Since traffic here has really died down, Iām not sure if Iāll be posting as much here as I used to. For the time being, my WordPress site might be a better place to keep track of my projects:Ā link
As a side note, Eldritch Academy has since been released on Steam, in addition to its place on itch.io. So you can now visit either site to buy and download the game.
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The time has come to uncover the secrets of Solana Academy: Eldritch Academy is now available for purchase on itch.io!
Monsters have begun appearing in the old ārestricted buildingā at night. After discovering a set of magical petals, Yue Ishikami and her classmates are the only ones able to keep these monsters at bay. Meanwhile, the school continues operating as if nothing is wrong, and information about a similarly strange incident from the past is strictly controlled. It is up to Yue and her friends to find out the truth of whatās going on and put an end to it, or else it may become another cover-up...
Eldritch Academy is a Romance/Paranormal Thriller visual novel. Who Yue interacts with during her investigation may lead to friendship, romance, or heartbreak.
After about five years of on-and-off development, Eldritch Academy has a potential release date: January 4th, 2019. Unless any game-breaking issues are discovered in the meantime, the game will be available for purchase sometime that day.
Eldritch Academy is a romance and paranormal thriller visual novel set in the same universe as Shireishi and Those That Linger. A sudden outbreak of monsters from the ārestricted buildingā of the remote Solana Academy leaves the school under the protection of four girls who discovered magical stone petals. With few to turn to for aid and unable to reject this responsibility, the girls must now uncover the secrets of their school in order to end this threat.
The game is seen from the perspective of Yue Ishikami, a standoffish girl who is slow to make friends. Yueās choices determine which of her new companions she becomes closest to, potentially leading to romance or heartbreak.
Eldritch Academy will be available on itch.io for $15 USD. The game was developed with Ren'Py for the Windows operating system, but Linux and Mac OS builds will also be available.
I was playing around with some games I had on Steam but had never actually started up before, and ended up finding some code I wrote in the wild. Years ago, when RPG Maker MV came out, I wrote a snippet of code for keeping track of data separately from normal save files and posted it to the official forums for free use. While trying to figure out how a game was tracking game data without having any save files, I discovered that it was an RPG Maker game using that code snippet.
It's kind of a weird feeling, finding out this way. It's cool that people are finding use for something I wrote for my own purposes years ago, but I honestly didn't expect to see it anywhere outside of my own projects. I guess it was more useful than I had expected it would be.
After about five years of on-and-off development, Eldritch Academy has a potential release date: January 4th, 2019. Unless any game-breaking issues are discovered in the meantime, the game will be available for purchase sometime that day.
Eldritch Academy is a romance and paranormal thriller visual novel set in the same universe as Shireishi and Those That Linger. A sudden outbreak of monsters from the "restricted building" of the remote Solana Academy leaves the school under the protection of four girls who discovered magical stone petals. With few to turn to for aid and unable to reject this responsibility, the girls must now uncover the secrets of their school in order to end this threat.
The game is seen from the perspective of Yue Ishikami, a standoffish girl who is slow to make friends. Yue's choices determine which of her new companions she becomes closest to, potentially leading to romance or heartbreak.
Eldritch Academy will be available on itch.io for $15 USD. The game was developed with Ren'Py for the Windows operating system, but Linux and Mac OS builds will also be available.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Still need a little more time to look over things and make a final decision, but Iām tentatively aiming to release Eldritch Academy in early January 2019. (The dates I have in mind are the 4th or the 11th.) Iāll probably make another announcement with the full details once Iāve made the decision on which date.
The itch.io page for Eldritch Academy is up! The game is in the testing stage, so--barring any issues--it should be available relatively soon. Iām aiming to release the game either sometime before the end of the year or early next year.
The game is planned to be sold for about $15 USD. More details about the game can be found on the itch.io page.
Been a while since I did one of these, but the PC release of Book of Shadows inspired me to write something Corpse Party-related. So hereās a snippet of a story about a character from Corpse Party D2: The Dragon Mask, taking place roughly around the same time as the opening of Act 3.
Note: I tried to disguise the identity of the narrator to avoid spoilers, just in case the rest of CPD2M comes out one day, but I feel it will be pretty clear anyway. Also note that Act 3 of the game is only in an outline state, so details may change if the game does get finished. Either way, this could be considered spoilery, if youāre worried about that for a postponed fangame.
Penalty Game
I scowled at the caller ID I was seeing. I had told Niwa not to get her involved.
I tapped out of the call tracking app. The icon listed as "GhostSense" was looking damn tempting. I could have it on every app store known to Japan within a week. Since its protection features had never been fixed, I'd bet dozens of people would anger the restless dead and find themselves in an early grave. And that rabble would fucking deserve it.
Even so, Niwa hadn't technically broken her promise yet. If I released the program now, she'd blame me. She wouldn't suffer the soul-crushing despair of knowing that her actions caused another tragedy. She'd have me as a scapegoat.
I huffed to myself. Fine. I didn't care what happened to a bunch of human refuse either way. Without being able to make a bigger statement, I'd not gain anything from their slaughter. The only people who would die are the ones who are the least threat to those worthy of living.
No, if I was going to unleash Niwa's little mistake on the world, it would be to crush her. So as long as she can wiggle her way out of a hurt conscience, there's no point.
Still, I couldn't help but seethe at Niwa's audacity. To call the person I specifically told her not to meet? She must be trying to slide by on a technicality. I popped a piece of gum into my mouth, chewing to relieve the tension. If Niwa dared to smuggle the Mask to her...
A grin cracked over my face. That's right... Niwa didn't have the Mask on her right now. She wasn't a total retard. Whatever worthless excuse of life had the Mask right now had no way of stopping me, if I chose to take it back. And I think I will. After all, Niwa should pay for siding with some common rabble over her own kind. I think she can endure a little game...
Changing course, I started walking toward the home of the person with the Mask. It wouldn't even require spiritual abilities to steal it back, I bet. And then, I have a few ideas of where to hide it that will give Niwa a rough time.
The idea kept getting better and better in my head. I opened up a web browser on my phone and downloaded a music track I was familiar with, one that Niwa was sure to be annoyed by. I proceeded to insert a line into the GhostSense bytecode to force the track to play when the program was active, ignoring system volume and the emergency setting.
By the time I was at my destination, I had a solid plan for my game. My phone was empty of almost everything except the hacked copy of GhostSense now, but I had a backup flash drive of the important files. I'd buy myself a new phone tomorrow.
"I hope you find the answers you're looking for, Niwa." I slipped the phone into my pocket, barely containing a chuckle. "Because it's going to cost you a lot more than you expect!"
Replaying the last chapter of Corpse Party: Book of Shadows brings back a lot of memories of early 2013. It wasnāt long after binging the available English games at that point (Rebuilt, BR, BoS) that I decided to spend the next few months making a fangame for the series. I had actually forgotten how many elements of the opening of Depths of Despair were directly lifted from little bits of narration in Book of Shadows.
Oddly enough, I think I was more optimistic back then, when the memories are from. Itās kind of funny how a game about people dying horribly reminds me ofĀ āhappierā times. I guess a lot has happened in the last five and a half years.
After watching some videos of the original version of Depths of Despair, Iām tempted to do a stream of the Nightmare Edition. I feel like it fixes a lot of story issues that existed in the original version, but it seems like no one wants to play it. In fact, I had been working on an update to the game about a year ago that I ended up not releasing when I checked the download numbers. (I donāt even remember most of what changed anymore.)
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There are only two more events to implement portraits for in Eldritch Academy, though I need to wait until the last few portraits are finished to do them. After that, the only things left should be fixing the sound effects and doing final edits to any bugs I find.
It might be about time to put up the new game page, but Iām feeling a bit nervous about that still...
I think I now have all the art needed for the main game of Eldritch Academy, and all that remains is to implement it and test everything. Then Iāll just need to wait for the sidestory art to be finished and double-check the sound effects, and the game will pretty much be done.
The one active Corpse Party community that I still kept track of is being forced to move services, since the old one is being merged. It feels like when the BioWare Social Network moved and eventually shut down all over again. Except this time I feel a lot more numb about it.
I'm starting to get really tired of looking for Dead Patient news only to find people begging XSEED for Vita/Switch/PS4 ports of the game. (Decided to put the bulk of this under a read more, since it turned into a rant.)
The reasons:
XSEED does not traditionally do ports. They do localizations. The ports they have done are ports to PC, and have historically taken a long time due to having only one programmer at the company. (Examples: Trails in the Sky FC and Corpse Party BC. The latter was announced for 2014, came out in 2016.)
GrindHouse/Team GrisGris generally consists of 4 permanent members: Kedwin/Kamishiro (Story and Art), Hamamoto (BGM/SE), and Ogawa (Programming). Having only one programmer means the likelihood of in-house ports is near zero. (Especially after they moved away from Unity, which is the "official" third-party tool for Switch development.)
The game only has one chapter right now, and has been in development for at least 5-6 years. The team's focus is surely on finishing the game, not porting it to other consoles.
This is a niche indie game series that probably lost at least half of its fanbase years ago. In addition, the Western releases are generally cheaper than the original releases. (Example: Corpse Party BC was roughly 20 USD (2000 yen), but sells for 15 USD on Steam.) The team probably doesn't have the funding to outsource a port. (And XSEED has had to convert originally free updates into paid DLC in the past just to pay off costs in niche series. Example: Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns.)
I'm not pleased that so many people expect the game to make it to consoles by default when the games that were on consoles also had far larger budgets, larger teams, and shorter deadlines. Yes, it has become much easier for indie studios to get their games on consoles these days. But that's not the default, even if previous games by that studio were on consoles. It costs a lot of money and work hours to get your game on a console.
Honestly, I'm getting a lot of fuel for an inevitable dose of schadenfreude in the response to Dead Patient's localization. And that's actually starting to worry me. I should be happy the game is going to be released in English, not creepily awaiting the disappointment of others...
At this point, I might need to find someone who keeps track of all of the released information and have them filter out the new/important information to tell me. It's getting too stressful to look up this information myself.
Now that I think about it (this might sound weird), in Fatal operation, is there any reason why Seiko didn't confess to Naomi, even after 6 years?
I meant Seiko in depths of despair.
The best way to explain this is that there was never really a good time. The years following Satoshi's death were rough on Naomi, and so Seiko wouldn't have felt like it was the proper time when Naomi was still actively grieving. And then Naomi went on to college and nursing school while Seiko got a job, so she wouldn't have wanted to risk the time they did have together with a potentially drastic shift in the relationship. Between Naomi's trauma and their accelerating schedules, Seiko would have needed a particularly dramatic shakeup to decide to confess to Naomi. Otherwise, she'd want to wait and hope that a better opportunity presented itself in time, an opportunity that wouldn't risk the friendship.
So that's the way I figure it worked to get to where things are in Depths of Despair, with the two still good friends but with Seiko still hiding her real feelings. Hopefully that helps explain things a bit.
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* To be continued: Which thing you thing tore the fandom apart more?: the plot, the characters or the ending? A last comment about the fandom's state: most part of the Blood Drive controversy seems to have died down, but there is a considerablemente number of people Who have rennounced of the series for good. Honestly, after reading your experience, i feel sad not only for those that suffered toxicity (obviously incluyes cases like yours), but also about dead patient. Think I'm going to give it
Iām honestly not sure exactly what upset people the most about Blood Drive, because I started distancing myself from those discussions when things started getting bad. I feel like, from what I saw, the characters were the least polarizing. The people who were vocal about hating certain characters tended to give arguments that ignored what those charactersā roles were. (Like people who missed the point that Kuonās āperfectionā was portrayed as a bad thing that made her alienate her sister and drive herself nearly to death over impossible, perfectionist goals.)
From the little I saw, I feel like the ending was the next most upsetting thing. Weāre starting to get into spoilers, so this is going behind a read more.
I feel like one of the āhate the endingā camps seems to not understand the tone of the series. Aside from the A rank ending of the PC-98 game, the Corpse Party series is bleak and punishes anyone who tries to find the bright side of a situation. These players bought into the lies of Aiko, Misuto, and the marketing that there was a way to bring back the deceased from the previous games and that the series would have a happy ending. But like any hope spot in the series, that was only even suggested to make the final revelations more painful. That plot point wasnāt a promise; it was a trap for Ayumi and the player. Aiko and Misuto even admit that they lied to try to use Ayumi for their goals. So itās no surprise that this was revealed to be impossible in-setting.
Another one of the camps seems to misunderstand how the ending was presented, and partially ties into the previous one. Itās made very clear during the ending that there is no happily ever after: the Nirvana will continue to be a threat no matter what. Iāve had people ask me why Ayumi didnāt just use time travel like Sachiko did, but that ignores two things: Sachiko was the most powerful known sorcerer in the series while Ayumi was the weakest, and Sachiko (without being the host of the Nirvana) could only loop 24 hours before dissolving. The actual options Ayumi was given, to my memory, were: 1) guard the Nirvana, but it would continue to work as it did since Sachikoās time and the souls within would suffer or 2) consume the Nirvana as Sachiko once did and free the souls within, but become a non-person in history. Ayumi, always concerned about how things āshouldā be, didnāt think it was right to let people suffer in the Nirvana if she could do something about it. Thus the ending.
Iām sure there are other negative opinions on the ending, particularly ones that critique what it is instead of based on misunderstandings, but I havenāt seen them myself so Iām not sure I can comment on them.
For the most part, I think it was the theme and plot that really turned people off. As Iāve said before, Blood Drive is a culmination of all the other previous products, with their witch hunts and birthday parties and secret societies. So it has a much larger scope than any previous game, which may have turned off people who enjoyed the more personal scope of the previous three games. There were obviously hints of a larger picture before, but not to world-threatening extents. And Book of Shadows and 2U tended to narrow down the scope more often than expand it, so suddenly having a big picture was a huge shift in tone. Then you add to this a bunch of characters weāre expected to know, but are new to the games themselves, while fan favorites are no longer relevant. That the first half of the plotās premise is based on a lie that hurts the player as much as it hurts Ayumi (as mentioned above) is just more to add to the sense of betrayal. This betrayal may well have been intentional, but itās a risky move to psychologically punish the player when you have a franchise to sell.
(As a side note about plot and characters, I recently saw a post complaining about how Misuto dies āhalfway throughā the game. This confuses me, since he dies at the end of Chapter 08, which is the ninth chapter out of eleven, if you count Chapter 00 as a chapter.)
Iām not too surprised that the main controversy has died down, since itās been years now and many of those who were the most upset are simply gone. That said, Iām still bummed out about how the community has dwindled to what it is now. I didnāt expect Corpse Party to be a big fandom forever, since I always knew the series would end eventually and itās a niche franchise to begin with. But I was hoping that the community would at least continue to interact and create together. Especially since Corpse Party has such a large number of finished fangames compared to the main series entries and relative popularity, I thought the series could live on for a while through fanworks. But then a lot of those people, the creative people, ended up dropping out of the community during the conflict and things sort of dried up.
Not sure what you were going to say about Dead Patient, since your second message hasnāt shown up for me yet, but Iām personally not optimistic it would be able to revive the fandom in the West. For one, the game wonāt get an official localization until itās finished, and Chapter 2 has been in development for at least 5 years. The second, bigger thing is that itās very much a āpost-Blood Driveā game that builds off from elements of Blood Drive. (DPN even fixed a visual discontinuity between DP and BD and added a Satoshi extra chapter.) So people who refuse to acknowledge Blood Drive (which some people who remain Corpse Party fans have stated they are) would not be able to enjoy the game. It also has elements that Iāve heard described as ānot fittingā in a Corpse Party game. (As an example, someone once said that about zombies in the CPD2 game āFatal Operationā. Dead Patient also has zombies, and in a more prominent role.)
Anyway, hope that helps. Iāll keep an eye out for the second message.
This question might sound weird, but, would you say that corpse party Blood Drive was really divisible among the fanbase?
Assuming you mean ādivisiveā, Iād say that thereās little argument. I donāt know about the Japanese fandom, but the Western fandom pretty much imploded starting with Blood Drive. The sheer amount of conflict among fans drove a lot of people away, even if they still liked the series. (I know someone who stopped liking the series and now avoids it, not because of Blood Drive itself, but because of how the fandom reacted to it.)
While that probably answers your question, I have a few lingering feelings about the situation that make me want to expand on my opinion. Thing is, Iām pretty sure Iāve said most of it before, somewhere. So Iāll try to summarize.
I feel like part of the problem was the nature of the game and its localization. Whatever you feel about the game itself, it was tied heavily to almost every Corpse Party product leading up to it, serving as a grand finale to the Heavenly Host story arc and everything connected to it. However, a lot of those products were never translated and involved other media, some of which is not popular outside of Japan (like audio dramas). So there was already an information lockout for Western fans that didnāt want to learn Japanese or read summaries. And then the localization was⦠not good. I generally tried to give XSEED the benefit of the doubt, but the main editor for the Corpse Party series literally went on record about how he didnāt give his all for the game because he didnāt like the direction it took. And thus we have nonsense (3rd person narration changed to 1st person with no regard to proper narrator choices) and flat-out mistakes (almost censoring Hinoeās rape by accident). People who only play the game in one language and never read the forums wonāt know these were issues with the localization, theyāll assume itās bad writing from Kedwin and Kamishiro. (Like Kedwinās strange ability to warp calendar dates beyond logic.)
And then there was the fandom itself. The āhatersā were the most vocal, as they often are in any situation. Whether they hated the direction the story took or the shift in the type of horror depicted, they shouted down anyone who dared to like anything from the game. I know a few people that left the fandom because they didnāt feel safe with their opinions anymore. And since the less passionate people were scared off, there were fewer people left around in the communities I kept track of. Of the 5-6 people I knew, only one is still in the community and we donāt talk much anymore. And due to the delay of future Corpse Party products aside from the live action films and BR 3DS, there wasnāt enough to keep talking about once people tried to move on from Blood Drive. Too much of the community in the places I knew had gone, so those who were left had little more to say.
Personally, I felt like the big reaction to Blood Drive was almost the end of an era in my life. From when I got into Corpse Party in early 2013 to Blood Driveās English release, it felt like I met and interacted with a good deal of people. Depths of Despair and Fatal Operation were released during this time. Corpse Party was a niche fandom, but it was big enough to be lively while small enough to know the big names, even if you didnāt talk to them. Then Blood Drive hit, and things fell apart. People left⦠they hated what Corpse Party seemed to have become, or they couldnāt handle the fandom conflict, or they simply stopped caring. The CPD2 games with the weakest releases came out during this period, where even acknowledging Blood Drive was a bad idea. (And those games did, so I have to wonder if that affected them as well.) One by one, the people I considered friends drifted away. The only person I met from that time that I still regularly talk to has moved on to an MMO, and doesnāt seem to like being reminded of the Corpse Party days.
Overall, I do agree that Blood Drive divided the fanbase. I could keep going on about what I thought and felt over the years, but at this point thatās probably just rambling. Ultimately, Iāve become numb to Corpse Party. Iād still say that I like the series, but itāll never be quite the same after what happened to the fandom. Iāve been told by several people many times that I shouldnāt let othersā opinions make me enjoy something less, but that might be a lesson I learned too late in this case. Because, honestly, if I were to say why I donāt participate with the Corpse Party fandom anymore (fanfics, fangames, discussions, etc.), itās because of the fandom itself. It became so toxic that it burned away the things I had liked about it, and it never really seemed to recover, as far as I know. But Iāve also distanced myself, so maybe itās rebuilding without me in it.
At any rate, that was probably too long of a response to a yes-or-no question. This subject just brings up a lot of personal memories, so I guess Iām not quite over it yet. At any rate, I hope that answers your question. Let me know if something I said was unclear.