Important notice about how long it's going to take
A while. It's going to take years. My plan is to hopefully finish it by the end of college (year 13) max, and considering I'm currently in my final year of high school (year 11) I think that's a reasonable time as I have 4 acts planned and I'm not sure how long the other 3 acts are play time wise as I've only focused on act 1, and that's going to be around 1/2 hour play time for a single route. In total the game will be around 2 and a bit hours for the pacifist route (the neutral and merciless route only have 3 acts and the 4th act is all 3D). The main reasons why it's going to take so long is that:
Like I said earlier, I'm in school and have to do GCSEs and A-Levels (which are a really big deal).
I have rushed games before and I'm dissatisfied with their quality. I refuse to rush games ever since (Sci-Fi RaiRoboska!? looking at youuuu).
Drawing all the assets takes time. That's my biggest road block. This isn't a pixel art typical 2D RPG where I could just make tiles and reuse them, all the backgrounds and objects have to be drawn for that place and nowhere else for it to look right in that style. Take for example this road:
Sure, the style is quite simple, but even this took a good couple hours. All the layout planning, lineart, colour, lighting adds up. Don't get me started on the animations.
4. I have 2 medium sized games planned to make in-between as well as a few small game jam games. This variety also helps with point 5 while making myself more well known in the indie game industry.
5. I don't want to spend every minute of my free time working on it as I'm terrified of burning myself out and losing motivation. I also don't want to end up like Yandere Dev by working on this for almost a decade only to produce a demo, but I don't think "The Sapphic Princess" is going to be too long of a game and considering there's just me, I think I can handle it. Speaking of which...
I don't trust people enough to hire others to help me. I'm very controlling and I want it to be exactly how I in-vision it. Also I find doing it all fun but if it gets too overwhelming then I may consider it but only as a last resort.
The 2 medium sized games that I have planned is a visual novel DDLC fangame that won't take too long to make (most of the time will be in writing as Dialogic is a great godot plugin and would make all the coding a breeze), and a Yandere Simulator "fangame" (more like a different interpretation from a horror game fan who actually knows how to write and design characters). I've gone into more detail about these on my main blog as linked above. The second one is quite big but not as big as my current plan of LV. Essentially this is my main project and those are short term projects, if that makes sense.
My plan is to release this on itch.io and Steam for around £3. I don't want to make it too high as it can be beaten in about 2 hours on the neutral route (ignoring the other 2 routes) but I also don't want to make it too low as I want to feel compensated for all the work I've put into, putting into and will put into. I may also make a Playstation version but don't count on it as I only have a PS4 and I don't feel like it's worthy due to it's short run time (but physical copies would be cool...maybe as a game compilation though). I'll get some people to beta test it in the future and ask what they think would be a good price.
I made this blog when I had a smaller idea for this game. Now that is not the case. I'll post updates whenever I feel like I have something worth updating about but I don't want to spoil it too much.
That's all for now. - PearlHikara