Hey everyone! Duhop from Violet Horizons here!

The biggest announcement I have is that the Steam page for Alex’s Journey to the Grave is live, with a free demo coming soon, and you can wishlist the game now! There isn't an itch.io page up for the game yet, since it will go live with the demo release, but you can follow us here on itch to be notified when it goes up.

If you haven't heard of Alex's Journey to the Grave (AJG) before, it's actually the massive visual novel project Violet Horizons has been working on since before Alex’s Hope & Alex’s Solitude (AH&AS) was even conceived! It's a dark and emotional romance story following the two main characters of AH&AS four years in the future, looking to weigh in at around 100,000 words with 4 or more unique endings.

Here's a short teaser: Alex's Journey to the Grave is a visual novel about a boy trapped by fate and a girl in dire need of a friend. Help guide them through some of the hardest decisions of their lives as you experience warmth, connection, tragedy, the inevitability of death... and the antics of a mysterious black cat.

Now, getting to what we've been up to, the past 6 (six?!) months have been pretty crazy for me and Violet Horizons. Right after finally releasing Alex’s Hope & Alex’s Solitude, I realized a few different things that prevented me from really pushing it as the prologue to Alex’s Journey to the Grave  as originally planned:

• The stories are raw and impactful, but despite the fact that they will connect with AJG later on, they contain nothing to really pique the reader’s interest in the upcoming game.

• Alex’s Hope really is too short compared to Alex’s Solitude. A variety of things led up to this, such as me writing Alex’s Hope first, me believing the similar emotional impact would make up for the length disparity, and me going overboard with the scope for Alex’s Solitude without going back to do the same for Alex’s Hope.

• The level of polish, in the writing, scripting, and UI at the very least, is not up to the new standard I have in mind for AJG.

Despite all of the above, I’m still extremely grateful to have gone through with creating AH&AS. An update to fix most of those problems will come once we have the time, but more importantly, the learning opportunities and experience it provided for both me and the rest of the team were immense. I honestly believe that AJG will be leagues better now than it ever could have been without that experience behind us. 

So after a short break following the release, with my skills sharpened, our marketing push delayed, and most of the team busy with school, I put my head down and got to work on Alex’s Journey to the Grave. I scrapped and rewrote the entire original outline for the story, planned out a new development and marketing timeline, then started from scratch with an entirely new draft for the game’s script.

After a few months I had nearly finished writing up to the end of Act 2, the second draft of the first two acts expanding up to a length of nearly 30,000 words from an original length of only around 8,000, before I got a super interesting opportunity. I was invited to go show off our games at a local anime convention, Ai-Kon!

Thankfully this came at around the same time as the team was becoming free from school again, so after I spent some time meticulously planning out all the assets we needed for Act 1, we got to work on finishing it up to show at the convention. Using it as a demo for the game is a big part of the new plan, and this was the perfect moment to expedite that plan!

It turned out that trying to polish the demo to completion in a month was quite optimistic of us, but the deadline spurred on some amazing progress. The visuals, scripting, and music we had by the time the convention rolled around were unbelievable compared to the blank slate we had just a month prior, and I was definitely excited to show it to people in person.

Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out at the convention. Our location wasn’t great, right past the exit doors, so only a dozen or so people (that were mostly on their way to leave already) stopped by to play either Alex’s Hope or Alex’s Solitude. Nobody finding us had enough spare time to play through both of the short stories, nevermind an hour or longer demo for AJG.

Oh well! To be honest, I’d expected it. I was more than content enough already with the progress we’d made with the convention as a motivator, and it was still great to see the interest in AH&AS and Violet Horizons as a whole that the few visual novels fans who passed by had shown. I have no regrets!

That brings us to the present, where work continues on the final assets we need to finish Act 1, and I’m back to doing writing, programming, and marketing. 

While we could release the demo version of Act 1 very, very soon, we’re able to take our time again now to make sure that its presentation is fully polished and a good representation of AJG as a whole, and we’re going to take advantage of that. The current plan is to wait on the demo release until a new trailer has been finished and the store pages and the UI have both had a full overhaul. In short, probably at least 1-2 months from now.

In the meantime, if you don’t feel like waiting, we are currently looking for playtesters for Act 1 and beyond! If you’re interested in participating, just join our Discord server and inquire about playtesting in the general chat. All we ask is that you provide some feedback on your experience via Google forms, and you’ll be rewarded with free access to the game on your platform of choice.

Thanks so much to everyone who read this far! I hope you enjoyed the insight into what Violet Horizons has been up to since the last devlog, and feel free to comment with any questions. I’ll be writing at least one of these per month from now on, so keep an eye out for them if you want to stay updated!

-Duhop