Hello, Requ here.

The scene was one dull afternoon in my part-time job. We had just finished our project, but we had to clock in for administrative purposes. My supervisor couldn’t let us leave the office, but we were given a consolation prize—an explicit permission to do whatever we wanted as long as we did not attract undue attention.

So I had about four hours to kill.

Three out of four of us had just worked on Miss Xero/Ceylon Entertainment’s Amplitude and the hype was running high, so on a whim I booted Ren’py and wrote a quick-and-dirty port of a short story I really liked from our club’s writing jams. It was written in BBCode for forum posts then, with branches nested inside spoiler blocks. Without any image whatsoever, I got it done within half an hour and sent it to RakaP. He was surprised, but delighted. We quickly devised a plan. Maybe we could get it done properly, with asteRiesling and OmTivi on board.

Everyone agreed. We drafted some outlines and listed out the resources we would need, division of tasks, all that shebang. We had worked together before, and each of us had done various different projects on our own. It shouldn’t be too difficult. After all, how long would a 20-minutes kinetic novel take to develop? asteRiesling sketched out the characters within a week, and the original plan was NaNoRenO’s perfectly viable one month schedule.

That was seven years ago.

Since then, we had had at least one college graduation, three breakups, five job changes, among other milestones in life between the four of us. If we have a Gantt chart to illustrate our progress, my seven year hiatus broke that chart. I was still having full-time STEM college courseload back then along with one full-time job and a part-time job to pay for the degree, and it turned out being a financially struggling sandwich gen kid meant relegating every passion project you had to the backburner. We did work on other people’s games along the way, and we had had less intensive personal projects. Xero had released three other games in the meantime (bless her productivity) and I worked on each of them, silently wishing I could go back and finish this someday. The others never berated me for this massive delay, but it was a love letter to a friend I greatly respect, and a promise I had always intended to keep.

So the tech winter saw me stranded after a layoff, and fresh out of Bewitching Sinners, I thought this was it, then. I might not get another chance. Besides, SuNoFes was in the horizon, and a deadline could whip me into shape. The old code was so old it was still written in Ren’py 6 (We’re now on 8, don’t worry!). I’d had to upgrade the resolution (it was 640x480, can you believe it?). It took me one whole day to load it with placeholders and I sent it to Avenue Q. They were very welcoming of the idea of resuscitating this project, but understandably reserved. We made the goal absolutely modest: to get it done, that’s it. In spite of my own skepticism, the momentum kicked up and snowballed. The old script was given a new paint job, and character artworks came in to replace the placeholders. I got consumed into learning shaders and Ren’py ATL to compensate for our limited resources. All in all, we worked on it in a pace we thought we could do seven years ago, with more depth than we could ever be because the old us did not have the seven years of experience we now possess. Within two months, we had a release date.

It was surreal. It is surreal.

The Butterfly Dreams might not be the most technologically shiny project, the plot might not be avant-garde, but the source material and how it came to be is near and dear to me. I’m excited to finally be able to share this to other people. RakaP is one of the most versatile writers I’d ever seen, and I’d never stopped being a fan of everyone in Avenue Q. As far as my personal goal for this game goes, if RakaP likes it, I’m happy.

I hold no illusion of this project being commercially viable, as it strays from the romance and dating sim genre prevalent on top sales, no NSFW, and so short, and it does bring into question why we charge for this game at all. I believe we have a worthy story to tell, and each purchase will support us in our hobby. We are no strangers to financial difficulty however, and we hail from a country with such a weak currency buying games could be cost-prohibitive, so The Butterfly Dreams will have community copies available upon release. If you want to see what Asynthesis has to offer without having to skip your next meal, you can, no question asked. I’ll write more about this in the coming days.

Until then, the collective consciousness sends you our gratitude. May the wings of a million butterflies flap in your favor.

🦋Requiem🦋