One year already? It seems so!

I have so many things to say and so many people to thank that I don't know where to start.

I was going to show a lot of images so you can see the changes that have taken place from the beginning of LA until the current version but I'm going to leave that for the "LA Classic" post.

We will go back to the beginnings where all this was born... It was a cloudy day, I was having a cup of coffee in front of my fireplace and... Suuuuuuure...

I remember I was going through a very bad patch in my personal life: I had recently lost my job after several years of giving too much of myself to the company I worked for and they had no better way to thank me for my "loyalty" to them than to "restructure the staff and get rid of some employees to blahblahblah", you know how the world of work is in some departments.

So with the bad luck of being unemployed and the covid was already starting to show up in every corner of the world... One day I woke up and thought: "Why instead of playing Ren'py games don't I try to make my own game the way I want it? The perfect game for me." and as silly as it sounds, that's how LA started: I had the ideas about a basic story and I was clear about the mechanics I wanted to have. The Moonstars? Something planned before Lisapi existed.

But before I got down to work there was a big obstacle: programming. I had no idea what kind of languages Ren'py used, what tools it used, nothing at all. So before even writing a script or planning the girls that were going to exist in LA I started to learn how to program in Ren'py. I have knowledge of different programming languages among other things because I've dedicated my whole life to systems administration, so I just had to make sure that it wasn't too complex a language and that everything I had in mind was possible to design it.

I spent several weeks until I managed to learn all the basics I wanted to implement. To this day I continue to learn to get the most out of what can be done in Ren'py.

The end result of a weird thing I did in the typical "test1" project was quite nice so I decided that I would continue with this and see how far I could take it.

The next step was to learn how to use Koikatsu/CS. I did several tests with character creation, maps, etc., and got to work without wasting too much time. As I didn't want to use the default maps offered by the Koi community I started to redesign them all trying to make at least 90% of the maps to be made by me. There are few exceptions where I hardly modified anything because it is more complex to modify (the alchemy shop) or I directly asked for permission to use it without modifying it (The Refuge + part of the Town).

It took me many days of work because it was a new tool for me but much simpler than SFM or Blender, which is what I've been used to use to make renders (yes, I used to be a "renderer" and I made renders in SFM and Blender).

After several hours of work, I decided to design some character to test the scenes. That's how Lisapi was born, the first designed girl. Lisapi is a mix of Latin words and refers to absolute knowledge, as it is also referred to in the game. This is not because of her role in the story, it is simply a small reference to the fact that she has been the first since the LA universe was created.

There are a lot of subtle details that I've purposely put in overtime, although I don't do it as much now because I've focused on other things. Once upon a time, I used to put some hints in the code to let you know about new content, but I stopped doing that too.

It took a long time before everything was finished and I could start working on the girls and their personalities. For me, the most interesting of them all is Anna, who was born with the idea of being the non-typical Tsundere and would end up becoming a kind of Yandere (she's still in the process of becoming a full Yandere). For me her design is unbeatable... Anna, Tali, and Vanessa are the best asses I've ever designed. Anna is based on a hentai version of Zero Two in case anyone hasn't noticed by now.

The hardest part of all this was the last step: Writing the story, dialogues, quests, sex scenes... And not happy with that, translating it all. I don't remember how long it took me but I had to translate +40k lines for the first version. The translation was a disaster but people weren't too hard on me at the beginning.

The thing is that writing was the hardest part as I have zero experience as a writer, so I knew it was going to be difficult for me and it was going to give me a lot of headaches. I really dreaded at the beginning just thinking about writing dialogues... In the end, my trick was to let myself go and see what would flow. The results weren't bad at all but it was obviously written by some "amateur". I've been improving a lot since then but I still have a long way to go to even get to a good level of writing.

That's why the intro has been redone recently, to adapt it to the level and quality of the rest of the content.

I honestly didn't know what to expect when I published the first version... Lots of nerves, fear of failure... and all the phases for these things. But fuck, I thought it would take like 10 or 15 releases to start considering this as a work, and in a few releases the popularity of LA had a good pace so I couldn't complain at all. I promised myself that if I couldn't make a living out of it by the end of the summer, I'd just abandon the project and get a job, because as I've always said, my hobby is playing video games, not designing them. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy what I do, but I have my own hobbies and programming is not one of them.

So here we are one year and 9 versions later. I was planning on 12 releases (1 per month) but it's something that sometimes gets out of plans and you have to delay it or unexpected things happen outside of work.

Not only that, but also during this year the idea of making Lisapi an MC in LA was born but after thinking about it a lot I decided to discard it. But I didn't want to miss the opportunity for the cutest and most beloved girl to have her moment of fame, so "Lisapi's Adventures (L'sA)" was born. This way, she can be the protagonist of her own story, focused on a totally lesbian environment. However, I have never ruled out giving her a certain "MC" role in LA, it's the nature of this story. We'll see in the future.

And in a super short way that would be the first year of LA. It's been an interesting and really intense year of many hours of work, a lot of dedication... It's been a crazy year and although there have been moments when I've thought about a lot of things, in the end, I've always kept going and I'll keep going, something really big and bad would have to happen for me to have to make the decision to stop doing this.

So I thank each and every one of you for the support you give, those who have supported me once, and above all those who have been here with me since the beginning, which surprisingly are not just a couple of you.

I would like to make special mentions but I don't want to make this extremely long so these days I have been personally thanking people who have helped me selflessly in different aspects of the project and I will continue to thank more people these days.

See you soon with the post about the "Classic" version of LA.

Oh yes, I hope you all enjoyed the first-anniversary short game.

I hope that next year there will be more of us and we can continue to celebrate that the LA universe still exists. To that end, I'm going to keep working hard every day.

See you all!

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