I’m very happy to announce that finally this game is out. I’m quite proud of it, because I think is something new, for the art-style and also a bit for the gameplay (a mix with visual novel/mystery/minigames).

Those who want to skip the rest of this blog post can head straight to the download links on the official game page.

Now, a bit of background / making of this game. I always loved comics: indeed, as soon as I was 5-6 years old I started drawing them. As I grew up, unfortunately I moved away from them, until recently when I started being an indie developer and in 2008 made the first visual novel / manga games.

I like manga art style, but I also like the standard comic (more realistic) style. I also believe that for this kind of game, which has a strong supernatural and mystery setting (and also a bit of horror), the manga would have been a bit out of place. So I think this other style fits the game perfectly.

The making of has been divided into 3 stages:

1. game conception: I remember I pitched this game style/character to a developer friend of mine who expressed some interest in entering the visual novel / dating sim area, but then changed idea.  I thought it was good and worth a try myself, so I first wrote down a storyboard in Openoffice, containing all the game details (character, story, objects, events, etc).
2. coding/writing: this was the most fun part, coding all the various minigames and write the story. Writing the story was really hard though, because of the many different paths the player can take. It caused much headache, indeed in the sequel that I’m writing right now I’m going to make it more linear, also to make it easier to test.
3. testing/proofreading: this was the less fun part. The game was started the 1st february and finished the 1st april. So took me two months to make. It is ou now, the 1st July. All this time was due to delays in proofreading (and also some testing of course). No need to say, I am really eager to resume working on less text-intensive games!!! 🙂

If you follow my tweets, you already know that I’m writing the second episode (I am at a very good point). So if you liked this one, you know that another one should be out very soon (this time the proofreading stage should take much less time).

And after the second? I don’t know if I’ll make a third yet: as you might imagine it largely depends on the sales of the first two episodes, so if you enjoy the game and want to see more, spread the word about it! 😉