You’ve probably noticed by now that I’m bad about saying how things are final when they’re not. Character reveals, blog posts, etc. You also probably noticed how we said that demo would be out in May, and now it’s June. Uhhh, well, about that…
First off, I’ll say with absolute certainty that it won’t be much longer. I know, I know, you’ve heard this one before. But the thing is, in the past cases, we underestimated how long certain aspects would take. Mainly editing and directing – we thought we’d breeze through those and get the demo out. Well, we didn’t end up doing any of those things.
But, what’s different this time is there’s no more opportunities to misjudge things, considering we’re damn near done as it is. Editing finished up over the weekend, and so Kevin just needs to implement the scene direction for the last few scenes, and that’s pretty close to halfway done. We do that, stick in the last couple art assets and voila!
Following that, we’ll have maybe a week or so of closed beta testing and quality checking. Assuming our beta testers don’t think that it’s awful and needs to be redone, we should have the demo available for download shortly after. So how long from now? I’m gonna say probably less than two weeks. But I’ve been wrong before, as the blog posts show.
Our ineptitude at gauging completion dates aside, we’re very proud of how things have turned out with our game. I’m confident that from a visual perspective, we’re one if not the best looking English visual novels out there. It’ll be up to you guys to see if our story holds up. I’m feeling pretty confident in it, though.
If all goes well, the Kickstarter will be launching at the same time that the demo goes live. This will occur alongside a Steam Greenlight campaign, too. For the fundraising, we’ve put together a neat mixture of smaller merchandise as well as some really cool opportunities to get involved with the game at higher funding levels.
Finally, don’t forget that we’ll be at Anime Expo this year! It’s looking like the majority of the Alienworks team will be there, and we hope to see lots of you guys as well. I’ll share designs for the rest of the prints that we’ll be selling once they’re completed, too. For those familiar, I’ll also be carrying a small number of prints for another VN project that I’m part of, Starlight Vega. It’ll all be available at Sekai Project’s booth in the vendor hall.
Thanks for being patient with us, folks. It won’t be too much longer.