Hey everyone, Tyler here! (You know, the dev for this game that's not Lupin.) I'm here to break some news about some major changes on the horizon.
See, recently Lupin and I made the decision to cover our bases and contact Spike Chunsoft to make sure that creating a DR fangame was legally in the clear. Considering the amount of doujin that's out there we figured it would be okay, and since SC also localizes English games into Japanese (Saints Row IV was a recent example) we figured there'd be translators on their team who could translate our question for them. So, we shot off a question to them and waited for a reply.
Good news: they replied. Bad news: it was this.
"Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, we will not be able to allow you to create a game with our IP.
We appreciate your kind understanding.
Spike Chunsoft Legal Team."
So this brings good news and bad news for Despair Drive. The bad news is that we will not be able to make this a Dangan Ronpa fangame. No mutual killing, no Elite or Ultimate or SHSL students, no minigame-based class trials, no flashy "executions"... the DR staples will be out of our reach, or at least we won't be able to copy-paste the formula from Dangan Ronpa.
The good news is that this allows us a lot more creative freedom and as a result, we will be making our game an experience all of its own. The characters are already original so they will stay mostly unchanged; some characters will not be super-talented but many will retain their talents or hobbies. They'll be far from #1 or anything like that, just great minds and hearts.
Our aesthetic and thematic ties to Alice in Wonderland will not change since that novel is in the public domain, though our overall aesthetic theme will be "post-modern/cyberpunk Alice in Wonderland". Characters will still die, but it will not be regular or predictable; some might be at the hands of the other characters, some at the hands of the unseen mastermind, and some at their own. But you won't know until you play.
The biggest change is the huge tone-down in murder mystery elements. There will be more of a focus on character-driven psychological horror, though their will still be plenty of mysteries to solve. There will be mystery-solving, but not necessarily murder mystery in every case.
We will also likely be changing the name to move away from our previous DR focus. Our tentative choice at the moment is "Heartbleed Wonderland", though that's not set in stone just yet. We'll see, and you'll know when the blog name changes.
Overall this change will not get rid of the things that make this game what it is, but it will definitely allow us to expand beyond DR staples that would limit what we would be able to do previously. We may even be able to sell it to fund future endeavors, though that will depend on your vote on your willingness to do so. We will have a poll for that soon, but regardless of the decision any public beta releases will be free.
In other news, there have been a few people applying for positions (though I haven't been able to respond immediately due to personal time constraints, so I apologize for that). We really love the help and though Lupin and I are wearing many hats for this project, if you think you have something to offer that we haven't covered then please check our "Join the Team" section for open positions. And to those who have already sent in your application but haven't gotten responded to yet (or have only recieved a preliminary response), please re-send your request so we can take another look. Include links to previous work if possible.
And to all you patient fans, we'll provide more updates as they come. The prologue is just about finished and will not need to be changed too much to fit our new game plan. That means you may expect an early build of the prologue within a month or two. Keep in mind that everything in early alpha/beta builds are subject to change; there may be many placeholder elements.
We hope you look forward to our future updates, and we'll see you very soon!
