Getting the New Game’s Store Page Ready

　I’m getting the Steam store page ready to open.

　If we’re really going to do it within this year, that only leaves about half a month, so everyone on the team is running around like crazy. But it’s the kind of busyness I don’t actually hate.

　In the end, the closer the time limit gets, the more our output accelerates; that sense of the game slowly but surely coming together, mixed with the tension of a looming deadline, sends my adrenaline through the roof.

　A friend is scrambling to deal with Steam’s store page review and all the cropping and exporting of images. I’m preparing the text on my side, trying to figure out how to present the Ohisashiburi illustration so it grabs people’s attention at a glance. And yet, even that trial-and-error process doesn’t feel unpleasant. It’s fun.

　It’s honestly fun.

　My writing gets paired with Ohisashiburi-san’s art, Aiobahn’s music plays over it, and a HAYAO pulls everything together with their programming. What a luxury that is. If we just keep repeating that happiness over and over, someday it’ll finally take shape as a game and be released into the world.

　Once you announce it, all that’s left is to make it.

　I’m wrapped in all kinds of anxiety and in a weird sense of omnipotence. This time, it’s basically just us—if I put it bluntly, it’s all “people on the inside,” a tiny ultra-indie production. And with that tiny, tight-knit group, we’re somehow going to launch this thing out into the world in Japanese, Chinese, and English. From 0 to 1.

　Everything we’d built up was stolen, and now we’re aiming for 1 again; the cherry blossoms of revenge will bloom in the dead of winter.

　From here on out, this is territory we’ll continue to walk on our own.

　It’s kind of incredible, really. We started our own company, put in our own money, and even though things are tight, we’re still sitting here going clack clack clack clack on our keyboards.

　I want to be a little kinder to myself.

　This year my mental state has been utterly shredded, and when I look back, I’m honestly surprised I’m still here, alive and creating. I really have survived a lot. I’ve been studying English, and I’m still keeping up a three-times-a-week gym routine so I don’t collapse during the anime production. So things won’t be stolen from me again, for the sake of my dignity. No matter how much the ugly people of this world try to trample or rob my soul, I want to prove through my own footprints that this is the fruit of my own sense of beauty, and not something trash like them has any right to lay hands on.

　I’ve come to hate people who don’t have poetry all the more.

　People without poetry have nothing to cling to except money and status. Because they can’t understand it, they casually trample on the poetry of others. They’re disgusting maggots, and in order to resist a world where such creatures shrug and say “Hey, it’s not my fault,” or “That’s just how society is,” and shift the blame while living comfortably—that resistance, to me, is what rock’n’roll and subculture are supposed to be.

　And visual novels are the ultimate form of that. Art, music, and writing. Directing all of that so every single click makes them just a little more effective, more striking. It’s a kind of total art. Otaku, delivering characters and stories—romance, in the broadest sense—to this rotten world, sending them as a twisted love song to their fellow creatures living under the same rock in dim rooms everywhere. It doesn’t reach the ugly ones. They can’t read the words, and they can’t feel the heat or the loneliness that comes off the screen unless someone spells it out for them. They have no sense of art. In this day and age, they don’t have anything close to the capacity needed to keep up with a visual novel.

　That’s why I feel safe. That’s why right now, I should be making a visual novel with zero regard for profitability.

　It really is sickening.

　There’s no point living in a world of pigs, swollen and bloated with desire. I’d rather get drunk on words in the pale glow of a monitor. It’s a legal drug that lets you avoid staring this gross reality straight in the face.