hello. today is february 27th of 2022, which marks four years since i first released one night, hot springs on itch.io (& later on steam). thank you to everyone who has played.
since then, i have made two sequels to this game & combined it into a remastered trilogy, A YEAR OF SPRINGS, which has been released on steam, itch.io, google play & consoles.
i've made a lot of different things in this time too. if you'd like to keep up with what i'm making, i've started a newsletter which you can check out here:
https://www.getrevue.co/profile/npckc
(there's a special wallpaper from one night, hot springs/A YEAR OF SPRINGS in the first issue! 👀)
back in 2018 i was still really new to game dev so there are a lot of things in one night, hot springs that i would design differently if i were to do it now (some of which is stuff that made putting A YEAR OF SPRINGS together difficult!), but it's still a very important game to me.
i originally made one night, hot springs, because of a news article i read that made me feel really uncomfortable. i will not get into the specifics, but it was about how somebody had the police called on them because somebody else thought they were in the wrong gendered area at a hot springs. it wasn't so much the article that made me uncomfortable but the general reaction to it online. i made one night, hot springs to organise my feelings on what happened as well as create a game where things would happen the way i felt like they should. i wanted to make a game about a trans woman who went to the hot springs and had a nice evening with her friends. that was it. nothing else.
i never planned on making a sequel (or two sequels), but last day of spring, once again, came about because of something i saw in the news. in the beginning of the year that i made last day of spring, japan's supreme court upheld that surgery was legally required for transgender people to change your legal gender in japan. the very same year though was the start of a new era in japan - reiwa - and there was talk of how reiwa would change things. the thing was, if things were changing, they weren't changing in a way that would make the lives of minorities living in japan better - at least, it didn't feel that way to me. i felt bitter & angry & just generally defeated... and that's how last day of spring came to be, with erika, the protagonist, finding out about the hurdles minorities have to face not just with governmental laws but just in living in daily life in society.
the third and final game, spring leaves no flowers, came about much more lightly... since the game was always about three women from the beginning, i wanted to round off the story by telling the last game from the final character's perspective. manami has always been a bit on the sidelines, which is important - because her identity, which the game gets into more, is also one that is often sidelined, because it's harder for people to notice & often isn't talked about. in the other games, manami was always the one supporting her friends - so i wanted to make a final game where her friends are the one who support her.
these are the three games that make up A YEAR OF SPRINGS. i don't currently have any plans on making any more games with these characters - i think their story has been told. A YEAR OF SPRINGS has an epilogue that shows a little bit of what comes after the three games, so if you're interested, check it out!
while i don't plan on updating this version of the game any more in the future, you can play A YEAR OF SPRINGS to enjoy one night, hot springs the way i intend it to be - with remastered art/music, better designed menus, & sound captions throughout the whole game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1688580/A_YEAR_OF_SPRINGS