Hello everyone. Boy, it’s been a long time since we’ve written one of these dev logs; this is TRULY long overdue. Here, we’ll detail some of the major changes to the game especially for those who haven’t been following our Kickstarter updates.

Firstly, if you haven’t seen our recently released opening, please do so here!

Yes, we’d aimed for a May release and had confidently planned everything for it — the extra two weeks are only a bit of a safety buffer — nothing too wild! 

So, yes, this June… But what can you expect? The last demo came out 3 years ago. We’ve reworked many things since releasing the currently available demo, as you can imagine. So much so, that we now feel (with this recent boost of downloads) that we should label the old demos “Legacy”. Please don’t expect the final version to at all follow the structure of it!

With all that out of the way, here’s a list of some of the changes. Some of the points will address some of the old Kickstarter promises.

Kickstarter:  A relaxing character-driven story - 

The story likely won’t always be so “relaxing” all the time; now, the relaxation factor is more of a byproduct of the plot rather than its main goal. There are certain story elements that cross into slightly darker territory than we’ve seen so far, and we’re considering putting up trigger warnings once we finalize the script. (An obvious one that we can tell you right now is if insects, which are a major part of the plot, are an issue for you, let us know! We’ve been considering having an ‘insectophobia’ mode…) 

That aside, characters are still the main driving factor, and the story has expanded considerably (to around 250,000 words). One example of a major change you’ll see is B, whose snarkiness has been dialed back quite a bit and is instead more soft-spoken. We hope you’ll find it all to your liking!

As for the ‘choices’ aspect, that won’t really appear in dialogue so much as we’ve seen. Rather, what impacts the story is mainly what you choose to do during Free Time. That might be a bit disappointing to some, but on the plus side, we’ve expanded from one singular linear route to three main routes and two additional semi-routes.

The aesthetic of the art is still aiming for that relaxing feeling, but the style has shifted much more into the "slice of life anime movie" genre, prioritizing prettiness and detail over the more casual and minimalistic style it had before.

Kickstarter: Balance your life 

This game was at first conceived as an open visual novel of sorts. One where you could roam freely, do whatever on whatever day… and there wasn’t much of a plot at all! There are still remnants of that design, but even the currently available demo moved away from that, and now we’ve moved even further away. Elements like stats, choices, item consumption, the overall structure of free time, etc. have all been reworked to serve the ultimate purpose of this project: the story. 

Kickstarter: A variety of activities 

Most of these activities are still there in some form, save for things that no longer fit tonally or, more specifically, for B’s character. A clear example of this is her phone (now a flip phone), which will no longer be the hub of the menu, and her map will now be a physical one. The laptop has been completely removed as well, with those features being reworked in different ways. 

Everything will have replacements, but all the kinks are still being worked out with the general goal being to have everything somewhat simplified. This includes a log that fills the entire screen, skipping and auto functionality, the basic quicksave/load functions, and other VN mainstays that we completely left out of the demo on account of being, for the most part, newcomers to the genre.

To add to the list of ‘game-like’ elements being removed… With the new structure, we feel certain visual and audio elements found in the demo no longer fit; namely, shaking text, voice blips, and character sprites that slide, zip and zoom across the screen. Again, this is purely a stylistic choice to fit an overall more serious narrative. We also felt that these things might wear thin eventually, so we didn’t want to rely on them.

A couple of other things: the font was an original creation by our artist nonagon, but we’ve decided to use a universally available font instead — yes, less personalized, but more convenient for localizations and probably more readable, hehe. In addition, aside from the name tags, the text won’t be as colour-coordinated. Again, this is for both readability and aesthetic vision’s sake.

Kickstarter:  Party System

This will be a little bit different from how we envisioned, and it’s not a very common occurrence across the thirty in-game days. However, this will still be an important part of a few of the scenes!

 Kickstarter: A plethora of art 

Ah, we were a bit silly with this one. We thought 50+ CGs and 20 BGs was a plethora! While we’ve certainly expanded on this number, at some point we were planning for nearly one thousand CGs. Then we realized how insane that was and dialed it back to around one hundred and fifty or so.  As mentioned before, we're prioritizing quality over quantity now due to our changed vision for the game's art.

Back then, we very much viewed the project as a game, with a focus on visual storytelling — thus the many CGs. We’ve since shifted to more of a novelistic style , with much more emphasis on narration — in third person, present tense. Over the course of these three or so years, we've gone from writing on the spot in GameMaker, to a screenwriting program/format, finally to novel-style (as in, pen and paper — fuels the creativity somewhat). All this to say, perhaps the game won’t be quite as action-packed or quickly-paced as it once was, which we understand might come as a bit of a disappointment, but we hope in embracing the tried-and-true format of the visual novel that you’ll find something that stands on its own two feet narratively, rather than simply on the merits of our original quirky mechanics or gimmicks. Only time will tell!

Here are some other updates and differences from the demo that you can expect:

• [UI] Main menu, options and other UI elements completely overhauled/updated
• [UI] Items, Mini-games, eating/item consumption and viewing stats are all now in a pixel art format
• [Music] Where we once approached the soundtrack from a kind of... lo-fi, modernistic(?) perspective, expect  a completely different tone to the soundtrack. It covers plenty of genres, but with inspiration now including other visual novels.
• [Story] Split into five distinct acts
• [Story] Rearrangement of scenes, entire removals of plotlines (especially C’s running away, and also how each character is met)
• [Demo] ‘Extended’ demos to be labeled ‘Legacy’. We are considering releasing something to replace them sometime in April or May. Please look forward to it ^^

So, some major changes. We’ve talked about this across our Kickstarter updates, and also in an old interview we did way back with VNGameDen https://old.vngameden.com/behind-the-scenes-with-team-robo/6841/, which lists some of our newer-found inspirations moving forward. We truly hope these changes don’t turn you away, but we understand any disappointment you might be feeling. No matter what, we’ll try and make the best product possible!

Thanks for reading!

Team Robo