Hey, long time no see!

I spent a month in Japan. While not everything went according to plan I had a great holiday and accumulated a number of body injuries in the middle of heavy partying and bear encounters (real) that still haunt me to this day. Mostly my knees…

But it was worth it. The memories are invaluable; even if I’d like to forget making an ass out of myself at a certain bar.

I arrived in Argentina on the 9th, but didn’t start working until a couple days later. And even then not in full capacity, as I had to attend to a number of things before going back in the saddle. So really I kinda worked half a month.

Lots of important progress though. Especially in the UI department as we needed a new menu to support the introduction of a new mechanic.

On the right path

I accumulated a ridiculous amount of feedback while in Japan (and also during my trip to gamescom) that, while positive and encouraging, made us go back to the drawing board on certain parts of the game (don’t be scared; it’s nothing fundamental).

But significant how? Well, I saw way too many people get lost in the first map and it’s not even a complicated layout. They’d also get stuck in difficult battles because the build is old and you still lose all your money upon death (we fixed this), so even if they knew how to upgrade the mc they can’t cause they don’t have money, and this caused players to bruteforce encounters that would otherwise be fairly easy if they buy a skill or two.

This leaves us with the following priorities in the short term:

• Balance the game around nudging players towards collecting and using skills and different weapons for difficult encounters, and communicate somehow to players that brute forcing battles will make them write a negative review on steam and nobody wants that.
• Make problem solving not easier, but comfy to keep track of. Information in this game sometimes goes by too fast, so when players find a key they need for some door they have a hard time remembering which door has to be opened. This must be corrected.

Most of this will be tweaking numbers and adding visual cues to triggers, but some things will require a couple more complex things such as giving enemies more ways to react to your attacks, unique weak points and generally make them more interesting to approach without turning every encounter annoying. It’s tough, but I think we can do it. It sounds fun to do, since nothing really breaks the mold of what we have and that’s an important thing I’ve learned during these trips: The game is fucking cool as is, and it’s only gonna get better as we polish the rough edges and spice up the battles.

Now, the UI stuff is almost done. I still need to properly playtest it but I’ll do so once I finish the required scenes for chapter 4. I’d like to do that this week and I don’t think it will happen but I’ve done crazier things. If we finish chapter 4 in February (as in, areas all grayboxed but with all the logic and dialogues and progression already included) that would leave us with the last three, that by nature of the story will be much simpler to make from a level design perspective.

Not that they will be rush jobs; it’s just what the story commands. It will make sense, I promise.

And that’s where we are right now, and aside from all that I mentioned, our more explicit plan is to simply keep grinding content and polish whatever needs to be polished. We’ll also be subtracting things we don’t need, or that make the game harder to work on.

We’re in no-bullshit mode. This game will ship sooner rather than later, and then we’ll make more awesome games applying what we’ve learned.

Some thoughts

I do wanna talk about how I feel about announcing this game for real.

We’ve been working on this for years in the shadows. Most people who follow us don’t know anything about it, or about this blog for that matter. I’ve been talking about it in such a non-committal way as if to minimize the impact of a possible cancellation of the project.

And that’s pretty much because of what happened with N1rvannA; a game we knew we could easily make within the time we gave ourselves to work on it. But shit happened, we missed our target, and private matters took precedence over the game’s development. Anything can happen between an announcement and the completion of a project.

So now I have this wound about announcing things. It’s a wound and it still hurts to this day. Life is too unpredictable, and who the hell knows what’s gonna happen whenever I’m like “THIS GAME EXISTS, WISHLIST NOW”. I could die in a plane crash or some shit and then that’d be another game in an ambiguous state of release.

Sucks to see life in this way but that’s how I feel right now. Maybe it will change later this year once we present the game at a certain event we submitted for, but even then I’ll only feel safe once the game is ready to be sent to QA and localization.

Or maybe I’ll announce it because it’s terrifying. Because I want to win that particular battle instead of playing it safe.

Time will tell.

What I do hope is that people can one day be as excited for this as they are for N1rvannA and can feel assured they’ll play it soon. I know Project D isn’t the game you lot are actually hyped for (or hyped at all), but as of today this is the main thing. It will be the game that will define Sukeban nearly a decade after Va-11 Hall-A (for the better, I hope). There’s a self-imposed standard I want to achieve and I’m confident we’ll get there.

It’s gonna be a new world, new characters. New concepts and mechanics and gameplay and visuals. It will be the result of a superhuman effort to tell a story that must be told.

And it’s scary. I don’t know if it’s gonna sell well or even talked about. But if life was all easy mode then why the fuck live at all.

El que tenga miedo a morir, que no nazca.

Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t sad here. I’m fucking determined bruh.

We’re making something special; whether the world is ready for it or not.