First up, I want to say Woohoo! and Thank you! to everybody who responded so positively to our announcement of voice acting. I also know a lot of you want to audition but we aren't doing open casting calls at this time. We may open up one or more roles in the future, and if we do, you'll hear it here first. We promise. Until then, thanks for your patience. Now, then! I had a long blog post written up about emotional sincerity, about how our game was meant to wear its heart on its sleeve and reject lol cringe attitudes... but it seems I already wrote that post like a year ago, so I had to scrap it. You can read it here if you like, though. So instead of a pathos appeal, let's talk ethos. Let's talk about my past experience in game development, and how it lead to Arcade Spirits. This is Stefan speaking; Aenne has her own tale to tell and I'll see about getting her on the blog to chat about it later. Most folks know me from two different paths I took -- writing (cough) anime fanfic and then original novels, and writing Neverwinter Nights modules. But truthfully Arcade Spirits first started out as an absurd little project from 1999 called Culture Shock, which was my attempt to write a visual novel engine in JAVASCRIPT to be playable in a browser. ...look, it was 1999, JavaScript was almost respectable at the time, okay?
It was a different time. A far weebier time. Eventually I canned the project as I just didn't have access to the art resources I needed to actually do it, and JavaScript was clunky at best. Although there was this new thing I'd learned about at Otakon, attending a panel about... what was it called... Ren-py or something? Which seemed viable... ...but before I could dip too deep in those waters, Neverwinter Nights was released. And that changed everything. With a strong toolkit-based approach and an excellent dialogue editor, I was able to create storytelling adventures using a popular platform. I was in on it from day one, releasing Penultima, followed by Penultima ReRolled and the more horror-based elegia eternum series. Finally, I very nearly created an official Bioware campaign named the HeX coda, but corporate miscommunication resulted in the project being dropped from their roster and instead released for free. (Interestingly, Fist of Discomfort -- the game-within-a-game of Arcade Spirits -- almost was a Neverwinter Nights module. I'd experimented with making a simplified brawler game out of the D&D based fightin' engine, complete with those flashy GO! arrows you'd see in Final Fight.)
All my NWN games were very character-driven, as you can see here. But D&D wasn't really ideal for storytelling, because no matter how hard I tried I could never quite get the combat balance right. I could make stories featuring memorable characters, including some of the dating mechanics seen in Arcade Spirits, but it wasn't quite enough to really explore narrative potential. Exploring relationships -- both romance and friendship -- through game systems has always fascinated me. To make that dream a reality, I needed a different tool. For about ten years I opted to go back to writing novels. I didn't need artists or musicians or coders to write a novel, just my own brain and a keyboard. It felt like a style I could actually work in without hitting the limitations I'd hit trying to be an entire game studio by myself. Meanwhile, the indie scene for games kept growing and growing, and visual novels started becoming more and more prominent... Then in 2016, Aenne Schumann suggested working on a project together. She had friends who could help, resources we could tap. I had money to bankroll the venture and an idea that had been forming since 1999. Both of us combined had a diverse array of perspectives about arcades and arcade culture, which could be used to write a stronger story than either of us could have created alone. And we had the tool I'd learned about so long ago, RenPy. The time was finally right to make this work. No more limitations. No more compromises. If I was only ever going to get one shot at making a professional video game I wanted to go all out -- hire amazing artists, collaborate with them, work with a publisher, get this in front of as many people as possible. If it tanked, I'd soak the loss and at least say I did it, I crossed that off my bucket list. But if it succeeds. If this grand fiasco actually succeeds... Well. We'll see, won't we?