Today, we’re once again continuing with this little blog post series about our latest release SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair!
In order to have the full context, be sure to check out Part I, Part II and Part III first, in which we discussed the project’s inception, its evolution and some of the worries tied to it, respectively.
- Marketing
As explained last time, Saku was going to be a very different project compared to what had come before and I was rather worried about how many people would even be interested in it. It wasn’t just the absence of a murder case or interactive gameplay elements, which made me feel like that, though. There was also the fact that Saku was going to be a direct continuation of Broken Beyond Despair, meaning that, in order to fully enjoy and understand Saku, players would need to play the original SHINRAI first.
Needless to say, it’s a bit harder to sell a new game to people if you tell them they gotta play this other 10-year-old visual novel with worse presentation first. Sure, there’ll always be people who will do that kinda thing (myself included) and so you could argue that releasing Saku was a good way to draw new eyes on its predecessor as well.
Nevertheless, I personally feel like the best way to handle things is to try and write a sequel in a way that allows even complete newcomers to jump in and use it as their starting point, without having to worry too much about being lost, just because they didn’t play the previous installment(s). Which is pretty much what I’m gonna do with Withering Without Hope. But with Saku, it wasn’t an option.
I’ve always seen Saku as an “additional epilogue episode” which is how I described it on the store pages. An extension of the original story, providing more closure, which you could start up immediately after seeing the credits in BBD.
- Why not DLC?
To be honest, it probably would’ve worked better as DLC and I’ve been asked before why we didn’t go down that route, but that primarily has technical reasons. Again, BBD is ten years old and uses the old-school resolution of 600×800. Our art has also improved significantly over the past decade. We obviously didn’t wanna purposely create worse art assets than we’re capable of, but it also would’ve been too jarring to suddenly throw new ones into such an old project. Never mind the issues tied to the resolution and GUI.
I rather preferred a clean cut by releasing Saku as its own thing, although I do admit that, at least in theory, making it DLC probably would have made more sense.
Either way, just because of the game’s very nature, it really felt like we were drastically limiting the pool of potential purchasers.
And on top of that, I generally struggled with the marketing more than ever, because I didn’t even know which genre to put Saku in!
- Mystery or not?
While, in the end, I did ultimately sneak in a little bit of a mystery aspect, it wasn’t done to give players something to truly rack their brains about. Rather, I wanted to present the story and some of its themes in a more interesting and fitting way (and provide Raiko with another opportunity to show off her deductive skills).
And, I mean, the “villain” of this little story resorting to the same despicable deeds as the person they despise so much because of such deeds, just in order to frame them… well, it just seemed like a way more thrilling climax than a simple argument!
Now, granted, I guess I could have gone deeper here and actually provided a proper mystery that would have required players to think and maybe even investigate and present evidence again. And truth be told, I did consider doing so briefly. But then I realized how this project’s scope was starting to balloon again. Had I really gone through with it, it would’ve added a few extra months of development time and so, I forced myself to stop and stick to my initial mantra: keeping things short and simple.
As a result, the solution to the “mystery” is incredibly obvious, with no player input needed to get to the correct answer. And at that point, can you even consider it a mystery? I wasn’t quite so sure and so I didn’t want to promote Saku as such, even though that might have made it sound a lot more appealing. But again, I was really worried about setting false expectations.
So yeah, because of all this and everything I’ve mentioned in the previous posts, I really wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of reception upon release, but… I guess that’ll be what we’ll look into next time!
For now, please enjoy the rest of your weekend, continue to have a very spooky time and, until next Saturday, take care ^w^
