#cpd2

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.

The longer answer to whether I’ll finish the Dragon Mask partially involves how well the CPD2 games have done overall. And the numbers (based on download counts per day since a game’s release)… aren’t great for the Dragon Mask. Here’s a simple rundown of the download popularity percentages, using Depths of Despair as the baseline (100%):

Depths of Despair: 100%Fatal Operation: 64%Zero Hope: 15%The Dragon Mask: 8%Depths of Despair -Nightmare Edition-: 19%

To be fair, there are a number of factors here:- Depths of Despair is a complete game, the others are demos.- Zero Hope focuses on minor characters and original characters.- The Dragon Mask is not story-complete.- The Depths of Despair remake has none of its final art and is less known than the original.

Even so, there’s was a MASSIVE drop-off of interest in the CPD2 games as the series went on. Whenever I see people talk about the games at all these days, it’s about Depths of Despair and maybe Fatal Operation. The other three pretty much don’t exist. (For reference, the first two games got VNDB and TVTropes pages without any input from me, and they each have multiple Let’s Play series on YouTube. I had to make Zero Hope’s page on TVTropes with a friend.)

The obvious counterargument here is that I should finish the game for myself and the people who are interested in the game. I hadn’t planned on Depths of Despair getting as big as it did, after all. However, it’s become difficult to get motivated to write without an audience, especially after my original ebooks flopped. At this point, I’ve pretty much “put all my eggs in one basket” hoping that Eldritch Academy will do well. So a lot of my focus is on trying to get that finished and plan out my future projects, which makes working on a fan project feel awkward.

I won’t say that I will never finish the Dragon Mask… but I can’t really make any promises about it either. It’d be easier to convince myself to finish it if I felt like it would have an audience beyond a dozen or so people, but I’ve seen enough bad creators beg for views/comments/etc. that I’m afraid to ask for more than I already get. I’m also still trying to get my original stories off the ground, so I doubt I’d do much more for CPD2 until at least Eldritch Academy is done.

The original idea for Fatal Operation was mostly to give Naomi a story to go alongside Depths of Despair. While Depths of Despair provided Ayumi with her “Epiphany Therapy” and helped her to start to move on, it didn’t really do much for Naomi. The earliest outlines focused pretty heavily on Naomi for this reason, with a lot of redundant and unneeded characters planned out just to fill out the cast. (Some of these characters still showed up in Fatal Operation or Zero Hope, though.) When I realized that there were too many characters to really focus on any of them properly, I ended up cutting it down to a smaller list of characters with specific traumas to deal with. (Seiko was close to Naomi and had her family issues, Yuuya and Haruna Kizami had their own family issues, and Kensuke worked well to provide a baseline–less traumatized–personality.)

As for the influence of DEAD PATIENT, it helped me settle on the hospital as a setting for the game and the use of zombies as threats. I had already made Naomi a nurse in Depths of Despair, but it became more obvious how a hospital could work as a horror setting after seeing the quarantine in DEAD PATIENT. It also inspired the use of QTE segments to provide more “gameplay” to the game.

When it comes to character focus, I wanted to make sure to give the characters who were minor characters in canon a bigger role in the story. For Seiko–who was a minor character disguised as a major character in canon–that meant she had to be important for a larger chunk of the game, which led to her family history becoming a part of the story and her connection with the antagonist. For the Kizami siblings that meant making their conflict more complex than mutual antagonism and giving it as much focus as the other character arcs.

In response to your last statement, I’m glad to hear that you liked Fatal Operation! That said, I’m not sure it’s necessarily comparable with DEAD PATIENT just yet. While Fatal Operation is essentially an open beta, the story script is pretty much complete. On the other hand, DEAD PATIENT has been stuck with only one (very exposition-heavy and low in character development) chapter for five years. At this point, I’m not even sure where the plot of DEAD PATIENT is going, since the most important development was revealed as a cliffhanger. Though I can sort of understand the apathy… Five years hanging from a cliff, and you just want to let go and do something else instead. (Even the gap between BC4 and BC5 was only about 3 years.)

I’ve been hinting for a while that each subsequent game in the CPD2 series gets less and less interest/feedback than the previous, but I usually don’t put together the information to actually prove it. But now that I’ve actually collected some data, it may be time to remedy that. I ended up focusing on two easily-quantifiable stats: downloads of each game/version from Mediafire, and videos for each game on YouTube.

The overall stats are pretty complicated for downloads per version, so here’s a few important pieces of the data:

Most Downloaded Version of CPD2: v9 (3116 downloads, x3 next highest)

Most Downloaded Version of CPD2 while Newest: v6/v8 (8.91/8.41 downloads per day, x2 next highest)

Total CPD2 Downloads (all versions): 5500, 3.95 downloads per day

Most Downloaded Version of CPD2F: v4/v5 (895/822 downloads, x2 next highest)

Most Downloaded Version of CPD2F while Newest: v3/v2 (5.67/5.16 downloads per day, x1.5 next highest)

Total CPD2F Downloads (all versions): 3297, 2.50 downloads per day

Total CPD2Z Downloads: 454, 0.64 downloads per day

Total CPD2M (v1) Downloads: 162, 0.38 downloads per day

Total CPD2re (v2) Downloads: 461, 0.73 downloads per day

Going off these stats, I’d say that Depths of Despair is roughly 2-3 times more popular than Fatal Operation, even after factoring in the difference in when they became available. Fatal Operation is then 5-10 times more popular than any other game in the series. (Completion doesn’t even seem to be a big factor after Fatal Operation, because CPD2re--with barely any art--is slightly more popular than the story-complete game with portrait art and some CGs: Zero Hope.)

Now here’s the second set of stats: YouTube videos/playthroughs. I counted incomplete playthroughs as well, since there are a number of unfinished ones.

Depths of Despair: 142 videos, 31 unique playthroughs

Fatal Operation: 59 videos, 9 unique playthroughs

Zero Hope: 7 videos, 2 unique playthroughs

Depths of Despair -Nightmare Edition-: 18 videos, 1 unique playthrough

Going off these numbers, I feel like I was right when I thought that Depths of Despair was 3 times more popular than Fatal Operation. And my assumption that Fatal Operation was roughly 5 times more popular than Zero Hope was held up as well. That means the third game in the series (Zero Hope) is fifteen times less popular than the first (Depths of Despair). CPD2re ends up being an outlier, with far more videos per playthrough than any other game.

So those are some of the numbers behind the CPD2 series. While I enjoyed making them at the time, the drastically diminishing returns in interest makes it hard to justify creating more games in the series instead of working on something else. If I were to work more on the series, I’d rather spend the time finishing the games that already have demos than making a new entry.