#genba

Ginga fanzine piece featuring Hougen and Genba for @gingafanzine ~ Fun fact: all the background characters are specific characters!

It's finally time! Jurassic June has begun and, as promised, we are going to tell you a bit more about our "dino project" GENBA, starting with a reveal of the full title and logo!

Just as the subtitle says, "GENBA no Kizuna" can be translated to “bonds of the crime scene”. There is, of course, a reason as to why I have decided to spell GENBA in katakana/capital letters, just as I did with SHINRAI. However, we will get into that another time. For now, let me answer the probably more burning question first: what is this about?

GENBA no Kizuna is the story of four rookie investigators trying to solve their first murder case and learning how to effectively work as a team. It will be told through the eyes of all four of them, with each member of the group specializing in another crucial area of crime scene investigation. Depending on whose role you assume, the interactive gameplay elements will change. Whereas one of the officers will take care of interrogating the suspects, for example, only the medical examiner may examine the victim's body and try to determine the cause of death.

The idea for GENBA no Kizuna (or simply GENBA, as I will refer to it from hereon out) stems from the wish to create a shorter, more interactive murder mystery. While SHINRAI - Broken Beyond Despair featured the possibilities to interrogate suspects and investigate the crime scene, these interactive segments were rather restricted and few and far between. This was not only a result from the way the story progressed, but also from the fact that it was originally written as a novel and never intended to be a visual novel (and therefore never intended to include interactive elements).

GENBA, however, is the exact opposite of that. Right from the start, the story for it was shaped with the very idea of interactivity in mind.

One of the main points of critique in regards to SHINRAI is the fact that it starts out very slow and that it takes a while for the first murder to occur. So this time around, we also wanted to throw the player right into the "action". When the game starts and the team arrives at the scene, the crime has already occurred and the investigation is just about to commence.

Finally, another big reason as to why we wanted to create GENBA is to try out a few different things which we eventually want to add to SHINRAI's sequel (named Withering Without Hope), as well. This, first and foremost, refers to the various gameplay elements.

There is another reason why I want to tell this story first, however. As you might have guessed already, simply by looking at the logo, GENBA is actually going to be connected to SHINRAI in quite a few ways. In a sense, I guess you could call it a "spin-off" to the series. How exactly this story connects to SHINRAI will also be a topic for a different time, though.

Now, you might still be wondering why I have referred to this as the "dino project" before and why I specifically chose "Jurassic June" to finally shed some more light on it... Don't worry, it will become clear pretty soon! We will reveal more information about GENBA throughout the rest of the month. In the meantime, you can get an idea by checking out this blog post, if you haven't already!

In any case, I guess it's time to wrap up today's post. I am really excited to be able to finally talk in a little more detail about this project and I hope that you are just as excited to learn more. Still, I should probably also mention that it will be a while before GENBA will be released. Don't expect it to happen within 2017. While it is supposed to be a shorter project, we also want to keep working on Withering Without Hope alongside it, and we are generally still in the early phases of development. That's just the way things are when you're basically a two-person-team orz"

Nevertheless, I hope you will stick with us for this new development journey, however long it may take. Now that it's officially revealed, I will work even harder to make as much progress as possible every week, so I can continue to give you little glimpses of our new project. After all, that is the main reason why I ever started typing these weekly updates in the first place: to motivate me. I mean, it kind of sucks if a whole week passes and you have nothing to show for it. So I'm doing this precisely to get things done and to be able to say that I have made some progress every week. Of course, there will always be an update where I won't be able to say or show much, whether it's because I just wasn't able to achieve much or because what I did manage to get done is too spoilery... However, I will do my best so that those instances become more of a rarity!

As Toube pins Jaw to the ground and finishes him off, the blood splatters all over the cave and dogs watching it.