Hey gamers!  Borealis here again!

It's time for the third episode of my exclusive devlogs!  This time, let's continue our character development with Haruka!  Enjoy!

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2018 Part 2

Having sorted out Kakeru's main backstory, he started to become a much more solid and understandable entity.  He’d been born with this hemangioma defect and had developed a massive inferiority complex due to it, resulting in a fear of being judged so strong that it bordered on a phobia of people in general.  With this in place, I could then pin down the reason Haruka would become the only person he felt comfortable in the presence of.  It had to come down to something more than just the fact that she inspired him as a musician – I felt like for someone of Kakeru’s nervous disposition, that wouldn’t be enough.  That’s when I realised that another big issue would enter into the fabric of the game – Haruka would have to be blind.

I’d never intended to portray a disability in the game, as if anything, I felt as though I wasn’t qualified to do such a thing, not personally knowing any disabled people.  However, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to fit the story.  Not only did it create the perfect pretence for Kakeru and Haruka’s relationship in response to his fear of being seen, but it also added to Haruka’s character tenfold.  Who wouldn’t be inspired by a musician who worked hard and played beautifully, despite being blind?  I felt as though Haruka really became a person in that moment – someone who had a dream to perform, and would do her best to achieve it, even though she would have to overcome not only her disability, but also her insecurities, to do it.  At last, she and Kakeru made perfect sense, and the time had come for me to begin telling their tale.

For the rest of the year, my evenings were spent typing furiously, figuring out how the story would actually pan out, and what routes and choices would be on offer to the player.  The concept of Haruka and Kakeru being in their school’s music club, and working towards their own musical goals, set the context for their daily lives.  Looking back on the totally overambitious plan I’d originally had way back in 2014 for the visual novel that never came to light, I laughed at the thought of having to write and execute a large amount of routes, each with their own various endings, and realised that I’d have to scale it down a bit.  Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that Venus: Improbable Dream will have four possible endings, and from my perspective, I think that’s more than enough for a visual novel of this style.  There is only one route in the game – Kakeru and Haruka.  It’s how Kakeru chooses to act that will alter how their story ends.  Despite not offering several characters for the protagonist to choose between as his companion, I was aiming for the story to be rich enough that the experience will still be exciting for players.  I continued to work on this narrative for months on end, filling documents with hundreds of pages, and dreaming of how this concept might look in the future.

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That's it for today's episode!  On Monday, episode four will take you into 2019, and bring you a lot of info about the game's soundtrack too!

Talk again soon!

Borealis