In the last few blog posts, I talked about the conception of GENBA no Kizuna and how it evolved over the course of its development.
Today, I’d like to start getting into the development process itself, the challenges we faced and the lessons we’ve learned.
And I thought I’d begin by answering a question we’ve been getting a lot over the last few years: why did it take so long?
Development on SHINRAI started in September of 2013 and the final product was released on August 26, 2016.
In other words, it took us almost exactly three years. GENBA on the other hand was only released on August 26 of this year…
so a whole eight years after SHINRAI! How in Pangaea did that happen!?
And it becomes seemingly even more unfathomable when you consider that on August 26, 2021, we released the full first chapter of GENBA for beta-testing! Meaning that it took us “only” three years to complete chapters 2, 3, 4, 5 and all the bonus content.
Which isn’t actually that bad. In fact, it seems pretty swift given that GENBA is twice as big as SHINRAI!
Essentially, we finished almost two SHINRAIs in the last three years. So I guess the bigger question here isn’t why GENBA as a whole took eight years, but rather: why did its first chapter take 5 to complete!?
Well, there is a number of reasons for that, so let’s go over them one by one, shall we?
- Post-Launch Support For SHINRAI
First of all, it’s not like we immediately jumped into development of a new project the very moment SHINRAI was released.
What followed first was a bit of a “down time” in which we had to tackle various post-launch-related tasks, such as providing Mac and Linux versions of the game, fixing bugs and typos discovered by players, or simply spreading the word about our project.
Since we had never commercially released anything before, we found ourselves in uncharted territory and had to learn and deal with a lot of previously foreign things to us. It seems so simple now, but setting up our first Halloween sale, for instance, was kind of an intimidating task back then! We still had to figure out and get used to a lot of the intricacies of Steam.
Not to mention, after all that stress, particularly the pre-release crunch, we were really exhausted and wanted to take some time to cool down, so for the rest of 2016, we really took it slow and primarily focused on further supporting SHINRAI and relaxing a bit.
That said, I had already started to work on some character designs here and there, but it really wasn’t until January 2017 that we officially dove into the development of our next project! Or rather, our next two projects…
- Taking On Too Much At Once
That’s right, not only did we start to work on GENBA, but also on the actual SHINRAI sequel. You can still find some old Tumblr posts in which I shared my progress on the updated sprites for Raiko, Nobara and Henjin as well as the very first background art of Withering Without Hope and even some first drafts of its script over on Patreon!
Back then, GENBA was still supposed to be a very small spin-off thing, so working on two projects simultaneously didn’t seem so overwhelming. In fact, it was kinda liberating. Spending three entire years fully focused on one single project was very monotonous and even frustrating at times. I’m a creative and constantly get new ideas. Moreover, the change in seasons or the stuff I get into can temporarily alter my mood and what I feel like working on. So I had often needed to force myself to stay loyal to SHINRAI, even though I would’ve preferred to work on a full-on horror project or maybe even something cute and fluffy instead.
As such, I felt kinda trapped and, while it sure was nice to keep making constant progress, often desired a change of pace.
Therefore, when it came to our next project, I figured that, this time around, maybe it would help to at least work on two different projects with very different themes and moods in order to kept things fresh and interesting.
Besides, I had often heard the advice to do exactly that for further benefits. For example, if you work on at least two projects and get stuck on one, rather than try to brute force a solution, you could just switch to the other, make progress on that and let your mind work something out in the process. And truth be told, this actually works! Maybe not for everyone, but it certainly does for me.
There were many times when I ran into an issue with GENBA and, no matter how many hours I spent aggressively pondering it, I couldn’t find a satisfying solution. But then, while working on some art assets for WWH, said solution would just randomly pop into my head. Because even though you’re not actively thinking about it, your brain still tries to work things out in the back.
So yeah, that’s what I did for essentially an entire year: alternating between these two new projects. And I certainly had a lot of fun!
However, around mid-2018, I began to realize just how big GENBA was becoming. It was no longer that short little murder mystery about two dead bodies in a back alley. It had ballooned into a story of equal proportions to SHINRAI. And, at that point, I started to reconsider my approach. Because if I continued working on two SHINRAI-length projects at the same time, of course it’d take twice as long until both of them would be done. Thus, I made the decision to prioritize what I still considered to be the smaller project of the two and that was when development shifted almost entirely to GENBA only (I still kept working on WWH, but to a significantly lesser degree. It really took a backseat compared to before, when both projects had been weighed equally).
Long story short, GENBA could’ve been done a whole lot earlier if I had done that from the start: just focus on it alone.
But of course, that’s far from the only reason it wasn’t released earlier. A bigger one really was just how big GENBA itself turned out to be. At that point, I didn’t know yet, but as stated above, it would ultimately become even twice as big as SHINRAI!
And with everything else going on in my life at the time, it would get very difficult to fully dedicate myself to it…
However, that will be what we’ll get into next time. For now, I’m afraid I’ll have to come to a close here.
So please enjoy the rest of your weekend, continue to have a super spooky time and, until next Saturday, take care ^w^
