Early devlog posts present illustrations, ideas and concepts that were altered or discarded . Some time has passed. The game page is up.

I've been writing and drawing a lot of stuff for a visual novel since the beginning of the year. Now, Harmful Heaven has taken a lot of shape and I'm sure I can move on to the part where I start coding the stuff in ren'py.

Sera, a silly boy who wanted to get out of his village, and Desi, a woman with a questionable past, meet on the way to the boat, the vehicle that will take them to the heaven prepared by the angels of the world. The road to the boat is chaotic and bizarre, and they can die by them.

Will Sera and Desi make it to heaven?

I want Harmful Heaven to be a small visual novel with adorable moments and conflicts where everyone shows their worst, in parallel.
Even with all your flaws and demons, what matters at the end of the day is how you deal with it and the actions you do to yourself, your friends and the world. All of that on a journey to heaven.

Features:

• Concise length, things will always happen to keep you interested.
• Sera and Desi use rifles to fight, you will have to use the mouse to click and shoot in battles.
• Crazy characters that will probably make you laugh but will also scare you. They all fall into this category
• Everything has a background: The end of the world, the angels, the world, Sera and Desi, their enemies and their friends.
• 5 Endings of which I hope, each ending feels satisfying, especially the true one. They will be easy to get out of, this is designed to be beaten in one or two plays.

The progress I'll share here will be more technical than anything, since I've been working on this for months, but it's only now that I'm going to start coding the game. Thanks ren'py you are easy to use.

Thanks for taking the time to read. If you liked what you saw I hope you get to play Harmful Heaven. I forgot to say that it will be a free game.

Issue 2, Things seem to be going well

• I haven't coded anything in ren'py, but what I have done is write the story again. The previous versions had a very simple and basic vision, that was supposed to be what I wanted, but its events and resolution seem very basic to me, and if I don't like it, others might not like it. This new version of the story, which at the moment has 10K words and is in the middle of the story, convinces me much more. After finishing it, comes the overall revision process, and only then I'll start coding the visual novel.
• Harmful Heaven was conceived as the smallest and most short project I could create, the new additions to the story I had to choose very carefully not to ruin that. I think I expanded the story in a way I can handle.
• I have added to the list tools associated with ren'py that I will be using, such as Twine to Ren'Py and Ren'Py Accessibility Add-On. One so I can write dialog better and the other for player accessibility. A bit related, while drawing the backgrounds, I decided that the black color will be much more prevalent than the white color, since white could cause discomfort and difficulty to the view.
• I also decided to use BGM music, SE audio and music in general from Pixabay and Freesound for sound effects, and MaouDamashii and YouFulca for music.  I've known about Maou's music for years, it's awesome and I'm happy to use their material.
  

For the following posts I will have illustrative images, because pure text can be boring. Undoubtedly, what I have worked the most on this time is the writing, with which I am satisfied and I hope that the final result will satisfy me. The development continues.

Issue 3, some decisions

After experimenting and testing a few things, I have decided to make some changes in how the game is played. In the first post I said that there would be a QTE mini-game that appeared regularly in the fights, now it's discarded.

Before (Up), after (Down)

I tested the QTE code, script made by Papiersam. It works and it's good. But after seeing how my visual novel would look like with QTE in practice, it made me question whether to use it or not.

I've played Fate/Extra and Tsukuhime, visual novels made by Type-Moon. It has made me question several things about how I see visual novels. The ones I've played don't have action story segments, or they do in a small dose, but these two VNs have life and death conflicts pretty regularly and I've seen how these VNs present life and death conflicts in an immersive and tense way. Music, descriptions of the situation, characters changing their reactions to the situation, unsettling music, and decisions where one is right and another leads to a death ending.

I haven't played The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog, but I read a review that said that while they liked the VN, didn't like the minigames it had, saying that feels the developers didn't trust that the game couldn't hold up to being a visual novel.

I had the feeling that the QTE would be bad for the game, but after testing it, trying alternatives and listening to opinions about it, I have made the decision not to use QTE in the game. Their absence will be compensated by constant crucial decisions in moments of conflict and better use of text for atmosphere. I consider this a good change, but I wouldn't discard experimenting with QTE in a visual novel, but in a different game, not this one. The development continues.

It's been several days without an update, I have to write stuff and, fortunately, I bring positive news relating to the project

Making the visual novel in RPG Maker felt pretty good for the flexibility and speed of the development,  I've done several scenes of the story and did a couple of placeholders for other scenes still in development. There's still a lot of text and decision making still left to add but doing things in an engine I know well makes things much better. Thanks to Kanji the Grass for making the Visual Novel Style plugin. I can add visual novel classic stuff to the game thanks to this.

In technical terms, the development couldn't be going better. Next time I will progress enough to put 20% on the post.

A good part of this time was spent practicing my drawing as well, I've managed to make some improvements to make the characters look better than before. I think I've succeeded. If I hadn't taken the time to practice these days the final character designs would look like this: 

And instead, they will now look like this: 

If you consider that something was lost or downgraded please tell me so, I personally think it's an improvement but I could be wrong. Along the way it lost the always-surprised Desi's face, but I might add it as a reaction.
(There are more characters besides Sera and Desi, but I'm still redesigning them)

It's about time I started designing the final art for the game, I've done so many sketches and so many changes, I've come up with something that looks good to me. I hope myself and others will enjoy the final result.

I have managed to make playable sections of Harmful Heaven at this point. It's a visual novel, so it's no great achievement, but the fact that I've made it this far means that the project is in a development that's going well.

Two people are very important in this project, Utsukushi Hana and Eurobeatlover, I love them very much. They are very aware of the work and progress I make, I'm still in charge of the design, art and writing but I show everything to them, having points of view of people who know about those things (One is good at drawing and the other at writing) is important, the final Harmful Heaven would be a lower quality thing if it wasn't for them. (Nothing assures me that the actual Harmful Heaven could be bad too, I better be quiet and keep working on it).

Talking about Harmful Heaven as a complete game, there are things that have changed from when I started developing this in January of this year, here a small list of things that were going but not anymore.

• The two protagonists were going to be devoid of feelings. They were not going to be hired killers, but because of the story taking place in the apocalypse, they were going to kill anything they came across, without hesitation. It's much different now, but will the current Sera and Desi be forced to kill in the current storyline?

•  Much less gentleness, and kindness. I don't know how to say it, now and before in the story there were going to be deaths, tragedies and despair, but before it was in a dry, half sarcastic way. When the story was much simpler and shorter it looked good I think, but not now. I like the current tone much better.

• In the first post I said there were going to be 5 endings.... With all the changes made to the story, none of the 4/5 endings can no longer be integrated into the current version. Writing one more time I could come up with replacements for the new storyline, but it's a shame. Maybe I could put those discarded endings as bonus scenes.

I was thinking about creating a reddit account to upload clips of the game in some rpg maker subreddit, because I've seen how games get to win people that way, but I don't know, maybe it's not that big of a deal and what I post in itch.io is enough.

For the next posts I will be more open about characters and story segments. I've analyzed it and it won't be that big of a deal to introduce the important characters. And maybe by telling elements of the story I can make it more interesting. Things are going well, very good.

I don't know what profile picture to put on my profile that isn't a dog or a cat.

I have made a short introduction to the story of Harmful Heaven.

How was it? I want to create interest in the story so I decided to start with this. How do you think the story will go based on this?

The development these days has been a collision of feelings, bad and good. I think it would be good to start passing screenshots of the game. The first screenshots of the game. The first language of the game is Spanish, but as soon as I finish the script in-game I will translate it to English. For now, I will translate the screenshots with text below them. I will talk about the experience in a separate post.

Start - Continue - Credits - Configurations

"Inevitably, the bombs began to fall." "Everyone decided to act to survive" "A little journey to heaven has started."

"Why would you scare me? You look stupid."

"On your way to the boat, wanderers?" "I'm sure you been waiting for this famous ride." "Get in! We're going straight to the boat!"

Those screenshots screams "videogame in development", don't they? Only the sprites are final. The text box, the colors, the font, the main menu and things like that are still pending. Wow, saying it like that sounds like a lot, well yes it is a lot. Not to mention the lack of music and few sound effects.

Really, if developing in RPG Maker is already difficult for me, using an engine that requires programming would finish me. It's partly because I'm making a visual novel, which is different from a Top-Down, but even if it's not impossible, it's exhausting. But it's a matter of planning my work time better and getting used to it, so it won't be so difficult little by little.

I have had periods of reflection on many things, mainly my situation and all that entails what I am doing and how I am. It is hard and overwhelming, but part of being adults is knowing how to balance things to face situations like this in the best possible way, so I will definitely continue, and I will complete this project, and many others. Actually my outburst was going to be much more long-winded but since I already did it mentally I don't think it's necessary.

60 days since I created this post. The simple decision to create this devlog represented an important step for me. This is the furthest I have come with any project I have ever tried to complete, I am happy and saddened at the same time.

According to the modification date of the .txt of the first Harmful Heaven writeup, the project was technically born on January 25, 2023. And now, we are just about halfway through the year. I feel good that I've been so consistent, but.... God, I feel like a failure looking back at all the previous things I failed to complete. I'm hoping that Harmful Heaven will be the thing that breaks this cycle that I've had since I've been trying to do these things since I was a kid.

Harmful Heaven is the most consistent and playable game I've made so far. Mainly because the gameplay of the game consists of reading. But... It's still a piece of playable software that's telling a story, one in development, but when I test to see if everything is working right, I feel like the game is... A game, i can play it and say "yes, it's in development, but it's definitely a game." I don't have words to express how that makes me happy.

A song from an anime I did not see was decisive in determining the tone and direction of the story of Harmful Heaven. Was this one: Jounetsu ni Tsuite Katarubeki ni, san no Shinjitsu.

I may do English lyrics later. "We rolled ourselves to fate, but miracles are awakening." Those kinds of phrases have the song. I like to think it's Sera who sings the song, I think it suits him.

Things seem to be going well. Still, I'd like to somehow reduce my entertainment time, but I can't lie to myself. I have to spend at least 1 hour playing some game or reading some manga. I have to learn to discipline myself and be stricter with myself.

The script of Harmful Heaven reached its end.

I have to correct it, fix what is wrong, improve the things that can be improved, finally edit the text to integrate it into the videogame. But it has a development and an ending, it has. At least in the quality of a prototype.

I have not stopped celebrating this personally, it is for me a major achievement. I wanted to share it with Eurobeatlover, but he spends more time nagging me for writing this nonstop from late at night until the early hours of the morning. He's worried that I'm going the route of a developer who puts his health below work. I will try not to do this again. But it's just that this for me was something special, I've written thousands of stories and this is the only one I've managed to write to the end. It's been 6 months since I started writing the various drafts of Harmful Heaven, and today I have given it a definitive end after so many.

I am so happy and proud of myself. I haven't updated this thread because I wanted the next post to be me announcing this.

The development continues, with more energy than ever.

The character sketching phase has been finished for a while, and soon the story writting phase will be finished as well. It won't be long before I start working only on the engine and the game itself. I have to make the preparations.

Originally Harmful Heaven was going to last only one day, its story. Then it was extended to 2 and it was for a long time, but Eurobeatlover told me "how do you want to make the audience feel the game's friendships are organic if they all met in 2 days" and now the story lasts 27 days. That is to say, the end of the world starts 3 days and by the time Sera and Dess decide to cooperate giving beginning to the story 3 days have passed.

The idea is that every time a day starts, this screen representing characters doing something will be shown. Sometimes they will be the main characters, other times they will be other characters that were left out of the focus but not to leave so much in the air what happened to them. Accompanied by three squares with small icons representing the characters, plus the remaining days to the "Day of the final bomb".

After revising the script and leaving it in a non-prototype state, I will make the scenes in the engine. This is really going well, even if the final game ends up being somewhat mediocre, I'll be able to say that I made my first complete game. I have to continue.

I've already made the corrections to the first segment and Eurbeatlover read it. I point out a few problems, all can be fixed with 2nd correction while introducing it into the game. Except one, which is cringe. He said the text is cringe. He also said that months ago when he read an early version of Harmful Heaven and he said it again now. I don't think I can do anything to make the text not cringe at this point, it will be for the next one to avoid making it cringe.

Also, I'm working extra hard to bring a surprise... It's not a big deal so I won't give too many details, but there's an interesting little thing coming.

The main story of Harmful Heaven has been revised and corrected, and a second correction is planned as it is integrated into the game as such. I don't know much about videogame versions, you could say that the game is in a 0.1 state and the script is in its 1.0 verion, so the project is in the middle? I'm going to think so then, it's a visual novel so I think it's okay to look at it that way.

Eurobeatlover thinks that even with its problems, it's a decent story that a number of people might like. Thank you very much, you've not stopped supporting the quality of the story from the beginning. I hope the story is even a little better when it's in the game itself. Definitely!

It would be interesting if a story/script could be treated like a video game, in the sense that it makes sense to present a changelog of changes with each update. So like, you test 1.0 and over time you experience each update that comes out, as if it were Minecraft or Terraria.

I'm going to try something.

Harmful Heaven - Harmful Route 1.0 changelog

• - Added 2 endings. One good and one bad.
  - Removed extra flashback at the end of the story.
• - Changed 'King Red' to 'Sir Crimson'..
• - Added more screen time to a character that a beta reader likes.
• - Added lyrics to a song that doesn't exist at the end.
• - Added tragedy at the end.
• - Ending where everyone is happy removed (now only several are happy.)

That doesn't work.

From here on I will work more and more on the game itself. It's curious that this is the last post on this page because the project is in the middle. Harmful Heaven will be a reality soon!