly, I cannot show it to you today. There’s the Lunar New Year still coming up, though, so I’m aiming to have it done by then!
I think that about wraps up our general plans for the coming months. During the next few weeks, I will elaborate a bit more on the specifics as to what’s still left to do in order to finish chapter four. Also, I naturally do have plans already all the way up until the end of the year, but for now, I just want to focus on getting GENBA out there at long last. Once that is done, we can talk about what’s next.
Now, even without a New Year‘s illustration to go along with it, Natsu and I naturally want to wish you a happy, productive, successful, safe, healthy and enjoyable 2023! Let’s all make this a great year and give it our best to realize our dreams, shall we? :3
