Pre Release : Going Gold!

The final and complete v1.0 build of "Hana Exposure! A Blooming Flower~" has been built and sent for verification to the online stores. Now it's just a matter of waiting for the verification process of each store to end so it can finally be released!

So long as there is no issues with the verification, the process should not take more than 10 days.

As you may have noticed, the Patreon billing has been paused since last month. The purpose of the Patreon has been to support the development, and with development complete, I'll be now pausing the billing for some time.

Now that we are here, I want to give everyone a profuse thank you. Thank you for supporting the development of Hana Exposure!.

I'll talk more about the future of the Patreon after the game releases, as there are some changes that I have in mind, and some of them are dependent on the game's performance.

In other news, new title! Hana's game will now be "Hana Exposure! A Blooming Flower~". There were a few reasons for the new title. First, the " 's " in "Hana's Exposure" never rolled off the tongue very well. Second, the Japanese title I always had in mind was precisely "Hana Exposure!", in Japanese of course, and so I also did the change of the English title so they could both match. And third, the subtitle will also works as a more SFW alternate title.

On the more progress log side of things, this post, and this part of the process was supposed to happen one month ago, as the game already complete by then, but there was one thing missing that I was going to announce as cancelled on the post I was going to make, and that is the audio. I had internally cancelled the addition of audio and decided to ship without it, but I ended up changing my mind at the last moment and decided to add the audio after all.

So, what was the process like? Can't be that hard. And indeed, it was not hard. But in good Flimsy fashion, I had to make it many times more difficult for myself than it needed to be. I have the sometimes good and sometimes bad tendency to want to learn and know how to work on all sides of development, and so I went with the first approach, which was trying to make the audio myself and learn how to do so along the way. Mixed results. I could not get into it properly due to the constant thought of "The game is late. The game is late. The game is late". After some time, I decided to try a different approach, and that's where the second approach came in. Royalty-free music. The good thing about royalty-free music, is that there is an absurd amount of it out there. So there are a lot of options out there for any kind of project. The bad thing about royalty-free music, is that there is an absurd amount of it out there. Good luck finding what you are looking for if you have any kind of specification. After some time, I decided to go back to first approach. When that did not work out so well, I went back to the second one, and then back to the first one. As you can see, I had an exciting vicious cycle on my hands. Anyhow, that went on for some time, and at some point I added a third approach to the cycle, which was to go back to cancelling the audio and calling it a day, and then a fourth approach was added, which was making use of the Unity asset store. This one is a bit interesting. For some devs this would have been the first instinct, but I personally have the also sometimes good and sometimes bad habit of wanting to avoid using the asset store at all costs. So the thought of using it hadn't even crossed my mind until way later. Well, I was able to find stuff in the asset store that worked, and voila, vicious cycle ended.

With music in hand, it was just a matter of making and coding the actual audio system and all of it's functions. It was very straightforward. I did have to manually add stuff to some events, and to the codes of some routine based events, but other than that it went without any major problems. Anyhow, the implementation as a whole is nothing too complex, but it has the functions that it needs to make for a pleasant experience. Music implementation was complete.

I do have a couple of outcomes/thoughts after completing the audio stuff. I would like to give making audio a shot again. But of course, I would it to be when I'm working on a new project, with a few more people on the team developing the game and things going more smoothly because of it, without having on the back of my mind the game being late and delayed. I think it could be fun to try it again.

The other thing is the asset store. I've always had a, for the lack of a better word, "hatred" for it that stems from seeing games overuse it, and the result being something that feels like some sort of asset flip, and at that point... what's the point?. It's like not wanting to use RPG maker due to it being border-line impossible for your game to not feel like "just another RPG maker game". This is the first I use the asset store, and after doing so, I think it could be alright to use it a bit more in the future. I know I'll still avoid it when possible, but I would definitely like to take it into consideration moving forward, as I know that there will inevitably be things where the asset store will be the faster and more efficient approach.

Lastly, I do apologize for the radio silence for the last month, especially after I said I was going to make a follow up post to last month's post. I did not like the idea of making a post explaining the situation without the details being clear about which of the four approaches I was going to take. So I decided to shut up, pause the billing as was planned, forget everything else so I could focus on the task, and get to work until the audio was done.

Next post will be the release post once the online stores give me the green-light.

Thank you all for supporting the development of Hana Exposure!