After having abandoned other stories or put other projects on indefinite pause, I said 'we have to do something new, something small, something I can handle'. I wanted to go the 'see something new and build from there' route and among several things, I decided to go for inspiration from two manga that I really liked: Girls' Last Tour and Fire Punch. I also took my love with Fallout, and along with that, I went to write the first drafts.
Months later, the 8K word draft grew to 70K words by now. The standard for visual novels are much more, but what I'm trying to say with this was that originally, it was going to be a story without any pretensions, the two main characters were going to be unfeeling beings who see no problem in killing senselessly and making jokes about how bad things are. Everything that is now was built was out of my silly need to make not leave things as something small. It didn't help that, to see what visual novels are like, I played Tsukuhime and Fate/Stay Night Realta Nua. A lot of my preconceptions about how fictional stories work were shattered. (That happens like 2 times a year for me).
The need to turn HH into something more, even if it's just a little bit more, became strong. It doesn't help that when I'm working on something like this, I can't get it out of my head until I give it some sort of "final sentence". I've stopped thinking about my previous projects because of the above, but with HH I always tried to relate it to things I saw in other stories, associate songs with the story itself, when I was with things like the shower just looking at the wall imagining things with HH.... Eurobeatlover says that bets the final game with the two routes will gonna be 4 hours long. This is a big project for me, but because I'm novice. Still, I hope I can feel satisfied when I finally finish this.
And how is it going at the moment?
All the text for the first part of the Dess route is in the game. I have already adjusted a plugin and a pattern, as well as collected the necessary soundtrack and sound effects. I want to finish writing Sera's route to start making the first part of the other one.
Eurobeatlover is someone who really wants everything to have logic and quality. Practically every day we have discussions about how to bring the story to a better end. It is funny that this is the least I will write about in this post, but, those discussions are every day, and last for hours, and they have brought the story to a better end. Thank you, my visual novel elitist. (Joke) Utsukushi Hana has contributed as well, only less but it is normal, her strength is in drawing, not so much in writing, but she still provides good ideas.
Eurobeatlover keeps telling me that making a demo of this is a bad idea, but.... For several reasons, I'd better dare to do this.
The idea I have with this is: Dess's route Pt1, then Pt2, then the full Sera's route. Contrary to what I planned before, that the game would reach its 1.0 state with the first story complete, in the Sera's route I have put everything I left out because I couldn't put them in the first route, so I can't consider Harmful Heaven as a complete game until both routes are complete.
I am open to whoever is reading this to express their point of view on everything stated I've stated. At the beginning when I was a kid I was hugely into that "you can create games by only yourself! After all these years, um, I guess it's true, but in my case, I can't make a *good* game by myself, and I accept any kind of help to make this project come out as good as possible.