Hello everyone! I hope you all had a pleasant holiday season, and I wish you all a happy new year!
To kick 2025 off, I'd like to announce a shiny new(?) project I've been working on very slowly for the last couple of years.
As you might have gathered by the title, I've been cobbling together a remake of the first VN I ever released on Steam: the yandere horror/romance story The Way We All Go!
The Way We All Go was my very first commercial VN, and it has a special place in my heart. I'm still very fond of the characters, especially Amu and Noelle (Amu even cameos in some of my newer VNs from time to time haha). During the last few years I started to wonder how the VN would look if I'd released it today.
When I wrote The Way We All Go, I was in my second year of university and I didn't have a job. I was dividing my time between writing essays and working on my horror game, which became quite expansive (somehow it wound up being over 200,000 words long), and I didn't have the budget to make it a big, flashy production.
I was a complete newbie when it came to commercial game dev. I'd made a few short, free VNs in the past, but there were all pretty humble, and I made them with purely free for use assets. I'd never commissioned an artist before when I started The Way We All Go, and I remember I was actually very anxious about the commissioning process in general haha ;;;
Given how small my budget was, it feels lke a miracle I was able to commission the few talented artists that I did for the spites and CGs. I didn't have the funds to give it any additional polish, however, and I had to use photographic backgrounds and stock music to finish it. Compared to my newer titles, it looks a little rogh around the edges, but I did the best I could with the resources I had at the time to make something special!
I'm still fond of The Way We All Go and how it turned out, despite all of its early game jank, which is why I decided to remake it! I wanted to pump a bit more money into it, and give it the gloss I couldn't afford when I was starting out. The remake will have completely new character sprites, and some supporting characters who didn't have sprites befoe will get them now, like Noelle's mother and Amu's father. The new backgrounds, meanwhile, are all drawn by hand and commissioned for this project, and the soundtrack will be fully original too. I'm upscaling the game to 1080px, instead of the old postage stamp-sized 800x600, and it has a shiny new UI!
As I said before, I'm still happy with the story of TWWAG, so I have no plans to add any new characters or routes into the VN. The writing will remain as it was originally, but I'm going to touch it up a bit and fix some awkward sentences. There will not be any significant new content to the game, however, so if you have read the original you won't miss out on too much writing-wise.
I will be releasing the remake in 2025, though I'm not entirely sure when. I was hoping to release the remake on March 24th, to coincide with the release of the original VN on Steam. However, I'm not sure if the remake will be finished by then, as I need to recode the whole thing (the old code was Utterly Terrible lmao it's quite shocking...)
I will aim for the March release, but if I can't handle it, I will try to release it on Halloween instead. It seems like an appropriate, given the nature of the story!
Either way, the remake will be coming out later this year, so please look forward to it! I've had a lot of fun revisiting it, and seeing my old characters come to live with shiny new art!
The old VN will remain on Steam for anybody who prefers the older aesthetic, so that won't be going anywhere either. The remake will be released as a separate game, and it will cost more than the original owing to how expensive commissioning the new assets has been. I haven't hashed out the price just yet, but it will probably be around $15. Hopefully this does not disappoint anybody!
Thank you very much for your support over the years, and for giving my stories a chance! I couldn't do any of this without you; you're the best!
I hope you all have a happy 2025!
- ebi x