Simplifying Aozora: the Series

If any of you follow me elsewhere you probably know that I suffered a pretty bad hard drive failure a few months back, yada yada yada. The main reason why I'm here is to detail a possible change to the series if it ever begins serious production since roughly half the ideas I come up for it stopped being relevant to me.

This namely affects two of the sub-series of Aozora games, namely the Aozora's Adventure 64 and Aozora's Adventure RPG concepts. These two games, each of which would come with their own sequels, would be much, much more bloated compared to the large but still constrained format of the mainline 2D-focused Aozora's Adventure trilogy (including the Metroidvania-styled Aozora and the Mirror of Illusion and the two "Gaiden" game concepts, Aozora Gaiden and Virtual Aozora) and the Rock-Aozora series with its six planned main entries and four Game Boy-style entries. The two Aozora 3D World games and the rhythm game Aozora Fever would likely still happen, as would Aozora XXL and its followup Aozora Corruption. Keisha, meanwhile, would still get Quest of Keisha and Rebirth of Keisha as offshoot continuations of the first Aozora's Adventure and Aozora Gaiden respectively.

The series would still be contained within arcs, numbered from 1 to 6, each arc representing a two-year timeskip. The jump between Arc 3 and 4, however, is a three-year skip.

While the desire to make games has been there for... almost my entire life, the Aozora series being eleven years old at this point and having a much greater degree of polish than any of my oldest ideas has made me want to attempt a further push at possibly bringing the series to life when I'm not as stressed from the lockdown and the resulting inability to not attend cons and keep my motivation to create strong. The above-mentioned hard drive failure similarly ruined me and I still feel its effects lingering on me. At least I was able to preserve most if not all of the Aozora-themed artwork I have both made and received over the years (from being in my favorites on deviantART to being on my iOS devices) but losing just about everything else, including WIP's, is going to take a long while before I make this new Mac feel more like my own.

Going back to the main topic, maybe expect some of the more complex ideas in the Aozora series not to see the light of day depending on how everything plays out. As for art I'm looking to jump back into drawing full renders again after neglecting it for several years in the next few months, so expect a thing or two to pop up in 2021 even if I go back to standard-size renders (seriously working on a bigger canvas is cool but it's scared me off a good few times when making character art).