Now that the work on the game’s back to routine track, I’ll keep talking about the inner working of a game developer.
Not so long ago we held a few meetings. One with the writers, the other with our coder, and we discussed the problems of the second episode.
I’ve already pointed out the main problem a few times before.
We never planned to make a quest where you save Kagera and that event with the vampires, even that it was planned, it was supposed to happen later in the game.
Then why’d things ended up the way they did?
We only have a general idea of the main story which we constantly edit as we keep working on the game. This isn’t a new way of working on something, you can see this both in movie industry and game industry.
And when we planned to make the abduction event, it was supposed to have a bit of a different quest structure and different gameplay, but it didn’t work out. No, we partially achieved what we wanted, a lot of people were furious about this event and emotions are our primary goal, something we always strive to achieve.
However, both in terms of gameplay and overall representation it ended up being completely different from events you could see in the first episode.
That’s when we decided to return to a more usual gameplay in the castle part. We did it and a few things became clear; first of all, the game ended up being boring and while the players would actually get to that part of the game, they’d have tons of questions like what the hell is going on in this game and why’d it suddenly become a typical VN.
We started thinking what to do next.
It was decided to quickly transfer the drawn-out prologue to some sort of open world.
When working on this concept, it quickly became clear that giving free access to all locations, like we did it in the first episode, was not an option. It’d break the game logic.
We had to redo everything from scratch right before the release, crunching our asses off like it usually happens before releases.
As a result, we’ve managed to fit the game into that new concept. Now a few more events will be added into that concept and things will get a bit more interesting.
In the third episode we aren’t planning on returning to the system of limited days for exploration but who knows. We plan on returning to the old concept of open world.
I also talked to the coder, and we decided to simplify the barge quest sequence. We’ll keep the leveling system in the game for those who’re interested in it and let the others pass the main quest without leveling up. We talked it over and decided that it has some sense.
As for level restrictions, we’re probably going to keep it for now until we find a better solution. Though I don’t think we will, simply because VC is split into episodes.
It is connected with burnout from working on a single project for a long time.
Either way, in the future we aren’t planning on making such huge games anymore. The main reason for that is burnout. The mistake I mentioned above lead us to the point where we’ll have to make another episode. However, if we do make it to the end, we’ll never work again on games that take 2-2.5 years to finish. Luckily, now we have options to write a more detailed script. Still, there’s no guarantee that we won’t make the same mistake twice. It’s okay to make mistakes.
We’ve made mistakes and we’ll keep making them. We constantly analyze them, talk them over and when possible, we fix them.
We constantly work on different concepts with our writers, the presentation of the story constantly changes, sometimes for the best and sometimes for the worst. Still, it’s all a part of our work.
This bring us to the topic of us not being able to take criticism. No, we have no trouble with that, and we criticize ourselves all the time. The problem is that most of the players don’t know about game development anything at all. If we haven’t learnt much in five years of actual development, what can you expect from a regular player?
And what’s most important is that players don’t know the story. Not everything is as obvious as it may seem. We try to keep surprises for later. Even in our team, only the writers know who’s the Possessed One.
The only thing we’re lacking so far is the creation of gloomy atmosphere and environment. We just can’t get it right even though we try.
And that’s it for now.
Thanks everyone and bye.