The Next Fiasco now has an official title!
This is Arcade Spirits, a visual novel about the hopes, dreams, and romances of gamers who share an arcade together. Part workplace sitcom, part anime romantic comedy, it’s going to be everything you love about my novels mixed with some really great visuals and music to bring it all together into a visual novel package.
We talked about the project a bit before, but here’s what’s new. The logo, obviously. But also, a few things about the Patreon.
If you join the Patreon, you’ll be contributing an amount of your choosing as low as $1 and as high as $GDP of Sweden into a fund which will be used to contract for art, music, and additional coding. If you contribute a total of $25 over the lifetime of the game’s development, no matter how much per month, you’ll get a copy of the game in the end for Windows, Linux, or Mac! And finally, if you contribute $5 or more a month, you’ll get access to test builds and demos as they become available (likely monthly).
You decide your level of involvement. Want to go whole hog? $5 a month will net you alphas and betas and all that good stuff. Just wanna follow development? Kick in $1-$4 a month and get early access and exclusive looks at the ongoing process, and participate directly. Want to wait for the finished game? That’s fine too — this blog you’re reading right now will provide free looks into what we’re doing, after a time delay (so Patrons get sneak peeks).
I’m looking forward to bringing you Arcade Spirits, releasing ??WhenItsDone?? on a computer near you.
Well, that was… not-entirely-unexpected.
This is the project that the Ren’Py research has been leading up to, correct?
Yep! I’d actually been poking at Renpy since 2003, when I took a class in it at Otakon that year. But it kept getting backburnered under the assumption I’d never be able to get art resources together, so why bother? Also I was worried I’d lose my audience, who wouldn’t want to install software and play a game, just read a book. But conditions have changed in 2017. I’m more adept at handling art contracts and the business end of things, and thanks to the rise of indie games on services like GoG and Steam and itch.io along with reliably powerful computer hardware, software isn’t as big of a dealbreaker anymore.