I’m working on various tasks, big and small, for scenario events and the tutorial. The video above shows the scene where you enter Active Imagination to proceed with the tutorial. In the prologue, you decided at a specific point whether or not to recall a past memory, and that decision led you to play the tutorial. In Chapter 1, you can practice skills anytime, anywhere, by pressing the Active Imagination buttons for each skill in the conversation window with Pi. The screen transition effect might not seem like a big deal, but it took a lot of time. I created videos like the ones below using Kling, then converted them into text to use. I’m considering remaking them later because the resolution and quality of the text-converted videos are low.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how to transition between reality and Active Imagination. I had no ideas and was struggling, so I started with the falling text ASCII art from the movie The Matrix, but it felt outdated and overused. Then I arranged metal pillars like basalt columns and tried various things with them (not sure why I started that), and eventually, it resembled a huge structure made of metallic basalt columns that I saw in a dream recently. I didn’t realize it until my wife pointed it out. When I put the metal pillar video into the game, it didn’t fit at all. After agonizing over it again, I ended up using the ASCII art transition I initially tried and discarded. I ended up spending over a day just on the screen transition. For now, I’ve included it in the game since it’s passable, but I might change it to something else later. Every day, I oscillate between feeling that the game is playable and feeling that it’s utterly worthless. While it doesn’t affect my pace of creation, it’s quite a tough experience. Considering the current state, the utterly worthless side is probably more accurate, but I hope it gets better little by little. Doing work that almost no one sees is really difficult.
Originally, I wanted to quickly release a series similar to DLCs under the name Axiom of Maria, with titles like Prologue, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on. That was when I didn’t know anything and just dived in recklessly. However, after making the Prologue, I realized that releasing new chapters as DLC-like additions wouldn’t be feasible. In fact, Chapter 1 is almost entirely refactored or newly created, except for some player actions from the Prologue. I decided that I needed to separate them, but Steam wouldn’t let me change the page name. I was so preoccupied with development that I left it as is, which seemed to confuse a lot of people. Interestingly, after receiving feedback that the word “Prologue” wasn’t in the name, I tried changing the page name again, and it worked. Go figure.
I’m always desperately thirsty for feedback, but sometimes certain feedback drags me into my personal hell. Even so, there have been many times when rude and aggressive feedback contained golden nuggets, so I can’t afford to disregard any feedback. To me, this was a harsh and brutal truth, just like how natural disasters harm people without discrimination. On the other hand, positive or vague interest was emotionally very appreciated and even sometimes made me cry, but it didn’t seem to help much in actually making the game. It’s quite ironic.