Welcome to our new development blog!
Im LaChez, creator and writer of this project! We did have another blog at some point but it was not updated very often, so I thought it was time to start a new blog altogether!
Creating Nakajo
Back in 2013 before this project first began, Nakajo started as a story revolving around Nakajo Sanematsu’s struggle to find his own identity aside from being the heir to his family’s fortune and Motoko Yuki’s struggling family life.
The two were always unwillingly stuck together in these bizarre situations with their classmates and slowly built a relationship as the story went on. They became popular through their interactions with the colorful characters of Class 2-D.
As I began to understand visual novels from learning how to use the Renpy engine and playing various other lemmasoft visual novels at the time, I started to think about how I wanted to lay out the story as a whole. During the first month, I created the characters: Yuka Hazuki and Mitsuko Saito, and Ai Kamiya as other potential love interests for Nakajo with the idea of a bishoujo in mind.
Yuka is in the Drama Club, Mitsuko is in the Music Club, and Ai was in the soccer club. After establishing the story and cast, came a long writer’s block and an odd turn in my life where I almost stopped working on the project altogether.
The Struggle (’13 to ’15)
I’ll try to make this as short and simple as possible. I was in a living situation working minimum wage in retail and having rent that cost more than I was making due to my hours being cut. For the scale of project I first had in mind, I did not have a budget to fund a visual novel with it’s own unique assets. All I could do at the time was work on the script until I was in a more stable situation.
The landlord was terrible at communication and would not let me out of the lease even though I met the correct conditions to back out of the lease. It was a stressful and complicated situation but I managed to tough it out before the lease was up. For the rest of 2014, I was stuck at another job only with even less motivation to write.
I ended up moving back home for quite some time with a new job but shortly after started to attend a technical college in the fall of 2015. I was juggling between a job, school, and had the inspiration to rework Nakajo as a whole during this period.
Rework
There are still bits and pieces left from the original script but they felt lackluster to what direction we’re taking now. I thought, “Well, all the love interests are in clubs so why shouldn’t Nakajo be in a club?” and wanted to give the story a group dynamic.
Tatsuya and Sumiko were recurring characters in the original script but didn’t belong to clubs in particular. Tatsuya had worked tirelessly at his family restaurant and Sumiko was part of the Student Council.
Nakajo and Motoko’s interactions would effect the nature of their relationship as well as other classmates. That was the original recurring theme at the time before making Nakajo the president of the Service Club.
Inspiration
I took inspiration from my favorite television comedy, Community. A show about 7 misfits of different ages backgrounds in what started as a Spanish class study group but in its later seasons evolved into a committee literally in charge of trying to save the school.
Community has incredible actors like Allison Brie, Chevy Chase, Ken Jeong and one of my favorite comedian and musicians, Donald Glover. If you have Hulu, I highly recommend watching it! It is incredibly satirical and the characters are absolutely lovable.
The closest thing to that show I could incorporate Nakajo’s story was something like a Service Club. Something non-specific and anyone would be able to participate in. You may be familiar with this club from the OreGairu series. This is also a good watch if you like slice of life, romantic comedies and drama.
From the start I wanted Nakajo to interact and get to know all of his classmates over the course of the story. This was an experience I fondly enjoyed back when I was school.
My Background
I grew up in a smaller suburban town in Minnesota. My family was Laotian in a 70% Caucasian community. It was a town with a close-knit community where was fairly common to run into someone you knew wherever you went and rumors spread like wildfire.
My high school experience can literally be described like American movies and TV shows with groups you could pick out simply by looking at them. All the stereotypical varieties of jocks, preps, goths, emos, gangsters, skaters, hicks and so much more.
In high school I was part of the band kids. I’m talking about concert band playing the clarinet. This close-knit friend group would expand through the years. We all still get together for parties and bonfires to his day.
Sophomore year, a couple of these friends and I started a hardcore metal band (Some of you may have heard this genre referred to as screamo) and played local shows all over our home state of Minnesota.
It was quite the unique experience. We were teenagers around the ages of 15-16 playing in this niche music scene full of older musicians in their 20’s that toured around the US for a living. I met some pretty down to earth people during that time.
I wanted to give Nakajo this experience of meeting and interacting with many different diverse groups of people. I soon began to overhaul the story focusing on the Service Club interacting with their classmates and their clubs. Some of the other clubs that Nakajo’s classmates are part of include: the Basketball Club, Drama Club, Music Club, Art Club, and Broadcasting Club.
Artists
During this time, I came into contact with Gato Hayakawa or lordofelemental on deviantart. He is an Indonesian artist whom I’ve had the honor to work with the past couple years. Gato-San is incredibly amazing at drawing mechas.
Gato is an incredible character artist, since 2015 he’s been working with me to create most of the art assets like character design/sprites, CG, and more. Please check out his work at DeviantArt.
I’ve also been working with Anirhapsodist for quite some time as well. Her relative handsofmidaz who worked on some of the earlier Nakajo sprites, referred me to her. She’s an incredible Professional Visual Graphics artist from the Philippines, also acting as a moral support over the years. Ani has made all of the fantastic backgrounds for Nakajo so far! Here is her DeviantArt!
Current State
Now that it’s 2018 and I graduated from technical college in May, I’ve picked up on writing after being inconsistent for so long.
I am currently at about 35,000 words with the latest script and am aiming for a demo build that may roughly be 100,000 words or more. We’ll be aiming for a demo build this fall or early winter.
As for art assets, we’re going to be working on CG’s for quite some time. We currently have character sprites for 30+ characters at this point and have been updating as we go with Gato’s art style consistently improving. I’m also going to have Ani work on a new game logo soon.
Soon I’ll be looking to work with a programmer and other possible roles for art and writing to expand the team. I have many ideas in store for this visual novel and really hope to find the right people to fill such roles.
If you’ve made it this far I hope you enjoyed reading this and look forward to more updates in the future.
-LaChez
nakajovisualnovel.wordpress.com 