Hi peeps, it’s Lazcht: Artist, Storywriter, and bits of everything (except coding and audio). Now it’s my turn and first time writing a dev diary on Steam, although I wrote lots back then everywhere else, haha.
Last month was a very busy month for us, we’re finalizing all the content.
But before we start on progress, I’ll talk about the narrative vision we had years ago. Rico and I were thinking of making something with similar narrative (not content or overall budget) scope as Enix’s Quintet games, such as Actraiser, Illusion of Gaia, Soul Blazer, and Terranigma. After finishing their games for research (and weeping with Terranigma’s ending :’> ), I thought it’s quite realistic for a small team to achieve.
Back then, I’m the one who was mainly in charge of writing all of the narrative parts, as well as the graphics. I was content with working in a very small team, but as the project went on and off for almost 4 years, we decided that we need to expand our team to speed up the whole development speed, that means finding people to take care of things to prevent bottlenecks from my side (since I have really little experience on story writing, it’s always slowing us down).
Since the team expanded, it’s been 9 productive months, having the eventing system reworked, the whole script written and implemented with major iterations, and suddenly the time for narrative wrap is there! We’re planning to get everything proofread and translated as soon as possible.
What we have done by now:
Draft events for all chapters
Draft of almost all assets
Cinematic trials
Almost all of the dungeons & bosses set
What we haven’t:
Finalized events
Finalized cinematics (including prologue, ending)
Polished assets
What we originally thought is simple to do, is actually not. I thought we probably needed to have stricter limitations so it didn’t end up in over-scoping. While it’s great to have the story enriched, and plot-holes covered, now we have to adjust everything linked to it. We spent last August-Sept mostly iterating and sweeping the main story.
Not long ago, we noticed that we have to limit our word count to reduce time, and that means everything we write needs to be monitored and heavily optimized (because it turned out w had exceeded our target by a lot; we never thought it’d reach 40k++, btw). We regret that this should happen, and in such a late stage of development, lol. But on the positive side, less words--lines--phrases, means less time to polish scenes.
Personally, I was really struggling on jumping between graphics, story writing, and trying to be in control of the project situation, and everyone else is working equally hard! Since Anuchard is our biggest project so far, we’ve been learning so much on how to manage a long term RPG project and managing an indie team that’s more than 3 people.
Hopefully we can pull this off by the launch date and stay sane, haha. Please take care of yourself as well!