As mentioned in last week’s blog post, I’m currently working on all the extra content for SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair, which includes everything you’ll be able to read in the notebook: trivia, diary entries and character profiles.
After already having finished the former two categories by last Saturday, this past week, I’ve mostly dedicated myself to writing up the profiles. And while they aren’t entirely done yet, I’ve certainly made some good progress!
I have to admit that I got temporarily distracted by another task, however, which I had almost forgotten about: achievements.
Now, with a kinetic visual novel that’s on the shorter side, there really isn’t all that much you can do, obviously. Nevertheless, I wanted to give it some thought and see what I could come up with, as I personally enjoy achievement unlocks very much.
I don’t want to say too much about it yet, as we need to see if we can get some of them to work the way I intend, but I ultimately did come up with a good number of them, given the size of the project. And rest assured, there’ll be at least one Jurassic Park reference to be found in them again, too…!
More importantly, though, I guess this is actually a good time to clarify one thing about Saku regarding its kinetic nature:
I may… have lied about that a little. Though I didn’t even know myself at the time!! This project was definitely planned to be 100% kinetic with no choices or player input whatsoever. But in the end, I did slip in a singular choice around the halfway mark of the game.
It’s nothing major that will cause a drastic change, never mind lead to a different ending. It only affects one particular scene. But it made too much sense to me to leave that moment in the player’s hands and let them decide what they want Raiko to do. And so, I’ve decided to also tie two of the achievements to it.
Other than that, however, the game still remains a kinetic experience, so I guess I’ll have to change the store page description from “entirely kinetic” to “almost entirely kinetic” or something along those lines, haha.
Anyway, outside of simply coming up with the achievements, I also gotta whip up achievement icons and come up with names and descriptions, so this was a little bit more complex of a task, but certainly a fun one. But we’ll talk about that more once everything can be fully set in stone!
Now then, time for me to get back to work, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
(PS: Angie Lumine’s GENBA stream continued last Monday and it was once again a ton of fun! We’re getting close to wrapping up Phase IV now, but there’s still some time to catch up before the grand finale if you wanna join us for that!)
