Hello everyone, if you've been following Anoldor's news, you know that I recently announced the opening of my little "studio", and its first project Imperial Grace. Since Anoldor account is pretty quiet those day, I thought it may raise some concerns, so I wanted to come back with you, on what this announcement means concretely to Anoldor and on my motivations to do this second project and also why our social media are rather quiet those days.
Why Anoldor social Media is quite quiet those dayĀ :
Simply because I donāt have anything more to tell/show for the moment. Most of the work I do is on the writing area (which perform very poorly in social media), and programmation (same, since the visual didnāt change I just code it for it to be easier for ME). Running social media account is really time consuming and I have more important things to do, if I want to actually deliver a game one day :p
I am not going to lie, the fact there is a global pandemic didnāt help the team, and we are all working at a slower pace, (and my motivation to work is obviously affected by the rest of the team motivation...) but it doesnāt mean we planned on abandonning Anoldor. NEVER.
Also, on a personal note, I believe we started too soon communication for Anoldor, we were very excited to share our baby to the world, and your support and advice was really helpful, but asking people to wait for several years between release is hard. Sometime, I feel like going on hibernation for a few years and come back only when we have enough content in advance to not make you wait too long but I donāt want anyone to believe Anoldor is dead. Thatās tough.Ā
My motivations for doing a second project
It is obvious that managing two projects simultaneously is not simple. I think all creators know this project bulimia where you always have lots of ideas, I'm no exception but I've always been able to restrain myself until now. If I made this choice with full knowledge of the difficulties, it's because IG is not just another game, it's also the beginning of a life project.
The truth is that when I started Anoldor, I didn't know much about the Visual Novel universe, I learned everything from scratch, and there were a lot of ups and downs. It was always obvious to me that Anoldor was a passionate project and that it had to stay that way. Except that I got a taste for it.
Coding, creating stories, leading a team, seeing the game come to life, I really got a taste for it and the more time went by, the more I realized it was something I wanted to do in my life. Not as a passion, but as a job.
I'm not naive, I know how hard it is, but I also think it's worth at least trying. That's why - without giving up my full-time job - I decided to create a commercial project, shorter and less ambitious than Anoldor (so that it could be done in two years), but of impeccable quality. A game that I intend to sell.
Several people have asked me why not just make Anoldor commercial, and the answer is simple: Because that's not what we agreed on. Neither with our players, to whom the game has always been presented as a free project, nor with the team that has always worked on a voluntary basis and with the guarantee of not being pressured to meet deadlines - we move forward at our own pace - and with no paperwork.
What is the impact on Anoldor?
Writing being the most time consuming part of the project, I originally planned not to take care of writing IG (just detailed storyline), but in the end, for several reasons, I co-wrote it. (And I really enjoy this, so I might ask for a co-writer for Anoldor too). Nevertheless, I chose to give up other passions (the Roleplay forum in particular) to compensate for this workload, in fact, the creation of IG should only moderately impact the Anoldor one since I will continue to devote my vacations to writing Anoldor exclusively as I did before.
However, the impact of IG on Anoldor is also, in my opinion, positive because the more I write, the more I program, the more I direct, the better I get in all these areas. I've already seen real improvements in the way I work, in my rigor and skills. Furthermore, if I ever reach my goal of being able to work part-time in video game development, I could, in fact, devote more time to Anoldor as well.
Generally speaking, I'm quite aware of my limits, and that's why, as I said before, IG is less ambitious than Anoldor in terms of content: less love interest, portraits rather than whole sprites, a common route with romantic branches rather than one route for each love interest, fewer places etc. (paying for all these elements also helps to be reasonable *cough*) however, I'm really proud of what Imperial Grace is becoming. Too often, I've confused ambition with quality, and I hope to prove with IG that I can make a game with more reasonable content that is still a unique, memorable, and enjoyable experience.
Have a lovely day everyone, and thanks for reading my very very long rambling!Ā
