Once again, I’m shocked to realize how quickly time flies by. Not only are we into the third month of 2025 already, but it’s also been half a year now since the release of GENBA no Kizuna! Originally, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect a bit more on it, especially since we’ve received a little wave of feedback again recently.
However, I’ve decided to hold off on that for a little longer, partially for reasons that will become clear in a couple of days and partially because, today, I’d just like to focus on SHINRAI Saku – Blooming Beyond Despair again. Last night, I’ve made some pretty significant progress on it, after all! Namely… writing the final lines of script before the credits roll!
- Saku Script Complete…?
Now, I have to make clear that this doesn’t actually mean that the script is 100% finished. For one, I still need to take care of two scenes in the first half of it, which I couldn’t properly finish without knowing how exactly the second half will play out. I also need to throw in an additional line or paragraph here and there for clarification’s sake or simple foreshadowing. And then, of course, the script needs some overall polish. While certainly not in a “first draft state”, I’m sure there are still a bunch of typos, repetitions, grammar issues and so on and so forth scattered throughout. So yeah, there is still some work to be done, but it’s a major step up from the mere outline, of course. And, at this point, I can give you a good idea of the length of the project. Because, no matter how much is gonna change during the refinement process, the final word count won’t be significantly raised or reduced!
- Word Count
Said word count currently adds up to almost exactly 40,000! For comparison’s sake, GENBA‘s shortest chapter (the first Confrontation Phase) is about 30,000 words long, while it’s second shortest chapter (the final Confrontation Phase) is around 50,000 words, so I kinda ended up smack dab in the middle with Saku. Which is admittedly a bit longer than I anticipated it to be, but at the same time, I did manage not to go wildly overboard again! I think it’s a pretty good length, actually.
- Plans For March
Now that we’ve reached this point, we can officially switch gears and shift the primary focus of development over to the game assets, such as sprites, backgrounds, sound effects, GUI, etc. I will just keep refining the script while working on all that stuff. The plan is basically to go through the story scene by scene and make a list of all the needed assets for each individual one in order to translate them into VN format one at a time. So I’m gonna have to go through the script a few more times, anyway.
That’s what we’ll start doing later this month. This first week, however, I will probably still focus mainly on the script to take care of the things mentioned above, so that I can also present my dev partner with a full version of the story to read.
Anyway, gonna call it quits here for today. I wanna get right back to work, after all!
As always, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and, until next Saturday, take care :3
