Highway Blossoms: Next Exit Progress Update (Patreon)

Hey y'all,

I'm here to pop in and give you a quick update on the progress for Highway Blossoms: Next Exit. In case you missed it, HB:NE is a story DLC for Highway Blossoms that we announced a couple of months ago. It's set roughly a month after the end of the main game, and sees Amber and Marina, as well as the Trio, return to the city of Las Vegas.

It's been a really interesting experience working on this expansion. I expected writing Amber and Marina again to be like riding a bike - something I could pick back up and be good at despite how long it's been since I last did it. In reality, it turned out to be a fair bit harder getting back into the headspace of those characters. For one thing, both Syon and I are very different people than we were when we first wrote HB, and that's really affected how we view the characters themselves. When we first decided to do the DLC, before even deciding on what the story would be about, we knew that we wanted it to show the characters maturing. It needed to reflect the growth that they'd undergone. There are parts of the story that thematically will probably feel really similar to the first game, but how we handle them is a lot different. This is the first time I've ever worked on a sequel to something, so at first I was afraid that if it wasn't exactly like the first thing, people wouldn't like it. But now that we're farther into the development cycle, I'm pretty confident that we made the right decision.

WIP of one of the DLC CG's by moekki and kamifish

There are also a number of differences to the game itself. Or rather, one big difference: we're going to be utilizing multiple perspectives in the DLC, instead of just Amber's. Some parts will be told from Marina's point of view, and sometimes you'll even have a choice between which character's POV you want to follow. For scenes that focus on Joe and Tess and Mariah, we're gonna be using 3rd person, rather than 1st like the rest of the game. Tess has a pretty big role in the DLC, and so roughly half the scenes will be centered around the trio.

Another new feature in HB:NE will be the addition of cut-in art: little graphics of items that are mentioned in the story that don't really need a full CG. This mostly means food. In addition to the ones that'll be popping up in NE, we're also going back and adding a bunch to the original game. As Syon joked, "we'll remaster this thing as many times as it takes." All of the cut-ins for both the main game and the DLC are drawn by adi!

When we had finished outlining the DLC, but before we started writing it, Syon and I decided to challenge ourselves to do NaNoWriMo and finish the whole DLC script in the month of November. That… didn't go so well. But! We're over halfway finished with it now, and should be wrapping up the first draft before the end of the year. We're hoping to have it in your hands (well, hard drives) before Spring of next year is over. So far, that's looking pretty achievable. I'll end this now with these adorable chibis that moekki drew.

Cheers!

Josh