Hello everyone, I am Principal Huang from the game development team. Usually, I communicate with you guys in our official chat groups, but those conversations tend to be quite disjointed. Therefore, I’ve taken the opportunity to write this letter to you. It is a chance to sum things up, and also to share the funny stories, challenges during the development process, and information beyond our game.
It has been about half a year since our last real-life interactive game was released. We are very grateful for the support and companionship of our fans over these months. Our chat groups and channels have grown from 400-500 members to almost 1,800, and have all remained active. The most active friends must already know that we have been preparing for our new series Trilogy for quite a while. We do wish to create something different. The first PV of has been uploaded， which means we want our ideas to be actions instead of simply staying on paper.
In fact, real-life interactive game is not a new concept nor a new genre. We have learned a lot from the old-days games on 66rpg, interactive videos on Bilibili, and other excellent FMV foreign games. Especially last year, there was a popular game that entered the mainstream market. To us, the game moved the gears of fate, and also made it possible for real-life interactive games to become an industry branch. It was from that time on that a huge number of development teams and companies entered this field. We are also a small team among them, with no experience at all, just diving straight into the industry and wish to make a game. What we have is nothing but passion.
It is how was developed. In the late winter, we were seeking for filming locations, actors, producers, and wrote scripts on the spot. Everything started from scratch, with production schedules and project timelines being revised daily, almost a state of chaos. To find suitable modern costumes for the characters, we went through numerous costume warehouses and sorted through tens of thousands of costumes without finding exactly the right ones. What we thought would be simple turned out to be challenging. Although the production process was quite tortuous, we finally completed the work on schedule. The development team is filled with film and television enthusiasts and visual-novel game players, and we are very optimistic about real-life interactive games. Compared to traditional movies and TV series, it has the operability unique to games and a stronger sense of immersion. Compared with visual novels or galgames, it is closer to real-life scenarios, reducing the barrier to understanding and allowing more players to experience the fun of interacting with the story through real-life interactive games.
The idea before we started developing was simple: we wanted to make a dating simulation FMV game, that is not over-sexual and has its unique characteristics. So at that moment, we chose a fantasy novel to be our main setting reference. We thought we prepared enough and there should be enough intriguing stories and selling points in the game. However, when we reflect on ourselves again these days, we realize that stories will limited if our FMV game only bonds to the dating simulation topic. We should utilize our advantages of immersive experience and dramatic performance. We should try to make story-centered games with various topics or improve our playability by merging more gameplay genres, such as SLG, EDU, etc.
not only improves our understanding of the topics but also gives us a lot of practical skills. For example, when we are shooting a first-person view scene, most traditional close-scene techniques, including camera angle and film editing, can hardly applied. Therefore, we have to explore new methods, which requires the director group to do tests and experiments on the spot to invent our own camera angles. Another example is, because our story requires multiple endings, we need to set up the order from the very beginning and then make clear about the process. The more branches the story has, the more complicated the logic will be. Due to the choices made in the early stages, the subsequent plot may undergo noticeable changes in certain scenes, all of which need to be re-shot. If anything is missed, there's no way to salvage the situation.
This is the reason why we choose to develop . We think we learned from our mistakes, and at the same time, we have infinite creative passion. Though it may be not perfect, we believe we can do better than last time. We hope to provide more interesting and exquisite work to all the players. This time, we integrate elements of mystery murder and time travel into the background story, aiming to create an extremely mind-twisting work. We believe this game will bring you a totally different gaming experience compared with . We want the story to be the core of the game this time, while meanwhile we still have attracting characters with different personalities. We retain our male protagonist perspective to interact with the actresses to develop various kinds of emotional bonds. We hope the entire story to be logically consistent, avoiding the non-sense dead-end stories. Currently, we are preparing the second PV, which is expected to be available for everyone to see within the month.
Furthermore, we encourage everyone to provide more feedback, we always value the voice of our communities. For instance, on the 29th, when was launched, we fixed the black screen bug on the Mac system within 20 minutes. It was the weekend but when our development team saw the screenshots of bugs from the player community, we immediately fixed it that night. Earlier on, we received feedback that the UI on our store page was not appealing and was too derivative, we redesigned several versions and replaced it immediately. When it comes to the personal storyline, we continued to refine the Easter Eggs and behind-the-scenes content until June. For the mobile version, the development work was not stopped until September. In terms of development, our true commitment is to respond with lightning speed to any issues that arise. We aim to maintain an efficient development pace and ensure that the challenges we've faced will serve as valuable lessons for future projects and even those beyond. Therefore, please provide us with more feedback and remember to join our official chat group and channel.
No matter new friends or old friends, thank you once again for the support, and Happy Mid-Autumn Festival in advance，best wishes
