Since I’m (sadly) back from my trip now and have a bit more time on my hands, today, we can finally continue where we left off a couple of weeks ago when I started talking about the inception of our latest visual novel release SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair.
So, if you haven’t checked out the previous post yet, or you simply gotta refresh your memory a bit, be sure to check it out here!
But with that out of the way, let’s delve deeper into how Saku grew into something bigger and more complex than originally intended…
- Evolution
As mentioned in Part I, Saku simply started out as a silly little idea to help me chill out and rediscover my joy for writing during a time when I was facing some severe roadblocks with the script for GENBA no Kizuna. And once those roadblocks were overcome, my focus fully returned to our dino murder mystery, while Raiko and Co.’s onsen shenanigans were mostly pushed to the side.
They weren’t forgotten, however. And neither was Withering Without Hope, the proper sequel to the original SHINRAI, which had consistently been on my mind all throughout GENBA‘s development as well. And one thing that eventually became very clear to me about WWH was the fact that… I was trying to do way too much with that project.
While I mainly wanted to tell a new tale with a new murder case and a bunch of new characters, each with their own back stories, I also didn’t want to forget about the previous project. We’ve got a bunch of teenagers here that got involved in something truly traumatizing and it wouldn’t have felt right to just superficially address it, never mind hand-wave it completely. But while I was thinking about the aftermath of Broken Beyond Despair and all its aspects I would have liked to delve into, I really began to struggle figuring out how to do so in an adequate fashion while also keeping the focus on all the new stuff.
And that’s when I thought about that onsen project again and had an idea: what if I’d take it more seriously and turn it into a “real” story? A school trip was actually the perfect setting to address many of the consequences of that horrifying Halloween night. So, rather than forcefully shove them into WWH, maybe the better idea was to simply dedicate a separate, shorter project to them? That way, I could tackle them in more detail than would have otherwise been the case, while WWH could keep its primary focus on the new case!
Plus, handling things this way would also make WWH more accessible to complete newcomers, as it’s obviously harder to sell a game that’ll definitely require peeps to first play everything that came before in order to fully appreciate the new thing…
Anyway, it didn’t really take me long to make a decision, as I was very happy with this solution and so, my silly little onsen idea was infused with a lot of stuff from the early parts of WWH, thus resulting in SHINRAI Saku as you now know it!
Despite how enthused I was, however, there were also many worries about going down this route. But those will be the topic of Part III!
For now, it’s time to come to a close again, so please enjoy the rest of your weekend, have a terrifying start into spooky month and, until next time, take care ^w^
