- Nov 11, 2020
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As a player, we don't always grasp all the doubts a game developer can feel.You must be registered to see the links
This is going to be a bit of a different one and quite long, so grab something to drink and sit tight.
6 months ago, on the 17th of February 2024, I reluctantly clicked "publish" for a little thing called Actual Roommates.
I was sure it would die in obscurity. 6 months later, here we are!
I wanted to make a post to thank you all for your support, being it monetary, spreading the word around or even just by downloading and giving Actual Roommates a chance.
As I said I was convinced that no one would care about it, the market for AVNs got very saturated after 2021-2022, it didn't have the most amazing renders or the most gripping story, just a talking cat and an horny protagonist. Despite that, the game was received positively.
And yet, the game almost died one month in.
Only a select group of friends knew what I was doing, but they all had 0 experience with DAZ Studio, coding, and very limited experience with VNs in general.
As I was putting together chapter 2 I was lonely, isolated. I only wanted to finish the chapter and go back to playing videogames with my friends.
And then, a DM on discord changed everything.
For some reason I caught the eye of Asia The Magical Gurl, dev of Projekt Moon. They invited me to their discord server and OH BOY!, there's some very talented people in there.
Overnight I went from having no one to talk to to have a server full of fellow devs to mine for information, criticism and boob gifs.
This is the first of many thank-yous and it goes to Asia: thank you for pulling me up from the metaphorical darkness, you are a wonderful human being and one day I'll give you the biggest and tightest hug I can muster.
In said server, after having calmed down from the shock of realizing that Moonbox was in there and trying to not embarass myself from fangirling all over the chat, I got friendly with 3 wonderful individuals: TheSugarRay, TheDevian and FireValley.
Me and FireValley being "newbs" in this environment grew up a lot as devs together, learning things as we go, being coached by other, more experienced, devs, and I can't wait for his game, Dragon of Calon Valley, to FINALLY be released (I played the alpha, it's good shit!).
TheDevian (of Bonds of Blood fame) is sooooo fucking gooooooooooood at 3D modeling and has a deep knowledge of DAZ Studio. I can't count the amount of times I was struggling with something and he'd just pop up, dispense knowledge, then go back to, I presume, play Fallout for the 1200th time.
Ray is my bro. I fucking loved his game, Candied Oblivion, and we bonded over that. I love people that, despite not taking themselves too seriously, still work their butts off and he fits that mold to a tee. Also trolling him on twitter is one of my favourites past times and we constantly put up with each other's bullshit. Even if the game dies tomorrow, the experience of having found Ray makes all of this worth it.
But, of course, the game would be a mess of bad grammar and errors if it wasn't for my right-hand woman, someone who loves girls probably even more than me (actually, DEFINITELY more than me): Lunaedge.
She's one of my closest friend, I've known her for over a decade and the fact that she accepted to embark with me in this dumb journey still baffles me. I've asked her to share her thoughts about it, and here they are:
"Hi everyone! Professional nitpicker Luna here~ ^_^ I
just wanted to thank you all for playing Hanako's game!
I've known them for [REDACTED] years and when they first pitched the game and asked me if I wanted to lend a hand with supervising the script, I'm not gonna lie, I was kinda confused.
I'd played a single AVN in my entire life (Katawa Shoujo btw, very different style but go check it out if you haven't experienced it yet!) and I had no idea there was such an active, diverse and dedicate community around them.
But the moment I laid eyes on the first Chapter's early draft I was immediately sold. I knew they could weave a captivating story (they had to deal with my plot-derailing shenanigans A LOT playing D&D lmao), but I wasn't expecting the level of detail, passion and attention that Hanako poured into every single render and how believably, genuinely LESBIAN the characters felt right off the bat. As they shared with me and a bunch of other friends the early creative process and its weird HW-related hiccups I couldn't help but become a fan of their work.
I'm incredibly proud of being part of this, I am sure that the best is yet to come and I can't wait to share more hilarious, heartwrenching and spicy moments with all of y'all, especially if they involve Arisu or Sarah"
If you end up reading this, Luna, thank you! From the bottom of my heart! Without you this game's success would not have been possilbe!
[EDIT: There's, obviously, a typo there that Luna immediately caught. I'm gonna leave it and the rest up just as a testament of how important she is]
Two more people I want to individually thank, before we move to some exciting stuff, are TRL_3D and SexyShelly.
They were the first two that reached out to me to let me know that they enjoyed the game and that helped A LOT during those dark beginnings.
Both are actually very talented, with Shelly releasing Shelly's Future Past and TRL_3D will release SOMETHING in the future, if only to stop me from badgering him to do so.
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Thank you all! Thank you for believing in me!
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HanakoXVN, Actual Roomates is a great game.
As others wrote before me, good story, endearing characters, a sexy badass MC, lot of humor...
And you deliver 5 chapters in just 6 month!
Not bad at all for a first game.
Hell, I'm not a cat person, but I think Spoon is one of the major character. And the game won't be the same without him.
I think it's a sign of good writing.
So you should be proud of yourself!
