The Human Reignition Project - An English Visual Novel

Huangquan 2.0
over 4 years ago – Sat, Nov 09, 2019 at 01:58:19 AM

Hey everyone,

It’s Kevin again with another update. This month is a little smaller, yet somehow the most important. Why?

…

Because everyone's favorite Chinese restaurant, Huangquan, for the first time in its seven year history of development, finally looks like a restaurant that fits the setting:

Now the contrast between Hitomi’s enthusiasm and everyone else’s lack of caring finally makes sense.

Ultimately, a lot of what we’re working on right now aren’t grand strokes of genius, but us finally getting around to fixing things that should have been fixed a long time ago. I think this is the perfect example of one of those fixes.

As always, Mondo is working tirelessly both on writing and on new music. His new song for the later scenes at a distant ryokan is appropriately chill:

Or you can be me and ruin all of that atmosphere for some DOPE BEATS:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=16NkKeRlnUPICg8YZDbxmtIWeYNi8dQcS

In any case, our heartfelt thanks to those who are still paying attention to this admittedly long in the tooth project. If you haven’t already, you can join us in the newly revitalized AlienWorks discord:

https://discord.gg/RaebFpc 

Lots of new faces and some hardened older faces are around and currently chatting like they have never chatted before. Also, we have a bot that recommends waifus on a roulette, so that’s pretty fun too if you don’t have anything to say in the other conversations. Our goal is to be released solely so the HRP girls may one day show up in the waifu roulette as well.

The “Human Reignition Project” Reignition Project
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 05, 2019 at 08:53:58 PM

Hey everyone, this is Kevin back with another update.

We mentioned last month that we have reorganized the team with Mondonater and Jaspirian leading everything. This isn’t the first time we have reorganized with the intent of getting more done, but considering that we still have a better pace of progress than before over a month later, it’s still our most successful reorganization.

Like last month, we’re still focused on redoing old work and taking inventory of what worked and what didn’t, although this month seemed a little more focused on music. One particular point of contention was the original title theme, and what we could do to make it sound better. Tim and Mondo went back and forth on trying out new ideas, and now you can hear the new direction. We’re still not done with the new version since we’re still trying out new chord progressions and haven’t done any final mixing work, but we figured you would be just as interested as we are in trying something bold and brash:

Part of the reason that we could focus on music is that our new background artist, Voloshenko, is a machine who lives and breathes efficient background creation. You can see some of his new work below, in comparison to what we had before:

Old:

New:

“It’s the Kyou-ziest” - Mondo

Once we saw the cool warehouse background he made for us, we knew we had to try using some fancy lighting tech in Ren’Py. It might not make the final cut due to it not playing well with the 3D camera system (which you can see on the left side of the screen), but we thought it was worth attempting.

Additionally, we have some new CG drafts coming, and I think they do a good job of capturing a lot of character differences in one frame:

Finally, I have personally been working with our new main programmer, Shortcake, to make all of the characters come alive during normal dialogue. I assure you, this is the most Shion that Shion has ever been.

Finally, to address probably the biggest concern. Many of our closest fans who are still following us have expressed worry that we lost interest and stopped working on the game. To that we say:

That was definitely true, at least until a few months ago.

Ultimately, what little leadership HRP had slowly whittled away over time either due to disinterest or real-life responsibility. Eventually, I think we all realized we had no direction and just stopped working on things out of fear that whatever we put time into would get scrapped because we had no idea where anything was going. Fitting of our Katawa Shoujo origins, we had to take what we had and start over with a new team structure and a more focused vision. That’s actually where our previous update title came from; reading one of our completed scenes about Ken abandoning real life responsibility to just watch Space Jam proved two things to us:

1. We were doing the same thing with this project and our own lives, and that scene felt a little too real.
   
2. The fact that this scene had more impact on us than any of the future terrorism plot we were working on meant that we should probably move more in that direction.
   

It’s no secret that we’re way past our initially promised deadline, and I can’t say that’s going to get any better, as HRP still needs a lot of time. However, we think the time being put into it now is worth a lot more than the time from the past four years, and we hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it as well.

September 2019: Space Jam was the Turning Point
over 4 years ago – Thu, Sep 05, 2019 at 11:19:28 PM

Hey everyone, this is Kevin writing this update, which is already pretty unusual. We haven’t posted in a while, mostly because we have been reorganizing a fair bit.

I’m just going to get straight to the point: a lot of the people who originally worked on HRP at the start of this Kickstarter simply aren’t around anymore for one reason or another. I myself am really only on the team for basic production support and tying up loose ends; I no longer handle most of the programming.

Since things were looking pretty bleak staff-wise, we needed to take a good inventory of what we have, and what we needed to do. In that regard, Mondo has overhauled our organization and more or less has become the director, alongside Jaspirian.

With new leadership, we looked at basically every asset we had done, and figured out what needed to be fixed the most, and what was the most feasible way to get things on track. We got a new background artist, Voloshenko, who has already been getting us fantastic work, and has done a great job of fixing older backgrounds that weren’t quite working as intended:

Ken's Updated Apartment:

Ultimately, we looked at what writing we had completed, and decided to change course slightly. We aren’t scrapping everything again, but we did decide to shift our focus to what we thought HRP did well and start de-emphasizing anything that didn’t fit. In the words of Syon:

“HRP is at its best when it’s at its most mundane.”

That might sound like a bad thing, but more and more as we read through what we had, we realized HRP was a lot more engaging when it felt like a reflection of problems we saw in ourselves. It’s not a secret that HRP has taken so long, that our near future setting has become more and more the present that we’re currently living in, and so we’re moving to focusing on those problems.

We mentioned a while back that the first version of the game that we’ll ship would contain Senri, Shion, and Hitomi. That is currently still the goal, but we’re mostly working on only one route right now as a model to see how the other routes should be made, so we’ll revisit this concept after we’re done with that route and go from there. It’s the classic Kickstarter curse of overly ambitious scope, and now we’re reigning it in. Hopefully by keeping a tight leash on what is being worked on, we can better deliver what matters most:

For real though, we have a lot to show this time, with a few more exciting backgrounds from Voloshenko:

Some wonderful new CGs from Kimiyoto:

And last but not least, we have a new track from our very own Tim Reichert:

February 2019 - DJ Setsuna
about 5 years ago – Sun, Mar 03, 2019 at 11:45:51 PM

 Hey, everyone! I'm Syon, one of the writers on HRP. We have a slightly different update for you this month, but we hope you enjoy it nonetheless! 

I'd like to talk a little about Setsuna and the setting of her route. For a long time, we've tried to keep this under wraps, but you guys have been plenty patient, and I think it's only fair you get some more info on the story's objectively best girl. There's no graceful way to drop this on you, but that's okay, because Setsuna is already dropping some mad beats. 

That's right! Setsuna's day job is a DJ. She performs under the name "TaiSetsu," which I'm told is a pun, but I'm afraid I haven't gotten that far in my Japanese classes yet. At the start of the story, Setsuna has only recently returned to stage after a year-long hiatus that was spurred on by a mysterious event. By the time you're on her route, however, she's back to slinging beats and smacking down tasty jams at the nearby nightclub, 'The Uterus.' 

In the world of HRP, The Uterus is one of the hippest gathering spots for the young members of society who are more socially inclined -- well, as socially inclined as a person can be in Future Japan. It regularly hosts concerts and musical acts, ranging from holographic idol troupes, to up-and-coming acts that send downloads of their first EP to the phones of everyone in the audience. But its real bread and butter are its raves, and that's where DJ TaiSetsu comes in. For those brave enough to step away from their game of AR Hanafuda in the lounge, they'll be treated to a night of pounding beats that will be sure to give you arrhythmia. A throwback to simpler times, these raves will be sure to give you an awkward night out that you'll immediately regret the moment you start sweating!

But things aren't all that they seem in The Uterus. For years, sleazy rumors have floated around. Whispers of private rooms and illicit substances. It's fine, though! Things are always bound to get a little crazy when you gather that many people together. It's just a connecting cord to a different segment of society. A Placenta, if you will. 

For those who have been following the project since the far away days of 2012, then you'll probably realize that Setsuna hasn't always been a DJ. While not a recent development at this point, her profession has its roots in Anime Expo 2015. For AX that year, we printed dozens of postcards drawn by our artist, Myuto. One of them just so happened to be of Setsuna spinning some beats on a turntable. What was originally just a fun little one-off picture slowly morphed into a canon element of her character. This was a miracle at the time, and really helped redefine Setsuna as a character, something I had struggled with since joining the team. That, however, is a different story. 

Hope you enjoyed the update! If you guys like it, then maybe we'll do more lore/character spotlights in the future. 

Until next time! 

- Syon  

The Current State of Things, New Members, and a Short Demo
over 5 years ago – Tue, Dec 25, 2018 at 10:54:32 PM

Happy holidays, everyone. Let's get right into it.  

A couple weeks ago, you may have seen our Twitter that we were looking for an additional programmer and CG artist to help us out with the game. We had a ton of applications for both, from some very talented people. We narrowed it down, though, and we're glad to be welcoming our new programmer Shortcake and our new CG artist Kimiyoto to the team.   

Already, both of them have been doing excellent work and have really reignited (hah) the rest of the team's energy too. Programming and CG art have been our two main bottlenecks, so it's a big relief to see even better progress happening there lately. So, what does that mean for the game? Contrary to some speculation, we're not planning to cancel the project or hold a second Kickstarter. We're very against both those ideas. However, we really want to get something into your hands, and know you've been waiting a lot longer than expected. So, here's what we're going to do.  

By the end of 2019, we're going to release a version of the game with at least the Senri, Shion and Hitomi routes. We'll also start printing rewards around then, minus physical copies of the game. The Yukino, Setsuna and Aya routes will be added on (for free of course) as they're completed, which hopefully won't be much longer after the initial release. Once they're all finished, we'll print the physical copies of the games as well. We know that this isn't an ideal scenario given how long it's been, but it's the best way for us to get completed routes to you ASAP.  

We do have something for you right now, though. It's a playable version of the first 6 scenes of the game. You can get that here on itch.io.

While they're still a demo and thus subject to change, we can pretty confidently say these are close to, if not final quality. In other words, what you can expect from the full release of the game. Most of the coding was done by Shortcake, our new programmer. We're also still planning to do a full Act 1 release as we've previously promised.    

I know we say this a lot, but thanks for your patience and support. We hope you enjoy this sampler. Have a safe and happy holiday season.