Hey everyone. The past two weeks have gone really smoothly for us at AlienWorks, and we thought it might be time to give you guys a little more info on what’s been going on behind the scenes since our last post.
First and most exciting news first: We’ve tweaked our story a little bit to help things flow a lot more smoothly, adding a whole new subplot that’s meant to tie up a few of our loose plot threads and bring them back into the overall plot in an interesting way. Things are way less ‘jerky’ now when it comes to plot developments, since they now all have some connection to something that’s happened earlier in the story. I really wish I could go into detail about what we’ve thought up, because – and not to toot our AW horn – it’s pretty awesome and leads everything to an amazing climax.
The only small downside to having a new, amazing subplot is that we need to integrate it into our current story in a way that will make it seem like it was always there. This basically means we need to mess with a few flowcharts, edit a few scenes, and add some others. No big deal.
The second thing we’ve gotten going again since last post is our background image production. We’re starting to produce a few more of those to catch up with what we’ve outlined so far in the story. They all look great, because our art team keeps getting better and better as time goes by. We’re all looking forward to seeing how much they’ll both have improved by the end of this.
And speaking of “the end of this”, you guys might be wondering just when that will be. After all, The Human Reignition Project (in one form or another) has been in development for over a year. We must have some idea of how fast we can work by now, right? We should at least have some estimate for when we’ll be releasing a demo. And the truth is, we do. But you won’t find anything on this site that says “Q4 2015” or “late September this year” when we mention the possibility of a demo.
We’ve learned through our own experience and the experiences of others that announcing deadlines at such an early stage in development (we’ve only just figured out the general direction to take this game in the last, what, six months?) can be either a good idea or a terrible idea. We don’t want to get people’s hopes up only to disappoint them in the end when it turns out we’re going to miss our deadline for one reason or another.
For most of the AW crew, this is the first visual novel we’ve worked on, and definitely the first one we’ve worked on together. We spent a very long time doing not much more than just learning the ropes, and we all know we still have a huge amount left to learn. Most amateur first-time visual novel projects fail, and others might be released years after their first announced project deadline. We don’t want to belong to either category, so for now and probably until release, we’ll be keeping our deadlines private.
Of course if you’re really determined to find out our internal project deadlines, feel free to drop by our IRC and hang around. You might find out more about our project than we’ll ever post on here.