I’m feel a little bit weird writing a postmortem for a project we are still actively developing, so I added the ‘BAF’ to make it clear that we’re not abandoning this idea soon.

Just like The Butterfly Dreams, the concept was unearthed from Rheine’s old doodles (I’d let him explain in a separate post). I’m a big YGO player, was a Duel Master player, and did play a bunch of toys marketed by these anime tie-ins. Beyblades? Crush Gears? B-daman? Mini 4WD? Yeah, they were mostly knockoffs my mom got us in $1 shops, but they were equally fun for an elementary schooler. When I asked for a battle action fantasy idea and Rheine pitched this, I was immediately onboard, and so did everyone else. Hotblooded battle manga with toys played entirely too seriously sets your soul on fire whether you’re 9 or 29.

Over the top chants! The world’s balance hanging on the shoulders of three zesty teenagers! Delicious rivalry! Wholesome moments of friendship! The classic bildungsroman!

We got the script done by early June, and that was about the only thing that went smoothly. asteRiesling and I could only get to work around the Thursday second week of June owing to many personal circumstances (no CG for this version!), and I wrote instructions for special effects and background upscaling to OmTivi at the end of the second week to be due at the end of June. And then Brain Happened and I froze. I put off scripting for days on end, even when assets came in ready to be integrated.

It’s not our first rodeo however, and I have enough experience living with this tipsy-turvy brain that I had a couple failsafes and streamlined workflows, and we’re all accustomed to everyone’s ups and downs so we made the deadlines, but boy was it rough. I had to forgo a couple things for the BAF version, which will be rectified in the upcoming updates:

• Animations:

YYO is rooted in homages to shounen battle anime, and I couldn’t resist having a simple OP to go with it. However, given how close we were cutting it, this had to be scrapped. It also means I cannot have character entry animations because by then I was simply running on pure determination and my body was telling me to stop. I tried my best to give the characters some fade in/out so it wouldn’t look too static. I didn’t have time to move the camera around (just pretend it’s the old PSX/GBA games where the VN sequences were just talking heads). I did have a bit of time to style the duel screens though, and I think that’s a good place to focus my time on since it’s reused a lot of times.

• Duel System:

I’m. Really sorry. The way it is now, you’re at the mercy of RNG for the duels, and you basically have to retry it a bunch of times or coasted your way to the end. The duel system went through a lot. It was originally QTE-based, but I hate QTEs in my VNs, so it was then a typing minigame where you type your chants, and in the end we went with a skill system where every trick has a base point, parameters, and effects. But with me burning through days, there wasn’t enough time to implement it properly and I had to cut back with a placeholder. The finalized version of the duel system is fairly different, and there are ways for you to interact with your opponent’s score, so it’s not just pick a skill and pray. However, I would need some serious balancing and testing time, because the crux of this game is still a VN and I don’t want it to be unnecessarily tedious.

I did learn more about Ren’py and could automate a lot of things to make scripting significantly easier and faster. I’d say given the massive time crunch I had and my lack of energy, even the BAF version of Yo-Yo-Oh! is quite alright. It’s clunky in a lot of places but it’s stable, doesn’t have any obvious bug, and sort-of juicy?

All in all it was in a state to be submitted a day before the deadline. The duel system was only in place two days before the deadline and it irks me that I wasn’t able to make it at least fun for BAF, but the build was functional and that should be enough.

But of course we face another problem.

Just like Lady Anneliese Dies, we’re delisted by itch.io for some reason. I could upload the game, I could submit it to jams, I could do practically anything, but the game is not searchable. It’s also not in Recent, not in any of the tags, basically nowhere. So it’s destined to be buried in obscurity, and honestly having the games you personally like suffer this fate is morale-crushing. I’m not looking for numbers, I just want this to be at least… Uh? Discoverable?

Already sent a message to itch. Hasn’t gotten any replies.

But let’s set that aside for a minute. We plan to have the second half out this year, and if we’re lucky maybe the third (and the last) too? No promises because a lot of us won’t be available until much later, but if there’s an ounce of interest for more yoyo slinging, rest assured that there’s more incoming. (Side note: I forgot about the existence of Blazing Teens, but… the more the merrier?)

Until next time, may the string you sling be the ties that bind us

• Requiem

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