A couple of days ago, we unveiled a gameplay video of our upcoming project SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair on our social medias, offering a quick glimpse at its very first scene and the newly designed notebook menu! So, in case you haven’t seen it yet, let me start off today’s post with sharing it here as well:
As you can see, we got rid of the arrow buttons in the notebook menu, which were used in both the original SHINRAI and GENBA no Kizuna to switch between entry pages. Instead, we’ve implemented a scroll bar, so that each entry now only needs one page. This change doesn’t just make things a little easier for us, it’ll hopefully also make navigation a bit simpler for you!
Anyway, we’re hard at work preparing for the release. The game build is currently still in review by Valve and, once they’ve approved it, we can finally make a proper release date announcement. As always, we’re holding back on that until there’s absolute certainty that everything is good to go from their side as well.
In the meantime, we’re continuing to apply more polish to the experience and take care of other release preparations. If you check out the store pages on itch and Steam, as well as the Saku section on this here website, you’ll notice that they’ve all got a bit of an update, now displaying more detailed information about the final release, a bunch of new screenshots and even a little trailer!
As of right now, the trailer is only watchable in those places. It’ll go public on YouTube and will be shared on our other social medias with the actual release announcement. But yeah, if you’re curious, feel free to already take a peek! Honestly, I really struggled with this one, given that the game is so short and that the vast majority of it is either a spoiler for Saku itself or for its predecessor, so yeah… there wasn’t too much option in terms of what to show off, but I hope it still provides a good enough idea of the story and vibe!
Last night, our composer Crescendo also finished her playtest and, thankfully, she really enjoyed the game! Hers was actually the first feedback I’ve gotten about the project from anyone beyond Natsu and it was a great relief. More testing and fixing needs to be done, though, and so, I’ll get right back to that now!
Do keep your eyes peeled for another post once we’ve heard back from Steam. Their verification process is only supposed to last three to five business days. From past experiences, I know they tend to take significantly longer than that, but they hopefully won’t leave us hanging until next Saturday…
Anyway, until then, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and take care! ^w^
