Today will be a really short posting, because there sadly isn’t much to report on. As mentioned in last week’s blog post, I was off to Italy from Monday to Thursday and there were (and still are) quite a bunch of things to take care of now that I’m back home.

As a result, I wasn’t able to really do much progress on GENBA no Kizuna. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, however, and how to handle what’s coming next. We’ve gotten some more feedback which really got me thinking. I guess the content of our extended demo (despite already going through multiple revisions and having a bunch of things slashed) is still in need of more fine-tuning. However, rather than go back and revise it once again right away, I think I just want to continue with the next scenes for now, so that the first chapter can finally be completed. And once that’s taken care of (and we have collected a bit more feedback maybe), I’ll look over the demo content once again to see what I can do about it.

Generally, reactions have been very positive so far. Players seem to really enjoy GENBA overall. There are some recurring points of criticism, however, and I’m getting afraid of repeating the same mistakes we did with SHINRAI. I’m talking specifically about players being discouraged from continuing during the first two hours of the game. I certainly don’t want to create another scenario where most reviews mention how slow the beginning is and that it only gets truly exciting later on.

I mean, I do think that the pacing has greatly improved compared to SHINRAI, but… maybe it’s still not enough.

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