BAD END.
How did Sunrider end? Ah, that is the one thousand dollar question. Objectively, it was an obvious outcome. Nobody has ever released the visual novel yet, and the reason why was made even more obvious with the collapse of Sunrider. Making a project that was anything more than an hour long with amateur level art took years to complete, practically begging real life to intervene at some point during that time and kill the project. I had put nearly three years of my life into making the project, and in the end, we had less than the first 30 seconds of the game finished by the time the project went under. Not only that, but it was the closest moment I ever had to ever completing the project, and it was just about snatched away so close to my face that I could feel it brush against my eye lashes as it flew away. But the good news is that even though I don’t have a game, I’m much more skilled now than I was three years ago. In the six months that I worked with Sixten, I probably learned more than in the past two and a half years combined.
This is the story of the final day of Sunrider. Just what happened the day when the project collapsed? Here’s the full story.
This is exactly how far we got. Act 1 – Scene 1: Kaito and Sora arrive on the planet of Cera and begin their adventures through space.
Just getting to this point was an tale in of itself. Sixten really wanted Kaito to have a little sister, when the story never mentioned anything about a little sister, and I wasn’t even a siscon in the first place. I didn’t want Sora to be there, since the first girl that the protagonist sees in a dating sim has to be one of the possible end girls, and I didn’t want to rewrite the story anyways. But then, Sixten had just joined the project, and I didn’t want to displease him since I needed him as an artist, so I decided to concede that issue.
Ah, but it did not end there. Sixten then insisted that Kaito’s personality be rewritten. And this point, I pretty much refused to accept, since doing that would require the entire story to be rewritten from the beginning to end. What followed as an epic six hour long argument where in the end, we were both too exhausted to continue and decided to just leave the story as it was because we were too tired to do anything about it at that point.
And then, there were the stunning art arguments. My impression of Sixten’s art gradually went from “OMG, this is amazing!” to “Ah gawd, can’t you do better than this?” in about two weeks. I know that we both came close to popping blood veins more than a couple of times because I would be exasperated about the art and then Sixten would get equally exasperated that somebody who sucked a lot more than him was exasperated in the first place.
But all that seemed to have passed by the time the final day of Sunrider arrived. I was 60 000 words into the story already, and all of the major story points had already been decided. When it came into making creative decisions, Sixten and I gradually developed a give and take system where we trade concessions with each other, preventing anything like the epic six hour long argument from happening again.
Our first scene was completed. The text was appearing as it should, the right song was selected for the scene, and all those little buttons you see below the message box were functional, thanks to help from renpytom. And when everything came together and the scene was fully functional, I believed that we could actually do this. Despite all the arguments we had, we were finally beginning to work together on the project. And despite the enormous odds stacked against us, there was hope that somehow, we would actually complete this grand project.
And the next day, Sixten informed me that he would have to quit the project in six months to return to school because his green card was revoked. In the end, it was a damned green card, the US immigration office, that killed Sunrider. We tried everything to save the project – tried to calculate what we would have to cut to finish the project in six months (too much – we would be able to make only maybe the first two chapters), thought about making a manga adaptation (would take as long as the visual novel to make), hell, I even thought about emailing the White House and the US Congress to make them grant Sixten amnesty. In the end though, nothing we could have done would have saved the project. The end had arrived for Sunrider.
Well, I admit, my first impulse was to punch Sixten in the face and shove my laptop out the window. But then, it wasn’t his fault his green card was revoked, and if anything, all I lost was Sunrider, while he lost both Sunrider and potentially his job and home. If anything, we were partners. Despite my sky high expectations from him, he still stayed with the project until the very end. As both a man and a director, there was honestly no way to blame him for anything.
In the end, it was my fault the project failed. I knew that with each extra word I add to the script, the possibility of the project being completed will drop. I knew that if I hired an artist to work on it, then the chances of it failing would double. But I did both, fully aware of the risks. In the end, I wanted to tell a grand story that would span across the galaxy, and I was willing to take an enormous gamble to tell it. And this time, my luck was above average, but still nowhere near the celestial levels required to have succeeded.
And so, the project died, with just the first 30 seconds completed. The biggest disappointment was that I failed Asaga and Chigara. I had known them for over three years by the time that the project ended – longer than any real girl that I have known. (No, I am not a hikkikomori, I just move a lot. >_>) I still remember originally making Asaga as just a side character in the very first draft of the script, but she disobeyed everything that I told her, and by the time the story was over, she had made herself into a heroine who saved the galaxy, completely displacing the other characters who were supposed to save it. And three years after that, she still didn’t listen to a word I said, although I had practically given up on trying to control her at that point anyways. Chigara on the other hand was a darling though. She completely followed everything I said, and always had a kind thing to say whenever the project hit a wall.
And that was how the project unraveled. I have no game, but I have skill and experience now. I’ve become a much better writer and artist thanks to the project, and it was actually a sample of the Sunrider script that got me hired for my current job as a video game writer.
Maybe next time, we’ll meet again.
