Dear Players and Your Highness,
Hello! I am the producer of My Journey, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has shown interest and support for our game. I also want to especially thank those players who have provided criticism and suggestions—your feedback is incredibly valuable to us. We’ve been working tirelessly to address issues, and now, I finally have the chance to share more about the game with you.
We deeply value the voices of our players and have carefully reflected on your feedback. Below, I’d like to explain a few key points about the game and share our original intentions, hoping you’ll feel our sincerity.
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1. What kind of game is My Journey? What makes it unique?
My Journey is, of course, a live-action interactive game, but that term is quite broad. To be more precise, My Journey is currently a live-action role-playing interactive game.
Its unique features include:
1. Immersive Storytelling: Designed specifically for first-person perspective, allowing you to become the protagonist and experience the story firsthand.
2. One-Take Shots: Over 90% of the game is composed of long, unbroken shots to create a highly immersive "human-like" experience.
3. A Complete Journey of Growth: Beyond romance, a significant part of the game is about role-playing as the protagonist and experiencing a full journey of personal growth.
We aim not just to let you "watch" a story, but to let you "live" a life. We hope you’ll feel not only the sweetness of romance but also the sense of responsibility and achievement that comes with becoming "Your Highness."
I’ll explain more in detail below, and you can decide if this game is right for you after reading.
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2. How is it different from a TV drama?
Many people ask, what’s the difference between an interactive game and a TV drama? The difference lies in three main areas: experience, immersion, and high levels of choice. My Journey focuses primarily on the first two. While TV dramas let you "watch" a story, interactive games let you "live" it.
This game achieves this through three main methods:
1. Narrative Style: Information Gap
In narrative-driven works, there’s a concept called the "information gap." In TV dramas, the story often progresses by creating a gap between what the audience knows and what the protagonist knows. This builds anticipation for the moment when the protagonist discovers the truth.
However, in a purely first-person narrative like My Journey, the player and the protagonist share the same information. This significantly increases the difficulty of long-form storytelling, but it’s designed specifically for the "experience" of an interactive game.
For example, early in the game, you hear that the Red Mulberry Society is a major threat to the region. But later, when you interact with them, you find out they’re just a group of silly, somewhat pitiful villagers. This is because there’s no "God’s-eye view." The initial information comes from government officials who see them as a threat, but in reality, they’re just poor, struggling people. Only by experiencing it firsthand do you discover the truth. The world isn’t as glamorous as it seems, and everyone has their own struggles. You, as the player, discover this alongside the protagonist.
This narrative logic is completely different from that of TV dramas.
2. Cinematic Expression: Human-Like Perspective
TV dramas don’t focus on creating an "information gap" or "experience." They tell a "story," while interactive games focus on "living an experience." If we were to follow TV drama standards, many shots in My Journey would be considered unnecessary. For example, moving from point A to point B could be done quickly with a montage. But in My Journey, we use long, unbroken shots and moving cameras to create a more realistic, human-like experience.
The camera mimics the human eye, focusing on details and movements as if you were really there. You’ll notice the camera even simulates eye focus and breathing. This level of detail is meant to make you feel like you’re truly living in this world.
3. Content Focus: Experience
Many romance games focus on the experience of love, but why does My Journey include so much narrative? Because we believe players want more than just romance. They want to experience things like being a wealthy tycoon, a gang leader, or even the "guy next door." The goal of an interactive game is to let players experience things that are difficult or impossible in real life.
For example, in My Journey, you’ll experience leading a gang in a rain-soaked street fight. We wanted to give you the full experience of being a gang boss, but due to budget constraints, we could only use five water trucks for the rain effect. Coordinating dozens of actors and timing everything perfectly was a challenge, and we only got the shot on the last truck. While we couldn’t fully deliver the experience we wanted, we did our best.
The "guy next door" scene, however, turned out great.
My Journey was designed specifically to create these kinds of experiences. If you treat it as just a story or a TV drama, you’ll miss out on the unique experience it offers. Imagine sitting in front of your screen, telling yourself, "I’m about to time-travel and become a prince!" Then, immerse yourself completely in the protagonist’s perspective. The feeling will be entirely different. It’s like the difference between watching Harry Potter and riding the "Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey" at Universal Studios—the latter is all about the experience.
That said, I must apologize for some issues with the visuals. In our pursuit of immersion, we used many fast-moving camera shots (like quick turns or shifts), which caused some blurring in certain scenes. This was a mistake on our part, and we’re working to fix it in future updates.
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3. About Branching Choices and Story
We fully accept the criticism about the limited branching choices in the game. The branching freedom in My Journey is indeed weaker than some players might expect. Below, I’d like to explain the reasoning behind this design choice—not as an excuse, but to help you understand our intentions.
Why are there fewer branching choices?
We agree that branching choices are important. In fact, with the current scale of My Journey (around 10 hours of content), it wouldn’t be difficult to add more branches and parallel storylines. For example, each heroine’s interaction could have its own complete arc, allowing for more choices and outcomes.
So why didn’t we do this? It goes back to our focus on experience. We didn’t want to create just a simple romance story. We wanted to craft a believable journey for the protagonist—that’s you, the player.
The world of My Journey is a fictional ancient setting, not a historically accurate one. The characters use modern slang, and there are elements that wouldn’t exist in a real ancient world. If you accept this setting, you’ll notice that every character has their own motivations and logic, not just "scripted" behaviors. If we were to create parallel storylines for each heroine, it would be hard to justify them all coming together to fight the final boss. They wouldn’t have a reason to know each other or work together unless we forced it through "game mechanics."
We wanted the romance to feel natural. The heroines fall in love with you not because of your prince status, your looks, or your wealth, but because you changed their lives and made their world a better place. This is a story about your growth as the protagonist. That’s the true meaning of time travel in this game.
What could have been done better?
Ideally, we would have included more choices, allowing you to decide whether to help the world, pursue romance, or even act selfishly. However, due to budget constraints, we could only film what we have now. My Journey is already one of the largest-scale interactive games in terms of production, but we’re still an indie team. We poured every resource we had into this project, and many team members worked without pay out of sheer passion. We did our best, but there are still areas where we fell short.
If we ever make a sequel, we hope to do better.
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4. About the Use of Memes and Pop Culture References
The first half of the game is filled with entertainment, parody, and many memes, which take up a significant portion of the content. This has led some players to not continue into the deeper parts of the story. There are a few reasons for this design choice.
1. Establishing the World’s Tone
First, we wanted players to gradually immerse themselves in the world and establish its unique tone. The protagonist’s actions need to align with the mindset of an ordinary person to feel believable. If "I" were to suddenly time-travel and become a noble prince, "I" might not immediately choose to be a hero. Even Spider-Man needed a moment of realization to understand that "with great power comes great responsibility." This section is meant to provide some lighthearted and enjoyable experiences. Jumping straight into the main plot or introducing branching choices too early would make it difficult to establish the world’s full picture. In a real-world setting, this wouldn’t be an issue because players are already familiar with the world’s tone.
2. Why Use Memes and Pop Culture References?
You might wonder why we chose to use so many memes and pop culture references, especially older ones. There are a few reasons for this:
• Familiarity: Well-known memes and references help players quickly understand the underlying meaning, much like idioms. Many of these references are used ironically, critiquing the absurdities of this fictional ancient world—absurdities that might also exist in the real world. In the game, however, we have the power to change them.
• Comedy: We wanted to create a comedy. This decision was made with the goal of expanding the audience for live-action interactive games. Currently, the player base for this genre is still relatively small, and its growth depends on attracting more users. Comedy is one of the most popular genres and is highly shareable. We hope that players who enjoy the game will share these humorous moments, helping to bring more casual players into the fold. At the same time, we wanted to use comedy to convey a deeper, more tragic core and character growth, ultimately leading to moments of genuine emotion.
We believe we’ve done a decent job with the comedic elements. Comedy can easily fall flat if not executed well, but we’ve managed to integrate the humor in a way that feels logical and natural. We invite you to take a look and have a good laugh!
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5. Finally, About Our Sincerity
For our team, every completed game comes with its own set of regrets. We see them too, and we’re doing our best to address them.
The Meaning of Choices
While the branching freedom is limited, the choices in the game are not meaningless. We designed many of them to reflect the protagonist’s personality. Your responses shape the protagonist’s character, allowing you to align the game with your real-life personality. The heroines react differently based on your choices, just as they would in real life. The romance in My Journey is a process, and we hope you’ll remember the adventures and experiences you share with each heroine.
We also wanted to include an AI chat system that would allow you to freely interact with the heroines at certain points in the story. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, this system couldn’t be implemented. We tried, but it didn’t work out. We hope you can understand.
About Visual Quality and Bitrate
This issue has affected many players and is a major reason for some of the negative reviews. Over the past week, we’ve been working hard to fix it, and the update will be rolled out within the next week.
The problem arose because we wanted to maximize immersion, which led us to use many long, unbroken shots and dynamic camera movements. These require high bitrates and frame rates to maintain visual quality. In My Journey, the visuals are rich in detail and color, which makes bitrate especially important. However, higher bitrates also mean larger file sizes, which can deter some players from downloading the game.
We initially lowered the bitrate to reduce the file size, but this was a mistake. We sincerely apologize for this oversight. The upcoming update will restore the visual quality while balancing file size and performance.
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6. The Future
If you’ve made it this far, we’re incredibly grateful. My Journey is packed with details—every scene, every prop, every corner might have a little design or Easter egg. Many of these weren’t required by the script but were added by our team out of passion. In the future, we’d love to share more behind-the-scenes content based on your interest.
This project was a massive investment, and the risk of not breaking even is high. But we genuinely want to enrich the world of live-action interactive games and attract more people to this genre. We dream of a future where interactive games offer ultra-high freedom and realistic experiences, where players can step into an immersive world, open a door, meet someone, and see their choices shape the story.
Whether or not you purchase My Journey, we kindly ask you to recommend live-action interactive games to others. Only with your support can this genre grow, and only then can the journey of My Journey continue.
Thank you, Your Highness! We hope this journey becomes a cherished memory for you.
Your Highness, enjoy this journey of growth!
Sincerely,
The My Journey Development Team