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!

already had some scenes done in game, but they were few and early in the script. Now that the script is complete, I've been organizing myself so that the game is built from the inside in the most optimal way possible.

This was a recent decision when I completed the story, I felt that with some twists and shifts I could get more out of the story, since I intentionally left a few things out to make the story work. So I decided to reserve two open slots for two possible routes to continue where the main story left off.

Those who play visual novels are familiar with this: Routes that you play in a recommended (or sometimes strict) order where the story goes down different paths and gets more complex each time, taking advantage of things the previous route did and left off. But I have the problem that this was a poorly thought out decision, it was practically done in days, the supposed 'Harmful Route' was supposed to be the only story available, and it's the one that will be available in version 1.0 of the game, but if at the end of the game I am satisfied with what I did, there are people who liked it and would like to see more development of the visual novel (optional, a generous soul supports me monetarily a little bit.) I dare to expand the story of Harmful Heaven in 1 or 2 more routes. Harmful Route lasts an average of 2 hours (taken out by beta reader reading time) so they are not long stories either, which makes things easier.

There are scenes, themes and characters to be exposed and shine in these two routes, but.... It won't matter much if the first main story is bad! I have to make Harmful Heaven's main story as good as possible so that there is a quality base from the beginning and worth the expansions. All the more reason to give my best effort in this!

The following is not a flowchart, it's more of a super basic guide so I don't get so lost in what I'm going to do in the in-game construction of the story. I make references to important events in the game.

I've done several other things today, but I'll show them later. Dang, I slept very little and woke up with more energy than I should have, I feel like my body is a machine, a very worn out one right now, I'll try to sleep early. The development continues.

Harmful Heaven is a visual novel where the apocalyptic adventures of young Sera and the mysterious Dess take place.

The game has been in development since January 2023, starting with drafts of initial scenes of the story, and drawings of the main characters. It was going to be something much simpler than it is now - The actual game is simple in a way, but it used to be more plain.

With the planet being bombarded, Sera and Dess meet by chance on the way to the boat to heaven, and decide to cooperate to survive. From beginning to end, they will be presented with illogical situations and unhinged events, in a world where bombs destroy normality and take the world into strange facets.

The storyline that is planned to be published first, Dess' Resolution, will focus more on the disturbed woman Desírée, what her name before she died came to mean to the world, and what Dess intends to do from now on.

This is the project with which I've worked more consistently, if I was well disciplined maybe I would have finished it months ago, but I'm still in training, and at a bad time. My computer, apart from being old in terms of specs, is several years old, including the hard drive. I have started to make plans to back up important files, since the hard drive will eventually get ruined one day, thing that in these years i've always fear, because replacing it is not within my monetary reach. I don't know how I ended up with a decent computer in the condition I'm in in the first place.

From here on out, I'm going to take drastic measures with myself. Starting with today, I decided not to sleep and stay awake to make more progress. The script is finalized, and I'm making additions and corrections as I incorporate words into the game. The way I will do things from now on would be more or less like this:

More than 40k words are the ones that were chosen to be the definitive story after writing thousands of drafts in all these months.

Making everything legitimately good is a priority. Harmful Heaven, even if it has flaws, should not overshadow everything and become something that is only talked about negatively. Or, that it's a "meh" game along the lines of "it was entertaining, but nothing more." I have to make this game to be something more than these two things, all these months must have paid off in something, Harmful Heaven has to be something more. Not a masterpiece; that's impossible. I guess a 9/10 is being unrealistic, also 8/10. The best I can aspire to is something a little lower than that.

In other maid-news, I've started using Cohost, a social network that I feel really comfortable with and that looks promising (better be one of the first.). In the future I plan to make a page (not an account, a page) that represents the whole series of projects I'm going to do, but for now, I have this personal account where I talk about various things.

That's really the most important thing I had to communicate, I had no idea how to say it, so hence the inactivity on this devlog. I hope with all my heart to make this project to go ahead, and to go well. Thanks for reading this post.

My old computer has given me countless headaches. Today all of RPG Maker got messed up (and the whole computer too) because Steam Web Helper decided to consume an insane amount of ram and cpu, and I was offline with almost nothing open. Actually this is something normal every day, but it frustrates me because I use the least amount of programs possible so that in my work sessions it doesn't happen, and yet it does.

Something that has kept me "terrified" of getting into making the scenes of the game, is the fact that to insert images (pictures called in the folders) you have to place them with XY coordinates. I would have preferred an interface to place the pictures, position them manually, I hope it's understandable. But, I already realized how the XY coordinates work based on the custom resolution that I have of the game (it is not the base resolution of rpg maker MV). Maybe MZ already improved this. Anyway, now I work with this part without fear.

As it was seen in the screenshots, the backgrounds are very simple, and that's why... I'd better not try to make backgrounds if they are going to be very basic. I have in mind a way to present the visuals in the game without introducing 'normal' backgrounds, only elements like characters or objects. I have to test this way of putting backgrounds, because it will be much better than basic backgrounds from someone who doesn't know how to draw backgrounds. Well, I still have a lot to learn when drawing characters, but at least there I disguise it as best I can.

Those are the midnight comments. I didn't have internet all afternoon, next time I'll make these posts earlier.

Today's image is Dess in her final moments before getting her hair changed.

My colleagues say that her current hair makes her look like a man. It wasn't the intention, but it's interesting. Anyway I consider her current hair much better than what she had before.

All right, bedtime. The development continues tomorrow. My friends were upset when I told them I subtracted sleep hours to work more, and they are right when they were upset. I'm not good at staying awake with sleep anyway.

Over the past few days I've been taking care of the "scenery" for the game, along with inserting tons of story text. The process of this goes like this: Insert text from the script into the game, adding tags so that it displays along with other things, then add the visuals - the sprites, portraits, illustration windows, sound effects and music, and finally test and correct, and leaving it finished when it feels good. 

Only the first scene is complete, so I could see what Harmful Heaven is going to look like when it's finished.... Is it okay for me to speak negatively about my game? Tsukuhime (2000) has a better presentation, with the limitations they had at the time. This one I can hardly consider 'finished'. Is too simplistic, too basic. I don't have the artistic skills for real quality illustrations, nor am I a programmer to customize the game's presentation. game. This is difficult because solving it would imply things like paying a programmer, or learning programming (which I tried a thousand times and failed a thousand times) or dedicating other months to improve my drawings.

Right now, I just hope that the set of elements of the game will overcome the shortcomings and result in something worthwhile.

Only one of these boxes is finished. All the others have only a few illustrations, or are just pure text. And I'm not even  halfway through the script, not to mention that I keep writing scenes to 'fix' things here and there.

Sometimes I tell myself that I had good days, but, that's kind of like a breather to get back to normal. The truth is that I am the most pathetic stage of my life. If I had been successful before, my house would stop, and I wouldn't have to lose sleep over the fact that one day my computer decides not to turn on. Instead, I find myself in exactly the same condition as when I set out to start this, if not worse.

Health first - if I lose my health it's the end. But, I would like to mimic at least a little bit those work days of professional creatives. Those things that are no secret in the art industries. That requires a lot of work and discipline. It's not healthy. But in my case, if I fail at this, I don't know if I'll feel good about what comes next. My case is particular. Besides, I've been inept for a lot longer than I should be, I have to make up for it. I'm not good at staying awake, but I found a way to sleep for a few hours and wake up feeling rested - I just have to stay awake and then go to bed with my phone and alarm set. If I don't give it my all, I won't make it out of this sad cycle I'm in.

I give the estimated completion date for Harmful Heaven as sometime in October. I remember when I first started this and I thought I was going to complete my first game about 4 years ago. Now, I've lost count of how many incomplete projects I have. I will give my all to change that soon.

Now, some drawings:

This is how, after many drawings and versions, the angels will finally look like.

Time to continue the game, the development continues.

I am ashamed to post things frequently (more or less, with a lapse of 2 or 3 days) because what I have done I don't consider something worth showing. HH is not a traditional game, and a lot of the work goes to text, but I also work on things outside of text. I'm going to try to break that embarrassment by sharing a few things I've done.

Something I got to work on trying to figure out what I could change or improve to give it a better presentation. There is the window design, the font, and a change of other interface designs. But there is also the backgrounds.

I don't know how to draw backgrounds. But something I'm a little better at is rpg style maps. I was encouraged to go try that.

These background sceneries are not explorable or interactive, they work as a substitute for traditional backgrounds that cannot be drawn. I think it looks good, my colleagues think so.

"Why would you scare me? You have a stupid face"

There are several things to correct and change about this image, but the idea of the background maps and the front-facing sprites is there.

Plus, the face of this character looks better!

And I added a new font that replaces the base font of RPG Maker MV. It's called Ubuntu Mono.

"Either you're scared of them, or you love them, or you don't care about them."

"Even though they are gods living on earth, that's their social status."

"Although... I'll bet someone has managed to keep something with them."

I got a bug in the posting page and had to press 'Post' or else I would lose what I had written. Apart from all the visuals I have posted, I have worked a lot on the inclusion of text to the game, I have advanced in the development of scenes, I have decided the tracks that I will place and the sound effects that will accompany the scene, I think this could raise a little the presentation of the game, although it can not be seen in screenshots.

Something that I have thought a lot is to make a Maidelen Ch. in youtube where I post a few fotages to share videos in a simple way, but my colleagues repeat me that it is a bad idea, because being a video editor is a whole other subject that I would have to learn  and because HH is a visual novel, not a game with a gameplay that when you see it you say "it looks fun". For the moment I won't do it, but I might make one in order to share progress and general things about this kind of profession, maybe when HH Asassin's Resolution is complete.

I don't think I said things like "the last few weeks have been the hardest in the development of Harmful Heaven" before. It would have been funny if I had always said that and it was like a catch phrase.

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.

Happy new year 2024. Sorry for not posting any update in several months.

This game started its development (at least, the making of the story script) in January of the past year. Unlike all my incomplete projects, Harmful Heaven was started without thinking so much and without planing. It changed with the time, and now it reached a definitive point. Let's share the progress in three parts:

On technical

RPG Maker has been dropped for this. Harmful Heaven is now being made in Ren'Py.

Inserting the script in the game  (in RM) is tedious and slow. Also mimic the feel of a visual novel. But I was still decided to do all of it in RPG Maker MV... I dropped Windows 10 and install Linux on my PC. Since then, using the computer is 50 % more enjoyable. and much less stressful. I was relieved knowing that RPG Maker MV has native support on Linux. RPG Maker MV can be executed in linux. But the quality of the software there is very questionable. 

So I change to Ren'py, what I should have done since the start, but I didn't because I'm bad in coding, but is what is has to be done. I haven't done big progress in it, but at first sight, inserting the script in the games is so much comfortable, fast and simple. I have trust in the Ren'py community and my capacity to learn, so Harmful Heaven can get fine in technical terms

On the story

The process of the making of the story is like this: This is the story. Is bad. I changed how the story develops. Is bad. I give it an ending. Bad. Drop everything. Now the story is more extended. Is bad. I check and change what I think would improve the story, and a final arc with a new ending. Bad. New route written until the half of it. Is bad. Drop everything, start again.

That's the summary of the process from the past year to today.  The script is in a 'Redo' status, and I want  it to be the last. Is still a fun and frenetic story of the dumb Sera and the dumb Dess fighting in a dying world. What mainly changes is the important moments, all the dialogues, quit and put traits of the characters, more stupid jokes, adding and deleting arcs, and making sure that everything is cohesive.

This is a simple story, but when Harmful Heaven is finally out, I want it to be of a quality that others can enjoy and say "this is fine" at least. This section should be more larger, is the thing I was working the more, but I think this is enough.

On the art

This is 'Good old RPG' Sera. This is gonna be his way of showing. He and the whole game. Novels teach me that with well written words your mind can show you awesome images. And, you know it if you see all the art of this thread... I barely can draw. So the art will be of this simple style, admitting from the start that I don't count with actually good skills. I'll still continue to draw everything (sprites, map-style backgrounds, portraits, etc) but with a new approaching. (Goodbye, every-screen-of-the-game-looking-like-a-(bad)-manga-panel).

And about me, I'm the same, but worse. Thins are going worse. Things in and outside of my control. Is possible that the internet gets cut, and the computer breaks, or get trough months without electricity. Several stuff. I wake up early, and since then I was trying to start up the monitor of my PC, sometimes lasted half and hour, or two hours, but today lasted six hours, just trying to start the monitor. My thoughts in these hours were sad. It was like this since the past year in the end, but is worsening. Like everything here.

This is more to how far I can get, and time doesn't forgive. My PC and internet were in a 'yes' status in these months, but I don't wanted to update this because another post of "the development is hard but I still there" would be just annoying. I hope that with this, the development is now more clear.

Is a matter of going forward. The development of Harmful Heaven continues. 

Harmful Heaven will be available to play in a sort of a special story, one where you can see how it's an average day on the journey of Sera and Dess, alongside the story of Dess when she was a kid, calling herself Charlotte. She lived in Tierrazúl, an royal island with the most modern and peaceful lifestyle of all of Rock Star. In the present day, it's gone, because the past king ordered it's destruction to stop propagating something to the rest of the world. Charlotte watched all of the fall of the royal island.

The short story of Charlotte isn't exactly apocalyptic, like the normal story of Harmful Heaven is, but it will have a constant feeling that anything isn't right and will fall down in any moment. It will also have cute elements, comedy and pretty moments, between Charlotte and her grandma and his friend.

The sunofest ends in 1 month and 25 days. I hope I can finish this in less than a month. Will share related stuff soon.

The sunofest is not a ranked jam, but an exposition one, so it's important to submit the game as soon as possible, even if it's a prologue.

The demo will come out in a few weeks!!

Less than a month for sunofes to end, I feel like I wasted an opportunity. I feel loss. I don't know how much people will play this, I lose constancy and will in all this time in terms of do the effort to giving to know more people about this project. It's kind of hopeless.

Not terrible!