Hey Guys!
The 1st of November marks the one year anniversary of the initial release of Harem in Another World! I thought to mark the occasion I’d write a more long form post chatting about the general development of the game and how it started.
I first started work on HIAW in 2020 about two years before the initial release. It was a project I picked up during Covid and was mostly to pass the time. I dropped in and out of working on it over the next year and a half. Learning the engine better, making mods and just generally skilling up. After a year and a half of dipping in and out I decided to turn my focus directly on the game. Combine all the loose thread and ideas and pull it together to make a single vision.
The original working title was “An Adventure through Time”. You would have time-travelled to ancient Rome and need to find your way home. After working with that idea for a while I was finding the realism too restricting, so I started adding more fantasy elements and eventually dropped the time travel setup to instead travelling to a different world. Rome became Roma and I started adding Goblins and Ghosts and lots of fun stuff.
The setup wasn’t the only thing that changed during the initial development. Your childhood friend Ruth was originally going to be your childhood friend Dan! As I got more into the story I found having another guy in your party messed with the Harem vibes, and why waste art commissioning a guy when it could instead be a hot girl. So Dan’s character was changed to Ruth’s, in the initial version there was a glitch where his original sprite was still visible in places.
It took me a while to figure out what the art was going to be for the game. I toyed around with the idea of 3d models for a while but decided against it in the end. Although 3d has the benefits of being faster, easier and cheaper, I felt 2d made the game feel more unique, and if you were to see an image out of context you would be able to tell where its from.
v0.1 was probably 90% complete before I brought the lead artist Starli on board. I had tried a couple of different artists first looking for the right one but we didn’t gel that well, I think if your working on a long term project like this having a good relationship between your team members is key. Starli has been great to work with and I can’t now picture the game with any other art.
The release of v0.1 was a mixed bag. On the one hand I got some nice positive feedback, and some good constructive criticism. On the other hand I had a particularly nasty guy who went out of his way to review bomb me across multiple accounts and tell me to KMS. So you know, ups and downs :)
It’s true what they say about criticism, the bad ones stick in your mind far deeper than the good ones. Still, that initial abuse has for the most part been an isolated incident and hearing your positive feedback in reviews and on discord makes my day brighter.
And here we are now. A year later, released in steam early access and v0.6 in development. Thank you for your ongoing support and for being with me on this journey
Love
Jong