You know, I really thought I had covered all the reasons behind GENBA no Kizuna‘s long development time, but as it turns out, I actually forgot about one! But that’s fine, as this reason also weaves into one of the next topics I wanted to discuss. But before we get into any of that, you might want to check out the previous three parts of this series if you haven’t already: Part I, Part II, Part III.
Ready? Then let’s go!
- Audience
One key difference between GENBA and SHINRAI is that, when I was working on the latter, we didn’t have an audience yet.
SHINRAI originally came to be because I just wanted to write a little murder mystery story for Halloween to entertain my best friend.
It was never meant to be shared with anyone else. And when we eventually began to turn it into a visual novel, that honestly happened more out of convenience (and a bit of desperation) rather than anything else.
You see, when we first decided to create a VN of our own, we began working on a completely different project. One of insane proportions. It was really just too big in scope for first time devs. So, after a while, we switched gears to something smaller.
However, that too ended up becoming bigger and bigger…
After years of not making much headway and wondering if we’d ever finish anything, I suddenly had an idea: how about we would just take that story I had already written and turn that into a VN? At the very least, we then had a complete script before us and a much clearer idea of the scope. So that’s what we went with.
Now, of course, I was kinda worried about the reception upon SHINRAI‘s release. But I hadn’t been worried about it during the writing process a couple years prior. And that’s something that was very different with GENBA.
- Pressure
Somehow, against my expectations, SHINRAI ended up being very positively received. Not only that, we suddenly started gaining a dedicated little fanbase. People would follow us on social media, send us fan mail, join our Patreon to financially support us, enter our Discord and so on and so forth. And a lot of them would tell us that they were really looking forward to our next project and that they wanted to see more of SHINRAI.
To this day, the mere thought that people would feel that way about something I’ve created is so wild to me. It’s extremely flattering and makes me so incredibly happy. And I want to make absolutely clear here that I do not regret this happening at all! In fact, it’s one of the coolest feelings I’ve experienced in life!
That said, it did bring along some troubling side effects. Because when I started working on our next projects, I was no longer thinking about just writing something for fun and to hopefully entertain my best friend with. Suddenly, I was thinking about all those other people who wanted to see more from us, all with their own wishes and expectations. And that often caused me great concern.
With GENBA, I was significantly more worried about its reception than I was with SHINRAI, especially because I had purposely decided to go into a different direction. So I always worried about whether or not players would be happy with that. After all, I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. A feeling that only grew in intensity the longer it took to finish GENBA.
I mean, what’s worse than being disappointed by something you’ve been eagerly anticipating for years?
Given that it took us eight years in total… almost an entire decade… I got really scared. Along the way, we had already lost some followers and received messages of people expressing their disappointment and literally giving up on ever seeing anything else from us again and… well, those messages really stung. I’m not mad at them. On the contrary, I can fully understand and don’t blame them at all. If anything, I only blamed myself even more for being so slow and making them wait for so long.
But yeah… “if it takes so long to complete this project, it must be so much better than SHINRAI!” is what I often felt a lot of people would think. And I got scared of not living up to those expectations. Which I guess, to some degree, was justified. But that’s something I will talk more about when we finally get to discuss the reception of GENBA.
For now, I just want to sum this up by saying that all those fears and my desire to deliver “the perfect product” obviously didn’t help in getting GENBA done any quicker. I’ve always battled with perfectionism, all throughout my life. But I feel like it has only gotten much, much worse ever since the release of SHINRAI, ahahah…
The resulting pressure was downright incapacitating at times, causing me to second-guess my creative decisions over and over again and to go back and forth on whether I should do something or try to find an alternate solution… “orz
Anyway, we’ll continue this by transitioning into the truly final postmortem topic in next week’s blog post!
Until then, please take care and enjoy a pleasant remainder of your weekend :3
PS: If you’re curious how things are going with our newest project, I’ve shared some little teasers over on Bluesky recently!
Patrons should also keep their eyes peeled, as they’ll be able to see and learn a bit more about what I shared there very soon!
