#this post has been in my drafts with the first 3 pics since last december btw thats how long ive been thinking about him

[deimostes]

happy pride post this hammer the hedgehog (transmasc amy rose)

(no ship tags please!)

[itmightbemikey]

So yeah I'm becoming increasingly convinced I am actually living in some sort of horror story.

Okay, so, late last March I am up at like 3 AM like pretty much everyone was around then because time had just become utterly meaningless in that first month of Quarantine, just sort of pacing around my apartment like you do you are stuck in quarantine and it is 3 AM. Look out my front window, and across the street a couple houses down I see this:

Just, a big ol' cross of big red lights, just lighting up a porch.

At 3 AM.

Totally not ominous or anything like that.

I hopped on to Nextdoor to see if anyone had commented on the cross or explained it or wtf was going on, and, hidden among the 'found pet' and 'missing pet' and 'oh no a person in a hoodie walked somewhere in the general vicinity of my house plz be safe everyone' posts, there was this message, presented in it's entirety:

I have no idea what the reunion area is, I'm sure it's a charming place for... reunions, I guess, but, timing sure is a thing.

Anyway. Red Cross. It's just there, and as far as I can tell it's lit up 24/7, just there, outside my front window. Being an ominous cross glowing a bright red. Some peeps on Discord suggest that maybe it's just some sort of Easter decoration they had put up, and while that's not exactly a normal thing it at least sounds reasonable, so I just roll with that theory. Some people just be weird like that.

Anyway here's a pic I took in September.

Yeeeeeeeep. It's still there 5 months later. And it would remaion there until the end of November, when it finally goes away and is replaced with some sloppily thrown up christmas lights.

Though when the cross disappeared is also when my upstairs neighbor also just up and vanished too?

Like I don't have an exact timeframe on that, I just kind of noticed his van was no longer around. And then mid December a cop shows up at the building's front door, asking for him or if I'd seen him, because they found his van. It had seemingly been abandoned in a parking lot at the county event center outside of town, and they were trying to get a hold of him before it was impounded. Told them I hadn't seen him in a couple weeks, cop left to do other cop things, and I just kinda... sat with that for a while, because there really wasn't anything I could do beyond telling the cops "yo I haven't seen this guy for a while".

The Polar Vortex. My apartment was absolutely frigid, it couldn't get above 50, but my furnace was working and putting out heat. No idea where I was losing the heat, couldn't find any significant drafts that hadn't been there in previous years. So I trudge down to the Ace Hardware to get a space heater, pick up this tiny little personal desktop heater because it was literally all they had left other than the giant fuck-off propane heat cannons designed for heating warehouses or construction sites, and walking back up to my apartment building I look upstairs and see

The windows are wide open. All of them. In fucking February. And, since there's still been no sign of the upstairs neighbor, that means that they've been opened since late November, early December.

So my gas bill for Dec-Feb is an absolute fucking nightmare but that's besidses the point.

Skip forward to this week. Wednesday the landlord shows up, asking if I had any leaks in my apartment, there had been water leaking into and pooling in the basement. I tell them no, but mention that I think the guy upstairs from me hasn't been in his place since begining of december and the windows have been opened, maybe a pipe burst up there, to which the landlord looked.. confused and concerned at this. Which was a bit odd, because I'd figure the lack of rent checks after 3 months would have been noticeable, but maybe there were advance payments, who knows.

Anyway, landlord and his contractor got in and also called the police, they didn't find anybody up there (as well as no reports of him showing up in area hospitals), but they found the source of the leak. His toilet had been clogged and continually overflowing.

For Three Months.

Hey at least I know exactly why part of my bathroom ceiling had collapsed a month earlier. (I had reported it to the property management company but they apparently never forwarded the message to my landlord).

But hey, the windows are closed now at least, and the leak fixed. Anyway, the next day, I step out to pick up a package that had been delivered, and upstairs I hear a tap.... tap.... tap.... tap.... and sigh, thinking "Oh boy, what the fuck is leaking NOW." So, I head up the stairs to see if I could find it. I round the corner in the stairwell, start heading up the second stretch of stairs, when up over the banister pops someone wearing a full-on Gas Mask.

I certainly wasn't expecting that.

Turns out it was my other upstairs neighbor, she was sorting through some containers filled with items damaged in a house fire and was wearing the gas mask so as to not have the ash irritate her lungs, which she has issues with, and it was the respirators on the gas mask that was making the tapping sound. Anyway, we get to talking, she asks me if I know what's going on with the guy in the apartment next to hers, and I tell her the stuff I know, the cop, the landlord, the toilet, etc. And she tells me that around late November, she had started noticing a bad smell up there, but then one night shortly after she noticed the smell she heard a lot of stomping around and a loud ruckus in there, and it was after that that she too noticed the windows had been opened and that the shared wall between apartments had gotten ice cold.

Aaaand that's where I'm at right now. 10 ft below all of that. Just... living with all that information in my head. Had I mentioned that I'm on three different medications for anxiety? I'm on three different medications for anxiety, and I have all of that in my head. It's fine. I'm fine. It's Fine.

Anyway, if some of the worst stuff that's just circling around my brain meat comes to pass, well, I do have a way to defend myself. Because I got this nifty-ass corroded to all fuck Pipe Wrench that just so happened to fall out of my bathroom ceiling in January!

It's Fiiiiiiine.

[gosatsuvns]

Weekly Update #228 - 2018 Wrap-Up

Welp, this is awkward. First of all, I need to apologize for the lack of a weekly update last Saturday. The funny (well, actually rather sad) thing is, I had prepared the update in advance and the draft was ready to be published. All I needed to do was to hit that "Publish" button last Saturday, but I kinda totally forgot about that... "orz

To be fair, I was basically away from home all day and only got back somewhere around midnight. I guess at that point, I was too tired and my mind too occupied with other things to think about it...

This really bugs me now. After all, in all this time I've been doing these updates, that's actually the first time I forgot to post one! Aaaaahhhhhhhh, my beautiful track record... stained!! Q__Q

Well, there's no use crying over spilt milk. If you're curious about the contents of last week's update, I've just published it as well, so you can check it out here. It was a short post anyway. The really important thing brought up in it is the release of the next part of our extended GENBA no Kizuna demo, which patrons can now play test here!

But yeah, with that out of the way, let us move on to today's actual topics!

2018 is about to end and a new year itching to start. This one certainly was an eventful and rather unexpected one for me personally. It went into directions I would have never even dreamed of one year ago. As a result, what I had planned to accomplish throughout 2018 didn't quite work out, at least in regards to visual novel development.

For instance, I had to realize that working on two projects at the same time didn't quite work out as I had hoped it would. The initial idea was to alternate between them whenever I would get stuck. So if I'd hit a wall on GENBA and would need to think about how to proceed, I could work on SHINRAI in the meantime and make some progress on that. Sometimes, it can be nice to get a breather and focus on something else for a while. It can clear your mind and you can return to the other project with a fresh outlook.

In the end, however, I guess I'm just the kind of person who works more efficiently when I purely focus on a single thing. That's how we got SHINRAI done after all. Despite the constant urges to work on so many other things, I managed to stay on track and not get distracted. So maybe that's the key to success. At least in my specific case.

Either way, around the midway point of 2018, we decided to purely focus on GENBA. SHINRAI's sequel hasn't been ditched entirely, of course, but for now, GENBA takes priority. It's the shorter of the two projects, it chronologically takes place before SHINRAI, and it provides (optional) introductions for characters that will play a big role in Withering Without Hope.

You will still be able to play WWH without ever playing GENBA, but checking out the latter beforehand will provide you with some more context and background information in regards to the police investigators that will be involved in the case.

We have also already accomplished a lot more on GENBA in terms of writing and asset work, so that's why we ultimately decided to focus on that project first. Nevertheless, I also made some neat writing progress on WWH earlier this year.

(And on that note, if you're curious about the setting of WWH and want to get an actual first glimpse at what the location looks like, I've published a new special blog post on Patreon, featuring a WIP-preview of the very first background art!)

Earlier this year, I was thinking about releasing a demo for WWH in December, containing the entire prologue, but... that obviously didn't work out. We did, however, release a demo for GENBA's prologue in April and have since begun to work on an extended version of it, featuring even more content! As mentioned in the beginning of this post, the first half of it can already be checked out on Patreon. Work on the second half still continues, so the public release will happen some time early 2019. But we'll get into more detail about that in next week's blog post!

In any case, 2018 didn't work out as I had envisioned it. But that doesn't mean I see it as a failure. On the contrary, privately at least, it actually turned out to be one of the greatest year's of my life! And ultimately, I still managed to accomplish a lot of things I'm proud of in regards to VNs too, even if they're not necessarily what I had originally planned.

I would have liked to release the extended GENBA demo this year as well, but I'm still proud of the progress we have made on it thus far. We did, at the very least, release an early demo of the project earlier this year. And speaking of demo releases, there is also the one for Pitch Black Serenade, which I have to mention here, since I've gotten personally involved with the project as well.

It was a lot of fun to work with Kuna and I enjoyed proofreading the script a lot. It's an unconventional romance/mystery VN showing a lot of promise, so if you haven't gotten around to it yet, I highly suggest checking it out! It's more than worth your time!

Besides, eventually, Kuna will be working with us on our future projects as an artist, so you might as well use the opportunity to get familiar with her art! I really can't wait to see her breathe life into our characters and worlds!

Now, I guess I could also mention the release of The Day Akatarou's Blood Ran Out, a dumb little 4 minute VN I made over the course of a weekend earlier this year. This was really just me fooling around with Visual Novel Maker to see what it's capable of, but it was an enormous amount of fun as well as a fun change of pace. With this one, however (even if it's just 4 minutes), I'm really not sure I could tell you it's worth your time, haha.

I'd really like to do something like this again, but with a bit more effort put into it and no use of pre-existing assets.

Anyway! Overall, I couldn't be more happy with how 2018 has turned out. One of the biggest problems we're facing at the moment is that we're still at the start of our new project. A lot of assets are still missing, but once we have completed the extended demo, a huge chunk of the character sprites will be done, for example, so development should continue at a much quicker pace afterwards.

I will be talking about our plans for next year, specifically January, in next week's update. But for today, I guess it's time to not only wrap up 2018, but also this post! Once again, a huge thank you to everyone sticking around and following our progresses! The support we're getting means a lot and is a driving factor behind our motivation to continue! And rest assured, we're fired up to provide you with a lot more content next year!

Now, before I leave, I'd like to share two more things with you, which have also been added to our gallery. This morning, I received this super adorable Raiko from Khana:

But that's not all! For Christmas this year, Natsu drew a little pic featuring Shiku, one of the four suspect characters you will get to meet in GENBA! It also features Fujisa, one of the characters appearing in Pitch Black Serenade:

Now with this, I wish you a great end to a hopefully satisfying year! Please enjoy the last few days of 2018 and have a safe transition into 2019! Until next time, take care! :3

(Oh, and speaking of the new year... patrons can now also check out a WIP-look at our New Year's illustration!)