Hi everyone! Today, Hemotropic Friendship Virus celebrates its fourth birthday. I haven't been posting works related to it for that long, but that's how long it's now existed for. And, I have a couple of things to say about it.
First of all, thank you all so much for the love and support that you have shown towards the series. The overwhelmingly positive response to all things HFV has really blown me away. I'm so happy that my work has been able to have such an impact on you all. I will forever be grateful!
Second...well, it's been four years, and I'm starting to want to branch out my creative endeavors again. This is by far the longest I have ever spent working on a single project to date, and while it's been a whole lot of fun, there are a lot of other ideas I have that I simply cannot express through HFV. This will certainly NOT be the end of HFV forever!!! There are still some key parts of its story that I really want to tell. I WILL return to HFV. The biggest HFV fan is me and the main 4 are lodged into my brain forever.
So, then, what's next? What am I working on now? Well, this time, I've begun working on a game in GameMaker that I'm calling "Night of Eternal Night". It's a turn-based strategy roguelite with grid-based combat, primarily inspired by the likes of Fire Emblem and Brutal Orchestra. It's still in an incredibly rudimentary state right now, but I'm quite excited about it. I plan for its primary battle mechanics to be focused around setting and manipulating ground hazards using elemental attacks; for example, a water attack will leave behind a puddle of water, which can then be frozen into slippery ice, or electrified for massive damage. I want it to be fun and challenging, while also having a lot of silliness to it. Here's some of the playable characters, with little quotes that pop out of their heads when you click on them.
I've been wanting to make a roguelite game for quite some time now, and I was actually inspired to finally take the plunge by Nubby's Number Factory, of all things. I'm sure you can already assume based on this website's design that the presentation of Nubby's was absolutely divine in my eyes. But, what mainly touched me about it was something said by the creator himself, MogDogBlog, in an interview. Everything that he said about using games as an "ultimate" form of personal creative expression really got to me. So, this is the primary driving philosophy behind NOEN. With its audiovisual presentation, I'm just following my every creative whim. With its gameplay, I'm attempting to create exactly the kind of game that I would want to sink hundreds of hours into.
I plan to release a demo of NOEN's first "area", which will include its first two boss fights as well, whenever they're ready. I'm not even going to suggest a potential month for a release date (besides that it will 100% be before the end of this year) because I have learned I am pretty bad at estimating such things. But, I will be posting periodic dev updates here to my blog, too, and the final version of the demo will include a little bit more of the game. Unlike my other games, this game in its final version will not be free. I gotta establish SOME source of income......
A few of you may also be wondering what this means for the visual novel engine. Unfortunately, this does mean that I am also putting that project on hiatus for the time being. To be quite frank, the main reason why I am taking this break from making HFV content is because I'm getting bored of making visual novels at the moment. I learned GameMaker originally because I had been trying to first make HFV be an adventure game, but I switched to the visual novel format for it because I felt like the medium just fit the story I wanted to tell so much better. Thus, I really just want to keep HFV as a series of visual novels...but, yeah. I wanna make a GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!! right now. So, that's what I'm doing.
Anyway...thank you for reading, everyone!! ♡ Both this post, and in general!