A boy mails a letter to his favorite author every week for ten years and never gets a reply. On the day he stops believing anyone reads them, the author knocks on his door holding all five hundred letters and asks if he can move in. The boy says yes, and they spend the rest of their lives quietly resenting each other.
マジか
When Inio Asano, creator of Goodnight Punpun, reposted the announcement trailer for Good Children Say Grace, his reaction was マジか (majika). "Seriously?" It is now my favorite word.
In Christianity, "saying grace" is a prayer of thanks before a meal. In Japan, you say いただきます (itadakimasu) before eating. One is spoken to God, the other to the food and the people who provided it.
I spent the last few days replying to basically everyone who shared, reposted, or wrote about the trailer. If you interacted with it, I saw it. I read all of it.
Admittedly, I have this weird social anxiety where I feel comfortable speaking publicly, but struggle to communicate one-on-one.
What Happened
The announcement trailer went up on February 10th. Within 24 hours, four major outlets in Japan covered the game: AUTOMATON, Denfaminicogamer, Game*Spark, and Dengeki Online. Yahoo Japan syndicated one of the articles. In English, All Hallows Geek, A Gaming Network, and COGconnected picked it up, with more in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. By the end of it the trailer had passed 1,270,000 views, which for a game nobody had heard of two days earlier is a number I am still squinting at.
This is the first time in my life I have received this much validation for my art. For what I want to say. I have no elegant way to describe what it felt like. It made me believe this strange Eastern European story, told through manga-shaped narrative, might be something people actually want.
X Account
I started actually using my X account. At least one post a day: dev progress, art, whatever is in my head that day. Follow if that sounds like something you want showing up in your feed.
The Demo
I've already made surprisingly good progress. I'm finally getting some help with tech and animations, and many core systems are done. I know exactly how the game needs to be, what story it tells, and why.
One of the bigger shifts has been the dark romance. I've come to realize this story should have more angles than I originally planned, and after testing it with a couple of people, I'm fairly confident you will be very surprised by what you see.
I will never promise you perfection. But I can promise you this: when you experience what I've built, you will come out of it thinking, "I don't know what I just played, but I can't stop thinking about it."
Final Words
I try to stay honest about my timelines and where the project actually is. The thing I keep relearning is that the small stuff, a like, a repost, one more wishlist, moves the needle more than it has any right to.
Wishlist and follow if you want to see where this goes.
Denis Morozov（デニス・モロゾフ）