Mailbag #5: “Detour”
it’s december already? this will be our last mailbag of the year.
kavaya radar transmission
i keep thinking of movies. i want it to be monogatari. inserts, sounds, music, ended with a poingnant phrase on red with a scene number. but is that realistic? and if we pull it off, it’s going to take damn near forever. do i want to be stuck on a project for that long?
mentha found her way around to salt lake again a few months ago, where we found ourselves deep in the trouble, grappling with the multitudes of kavaya that need attention. it’s a huge game and it’s been challenging to keep the scope managable. it’s by far the most ambitious project i’ve taken on.
bringing new stuff out from nothing is a demanding process, and we don’t always have quorum in the team. the whole arrangement so far has been very different than hello girl, and i fear me doing the brunt of the work of writing has left the rest of the team in a weird spot. we haven’t found the right way, nor the time, yet.
it’s daunting, but i have faith that our desire will pull us through, even if there are one or two false starts.
we’ve made some tangible progress, it’s not all bad.
- found a voice for the game. third person has worked well, and it has been quite a change from the first person i’m used to. but this is a story about many characters, so i’m giving myself freedom to explore their thoughts and feelings from different distances.
- dialing in the visual style
- we want to avoid using photos as much as possible, having more drawn environments for this hard-to-capture setting. this comes with new challenges.
- character designs have been further refined. they all look distinct and interesting. good job mentha!
- technology. characters can blink now. breathing smoke. lighting effects. shaders. it’s all fun to play with. but maybe let’s make the game first.
- mara has been working on a secret project.
hello girl on steam
it’s every indie devs game to get their game on steam. for just a $100 price tag, dreams can come true.
we’r in the process of getting a store page up, and it will all be sexy. hopefully before the end of the year we’ll have things up and running. it’s a surprising amount of work to put a game to market. trailer. blurbs. promo art in 33454 different formats. steamworks. it’s a lot to take in.
in comparison itch.io has nearly no barrier to entry, but steam has a lot. but that visibility is more than worth it. we’ll get put the game in front of so many more eyes. and hopefully, make a buck or two in the process. it’s the start of something.
we want to do the fun stuff, like achievements and trading cards. not all of it is within reach at this time. we’re not in the big leagues yet.
didn’t really stop us from reaching out to a bunch of artists to see if they wanted to make trading cards for us. we call that optimism.
steam is making me rethink my whole approach to game marketing. i used to think that i was above writing quick eye-catching blurbs. “a game should stand on its own”, i held. but if we actually want to make a living off of this, we need to be a bit more strategic. a bit more shameless. mask off. rabbit with a telephone.
i’m breaking out in hives just thinking about it.
we didn’t just want to release the (almost) game jam version as is. upon replaying with new eyes, we realized that there are many things we could still improve upon. prose, sometimes quick and charming, sometimes clunky and awkward. scenes that end quickly. places where we could expand upon the texture of the world. and that ending, doesn’t it come a little quickly? there’s a lot to improve upon, expand & explain. so many threads we never got to explore are calling out to be pulled. back then, we were working on the game jam version until the 11th hour, and then felt pretty burnt out – so we released it as is. but now we have the time and energy to make it better, so we’ve been doing just that. hopefully in ways that won’t break what people liked about the original. it should be more of that.
beyond the less obvious improvements, we’ve also been working on sharpening up the GUI, sound, character expressions and music. it really looks like a real game now. worthy enough to be on steam? it remains to be seen. if things go right, this should be a huge boost to our visibility and by extension, motivation. we’re hoping to get the steam page up by the end of the year, and release the updated version of the game in january. but these things depend. we might want to wait longer to ride out a steam next fest for extra clout.
we’re hoping that even for those that have already read hello girl, this new version still has enough new content to make it worth a replay. there might even be some surprises.
anecdotes
- i used to write very short sentances. just two lines. i frequently feel like i don’t have enough room to express what i want anymore. i even made the text box bigger to accomodate for this. i guess that’s growth.
- many people didn’t understand why ana got confused as a military officer. many people theorized that ana’s sister really was someone important, but that isn’t exactly right. there always was an explanation for this, but it got buried.
- many conversations remain unchanged. i think exchanges between characters is my strongest suit. the environmental descriptions need more attention.
- food is a powerful tool to bring the reader into the world. these bunnies are hungry.
- yuno deserves more screen time. she’s just way too cute.
- surprisingly, my opinion has changed a lot on the epilogue. i used to think it was really good, but it’s the part i’m now the most critical of now. it feels more like fluff and less of a satisfying conclusion.
- bonus scenario. i want to do more with these girls.
i got a steam deck.
intermission
mentha is coming to visit here in salt lake for a week, so imo team will be reunited once again. she’s bringing her entire art setup with her, so we’re hoping we can use this time to get productive and finish up this hello girl update, and if time allows, maybe make some solid progress on kavaya local maximum as well.
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