Hello again, friends. This is our lengthiest update in a while, and also our most important! Probably ever. Lots of good things have happened to us, and many more are on the horizon. Here’s the breakdown.
First off, we’re thrilled beyond measure to announce that we’ll partnering with Sekai Project, the publisher and localization team behind many of your favorite visual novels. They’ll be helping us to promote and distribute our game, including via Steam.
That’s not all, though. We have the honor of being the first development group to directly receive funding from Sekai Project, as part of a new initiative that they’re implementing to support small-time creators like us. For the past couple of years, we’ve been paying everything out of our own pockets. While we’d do it again in a heartbeat, funding such a project is a fairly significant strain, considering most of us are students or making minimum-wage. Or both.
Let’s talk about money for a second. Currently, everything that we’re working on and paying for goes towards demo completion. Obviously, sprites and backgrounds will be reused throughout the entire game. Prior to our recent partnership, we were rather resigned to the fact that our demo wouldn’t include many, if any, CG’s, since they’re significant investments of both time and money. Now that we can afford to, we’ll be upping the CG count for the demo significantly. We’ve already shown you guys some of Hibiki’s work, and we also have a couple other artists to whom we’ll be reaching out to in order to do some CG work – most likely including some names that long-time visual novel fans will recognize.
In order to maintain the same quality and density of art throughout the game, we’ll be turning to a couple potential crowdfunding methods in the near future. We’ve entertained the idea of a Kickstarter in the past, though we’re currently leaning towards opening an Alienworks Patreon instead. For those unfamiliar, Patreon is a site designed to support creators by allowing patrons to pledge a monthly amount of support, in exchange for access to behind-the-scenes content and sneak peeks.
Those who have been following us for a while may recall that in the past, we had stated that we wouldn’t be using Kickstarter or raising funds at all. While we could write vague justifications and reasoning, what it ultimately comes down to is that we underestimated the cost and length of our development process. We could, and would continue to pay out of pocket if necessary, but it wouldn’t be unrealistic to say that the full version of the game would be quite inferior to what we know we’re capable of creating. Please understand.
That’s about it from us for now. We’re going to refrain from giving an estimate for the demo release date, for the time being. That said, we’re fairly confident that we can have it out by the start of Summer. Please look forward to it.
If you have any questions, you can post ‘em here, or reach out to us at any of the links below. Thank you for your support.
