Hello everyone!
So here we are. Almost there. Last Time I Saw You will be released in a couple of weeks from now and I can't believe it's come this far... I can't thank everyone enough who has been involved in its creation, both as part of the development team and on the publishing side. It's been a huge effort by a lot of people and I couldn't be happier with the result. Thank you 🙂
But the fact that this game is coming out also means something else, at least to me.
Some of you may already know that Last Time I Saw You has a very special meaning to me. It's not just a game that I randomly came up with one day. There is a special personal story behind it, and today I would like to share it with you.
Illustration by the artist Rokurō Taniuchi (谷内六郎), whose works have been a great inspiration.
As I already hinted in one of the first DevLogs, the story of this game comes from an emotional experience that deeply affected me some years ago. A romance that... well, didn't work out. For some reason, this very brief, almost fleeting bond affected me more than other times I'd fallen in love in the past. It actually left me emotionally stranded for several months.
How was it possible that such a fleeting encounter with a person with whom I really had nothing in common could affect me in such a way? Every night, for several months, she appeared to me in my dreams, and in each of those dreams there was always some impediment that prevented us from being together.
Things at work weren't going well either. After the release of Yume Nikki: Dream Diary I didn't feel motivated to continue working on the projects I had been assigned to. That sadness and apathy came together, resulting in one of the strangest Summers of my life, in which - at least - I learned a lot. And, perhaps also thanks to this, I discovered some very good music (not everything was going to be bad!).
This experience made me reconnect with myself, with my past, with who I was, and what I had come to do in Japan. It was almost like a constant state of meditation that lasted a whole Summer.
I met new people, and with their help, I overcame that sadness. At the end, life continued its course, and I started to heal. After a long period of coping, I realized how important that process of acceptance had been, something I had never experienced before in my life, at least not in such a conscious way. All this love, heartbreak and healing was such an incredible learning process, so I started to feel that, as an artist, I had to do something with it.
The idea of making a game then came to me. I decided to take all the conflicting emotions I had inside and try to make something useful out of them, transforming them into a somewhat healing experience that other people could also enjoy and relate to.
I still remember when I first called my family to tell them about the idea of making a game on my own. I was afraid that their reaction was going to be that's too risky, you need a lot of money for that, it's not a good idea, you better keep your job, etc. But... it was the opposite. They encouraged and supported me, and along with the help of a friend who helped me to assemble the programming basics of the game and the support and joy that someone new brought into my life, Last Time I Saw You began to take shape.
And, long story short, that's how the idea of making this game started. I could keep talking about this for hours, but I don't want to bore you! Last Time I Saw You is not a "boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love" story. That's not where the game is headed. The game is not only about the story of Ayumi, our protagonist, but the different processes of acceptance and internal conflicts that the people around him go through. Family problems, broken dreams, unrequited loves, fear of change... There is a lot going on in the town of Amatsu, where the game takes place, and all of its stories are important and worth telling.
Tackling this from a positive place and making the game feel like a nice and charming experience, I firmly believe this game could help younger people face many difficult things ahead of them: shifting interests; how to approach love; how to accept rejection; the importance of community; the importance of selfhood; how critical it is to tune into our own feelings.
This is why Last Time I Saw You means so much to me. It's not just any project, but something born from a real life experience that changed me and the people around me.
In the end, I'm just another person, but I hope that my humble story resonates with you and that you find something of value in it to stay with.
Thank you so much for reading until the end. I really hope you like the game we made! 💙
.Juan
Make sure to wishlist and follow Last Time I Saw You!💙
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/
And leave a review on the Demo page!💚
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/
