As of now, almost everything in the game is made. So far, 27 out of 36 CGs have been drawn. As previously stated, the story, programming, and sprite work are complete. To finish the nine remaining CGs, I’ll be transforming my workflow into a sleeker, more efficient model.

The first major change is that I will be shutting down this blog. It’s not necessary for me to have a development blog, especially when I could be spending the time to develop. Updates about any of my visual novel related activities will now be streamed through my twitter instead.

Second, I will cease almost all promotional activity of my projects. Once again, PR isn’t really necessary. I should be spending my time developing games, not advertising them. I’ll be counting on the people who like my games to PR for me. Once Homeward is finished, feel free to blog or tweet about it, hmmm? =w=

In summary, I’ll pretty much go silent, focusing all of my time on producing visual novels instead of talking about making them. It won’t add much more free time to my first year law student death march, but hopefully I’ll be able to work on some CGs during the breaks. Also, I’m looking forward to finally finishing Homeward and working on something new. Just because I’m going to go into silent mode now doesn’t mean that there won’t be any more stories from me.

Please keep waiting for Homeward. It’ll be done yet.

As expected, actually making a OP video turned out being pretty difficult. First, I found out that my copy of Adobe Premiere Elements wasn’t compatible with Windows 7 anymore. Phooey, I was looking forward to video editing on my new lappy. So I ended up going all the way to my school’s computer lab, since the computers there had the newest version of Adobe Premiere. Unfortunately, the computers there were pretty much pieces of crap. The school even knew this and hung a sign saying that they were going to replace the computers in a few days right beside the monitor. And I didn’t even know of my school log in password was even going to work anymore, considering that I graduated this August. Thankfully, it did.

I ended up working all day at the computer lab. And just as I was about to finish and render the video, it turns out that the lab was closing. >_>; Since it felt like such a waste to not have a video after working all day on it, I pressed “render and publish to YouTube” and then left. For all I know, that computer could still be logged on to my school account and huffing and puffing as it tried to render the video.

After that failure, I went back home and asked my dad how much he wanted Adobe Premiere. Then he told me that I could just download the trial version of Sony Vegas, since it was the full version with a 30 day limit. Oh, well, that was a great way to waste an entire days work!

The next day, I downloaded the Sony Vegas trial and remade a new OP video from scratch. The first one was more like a practice version anyways. It wasn’t so bad until I got to the render stage. Apparently, my lappy is loaded with an overpowered processor, but its heatsink is crappy. Even if it took less than 3 minutes to render the video, it pretty much overheated and shut down all the time. So I had to lay down a fan on its back and put my laptop on top of it as it was rendering. Good thing I didn’t have to empty out the refrigerator and put it in there. >_>

So after wasting a day at school, my laptop overheating six times, and my headphones somehow breaking in the process (wear and tear, the cord bit the bullet), and lots of effort, we finally have an OP video. And it’s not even that awesome compared to most other eroge OPs. XD But I learned much in the process. I just wish there were more songs available to use for visual novels… I guess all the skills I learned through this is more applicable to making anime MADs since there aren’t many other songs I can use to synch images with…

Tada…

Unfortunately, now I’m headed out of my house. I’ll be moving in less than two weeks out of Iowa to my new home in San Diego, so I don’t think Homeward is really in my head right now. Or maybe finding a piece of warmth I can return to is too much in my mind, heh. I’m too stressed about moving, so I don’t think there’ll be much progress for the meantime.

Hm, usually, moving would mean some nice speech about life, love, and the universe, but I guess I’ll keep it pretty short. I’ve moved many times in my life, and some of those times I moved have been the worst moments of my life. However, this time, I think I’m pretty glad to bust this joint. Moving from hicktown Iowa to downtown San Diego to go to law school is a pretty nice step up in life. There are a lot of people I’ll miss, but it seems reasonable to expect a happier time in the future. In all honestly, I can’t wait to get out of here.

Unfortunately, I do expect my life to get pretty busy, so I guess the new deal is that if I can’t finish Homeward by the end of this year, I’ll just release it as it is. As of now, all of the story is done, it’s been beta tested, and about 75% of the CGs have been completed. No matter how busy I get after I move and school starts, I think I should be able to bring the game to a releasable state in four months. Well, hopefully sooner than that, but I guess I should start thinking about the worst case scenario.

Well, that’s it for now. I’ll be busy packing my stuff!

Unfortunately, I’ll be pulling a page right out of the story and moving homes once again right when the game is scheduled for release. I presume that I’ll be very busy with moving out of my house and into my apartment in San Diego at the beginning of August. Not to mention that law school begins immediately after I move in as well. All things taken, the game might be delayed by as much as a month if that happens.

It looks like we have little other choice but to attempt to release the game before I move. At the very least, I want the game to be 99% complete when I have to fly out of here so that releasing it will be as simple as just clicking a button once I’m settled down.

It’s going to be an insane ride meeting this crazy deadline. We still have 13 more CGs to draw, an OP video to make, and a music box and CG gallery to program.

I am throwing down the gauntlet in this matter, however. If the game is not ready to be released by August 10, I will delete all trace of Homeward from my computer altogether and quit visual novel making for good. It’s either release or burn now. My back’s against the wall, the time is ticking out, and my wrists are starting to hurt from all the drawing. This is one hell of a hobby I have…

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.

While you are waiting, please enjoy this picture of Haru-chan. Moeee~

The final road to releasing the full version of Homeward will resume once I get my lovely Aeka. =w=

The long awaited and oft delayed beta is now finally here in its full glory.

What’s inside:
-The whole game. All 92 000 words, 500 character sprites, 50 CGs, 120 backgrounds of it. Indeed, the whole nine yards, all the bells and whistles, the grand enchilada. (what else am I forgetting?)

Known issues:
-The CGs aren’t finished and some are even horrendously bad looking. =w=
-The bonus button on the main menu does not work.

To qualify as a beta tester, you must meet the following requirements
-Be 18 years of age or over
-Have a registered account at Lemmasoft Forums

Are you over 18 and wanting to be a beta tester? It’s pretty easy to qualify. All you have to do is go here:
http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/index.php

And then register an account. Make sure you enter your birthday when you register. Once your birthday gets automatically entered into the database, you’ll be able to access the 18+ forum, where you can find the Homeward beta.

It was a pretty fun time! Now, time to graduate and then release the beta…