Looking at why Homeward got made

Now that I feel pretty confident that Homeward’s will get completed and it won’t crash and burn like a thousand other amateur internet projects, I think it’s pretty important to analyze just why it never crashed and burned. I’d be lying if I said I don’t have my own fair share of projects that burned. My last big project, Sunrider, pretty much burned apart like a meteor crashing through the Earth’s atmosphere, and I’ve had dozens of other projects that never got realized. In fact, I’d say that for each game that I released in my life, at least five others have never been completed.

I think that’s pretty much the biggest problem with working on a major project. Ultimately, we’re not doing this for any money and most of us have no intention of ever making money from it. (I don’t anyways.) You’re working on a new idea and things are fun. But eventually, it gets stale, so you just move onto a new project and just have fun with it until you lose interest in that one as well. Since money is not an issue, there’s really not much incentive to actually have a finished product. Even if you think that you’ll get fame/praise/internet points/advance the visual novel genre when you actually release something, that’s a hypothetical that exists far away, so I think most of the time it’s not enough to compel people to finish things once a project loses its new exciting stage.

Still, it’s pretty bad for other people if you just focus on having fun and never actually release anything. You might get a lot of fun from it, but it’s something only you can enjoy. Meanwhile, everyone else is stuck with nothing. So I think it’s important that we try to actually finish things.

With that said, I’ve compiled a list of various factors that I thought contributed to Homeward getting this far.

1. I wrote about a subject matter that I knew very well.
I didn’t take any risks with Homeward in terms of the subject matter. There were no hypothetical scenarios, since most of the events in Homeward I’ve witnessed first hand myself. I know what it feels like to return to a place that you might have called “home” at one point in your life and I know what it feels to live in different countries. Writing about Japan was natural since I was living there when I starting writing. In fact, the early bits of Homeward were more of a journal of my own activities in Japan. There were not many information gaps that I had to fill in using only speculation.

2. The goal of Homeward was to execute the fundamentals correctly
At the end of the day, Homeward is a straight nakiage without many groundbreaking features. I didn’t do anything crazy or absolutely inventive. I just took the very fundamental things that you need for a nakiage to succeed and just stuck with them. The mandate was not very big or ambitious.

3. The whole project was designed with only a single worker in mind.
From the beginning, I expected to draw, write, and program the entire project by myself. Of course, that’s changed now that Fawn’s joined the team, but even if she never did, the project probably would have been released anyways. The project does not demand anything that I am incapable of making alone.

4. I never actually expected to finish at the beginning
Homeward was a joke project that I began to write for fun while I was living in Japan. I never actually thought it would be great or that I would actually release it when I began writing. This had the effect of lowering my own expectations, so I didn’t plan anything ambitious or ground breaking. This also explains why the first part of the game seems pretty jokey, heh.

5. I planned out nothing.
Usually, the conventional advice seems to be that you should plan out your projects extensively before you start writing. This was certainly true for Sunrider, since I wrote hundreds of pages of material about the characters, mechas, and the universe. For Homeward, there was pretty much no planning at all. The entire design document was less than half a page long – the names of the characters and their archetypes. I didn’t even know how any of the character arcs were going to end until pretty much after I wrote them. This had the unexpected effect of lengthening the “fun” time I had with the story. For Sunrider, I felt like I was simply retelling a story that I had already witnessed. While I was writing Homeward, I felt like an active participant in the story because I had no idea who these characters were and what exactly was going to happen next. It was pretty fun to discover what Nonami, Haruka, and Sora were like as I wrote them instead of deciding beforehand. Also, the twists and turns of the plot were pretty exciting to follow since I pretty much had no idea what any of the plot was going to be.

6. I loved the characters
Fundamentally, I think the most important thing is that I was in love with the girls. Out of all the real life girls I’ve been in love with, none of them have let me love them as much as the Homeward cast. I think Nonami, Haruka, and Sora were simply the most high maintenance girlfriends that I’ve ever had in my life. They wanted about 15 hours of my time a week, made me stay up until 5 AM in the morning multiple times, and made me go through some of the worst shit imaginable. But what made me keep seeing them was that they needed me to exist. They depended on me, so I had to see it through to the very end that they can take a form in the real world.

7. I had a story I absolutely needed to tell
Homeward is my story. It explains who I am today, the things that happened that brought me here, and the things that drive me. Sure, it’s not really autobiographical at all and the whole thing is fiction, but the emotions felt by Riku were shared by me when I wrote the story. To tell the truth, for most of the project’s production, I was debating whether to release the game at all. I never really thought about appealing to a certain audience or expanding the genre. It was a story that I made nearly purely for just myself. I just wrote about things that I liked and would like to see, and wrote what I felt about the world. That gave the story a purity of focus and a singular drive, I think. I was only thinking to satisfy myself for most of the production and not meet anyone else’s expectations. It just turned out that other people liked it later as a side consequence of just having a project. I think the lesson here is that you should just write what you think is right. If you do, an audience will form by itself.