The Year of Starnova (Patreon)

Happy New Year, from Love in Space! May all your wishes come true in 2018.

While 2017 may have seemed a quiet year for us, an unprecedented amount of work has been done behind the scenes to create Shining Song Starnova. When we first set out to make Shining Song Starnova, all we had was the lofty idea that we wanted to make something which could have been released during Japan's golden age of visual novels. Well, it turned out that due to various reasons, making huge visual novels like that require unreasonable amounts of resources, but we're still hanging in there.

The game is now largely finished, and with just a little bit more work, I think we will be able to release a creation we can be truly proud of. (With the caveat that the final 10 percent of game development is always the hardest part of the development cycle.) Creative software like visual novels are feats of both artistry and engineering, requiring the combined dedication of many talented individuals. As much as we wish there was a button we can press to turn an idea into a product, in reality, the process of making the end product is worlds detached from the experience of using it. Due to the end user's subjective taste in both literature and art, there are no objective benchmarks for the product to clear, beyond that it runs when you press the play button and the basic UI functions work. All in all, a surprising amount of troubles can occur while developing visual novels. These issues are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to visual novel development, to get a taste of the creation process.

However, while reading all that may lead you to believe that we have hit "unexpected production troubles" and whatnot, the game is so far progressing on schedule and mostly on budget. (Breath of relief.) Unfortunately, it has become increasing difficult for developers to share information about the visual novel creation process due to the chance of the information being misinterpreted. With that in mind though, Shining Song Starnova has been an incredible experience for us to create. We've never quite made a product like this before, so we're all very pleased with how things are shaping up. Thanks to everyone's hard work, I feel like it will now only be a matter of time until you too can experience what we have created together.

Finally, it is ultimately you who keep Love in Space going. At the end of the day, visual novels are a niche within a niche with a still small fanbase. We hope that you too do what you can to help the girls of Starnova. 2018 will truly be our year of Starnova, and we are really counting on it being your year of Starnova as well!

 ~ Sam Yang

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