Hello everyone! You might be surprised to see another devlog from Barachoda Bloom almost two months after I announced that BB would become a side project and By Your Hands would be my main project, as well as implying but forgetting to mention that I'd be putting BB on hiatus. Now you might think that it's a bad idea to make a devlog about BB while it's on hiatus and to that, I say: well you got a point. However, I might as well post this devlog now because there probably won't be a new build for BB for at least three months. I at least want BB fans to enjoy something if they're going to wait for that long.

First of all, if you're from BYH and you have no idea what the fuck a barachoda is, which is likely considering how most of the traction BB gets nowadays is from BYH, then welcome! BB is a slice-of-life contemporary gay erotic dating sim about a horny and socially awkward Bengali guy who stays in Bangladesh for a year and gets to know a bunch of hot guys. Yeah, that's basically about it. I suspect most of the BYH folk don't care about this game because no furry. But hey shout outs for reading this devlog anyways.

Anyways, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend and I remembered asking him if Rahmir (the protagonist) looks Bengali. He told me that his face is ethnically ambiguous enough that while it doesn't specifically look Bengali it wouldn't be that much of a stretch for a Bengali guy to have that face. He says it's because of the animesque art style. So I wanted to really look at his sprite to see how much I agreed with him so I went to the itch.io page and looked at a screenshot that contained his sprite and there were two things I noticed. The first was that there was a fucking typo on the screenshot, which is really annoying. Curse you indicators that a language other than English is being spoken. But the second one was that I was thinking about how I wanted to explain why Rahmir has this type of face and not a more obviously Bengali face and I realized I never really talked about the game and my intentions from making it. I made a devlog about the creation of All in Love and War and made a follow-up post to that almost a year later. I made a devlog about the creation and intentions behind By Your Hands and I'm making an entire commentary on the whole VN. I even made a devlog about my experience working on Dwarven Destiny. But there hasn't been any devlog chronicling the background and how this game came to be until now. This is strange because, if you have read my devlog about All in Love, you'd know that this was the dream project I had in mind for years alongside another game project I also wanted to do. So yeah, now I'm making a devlog talking in-depth about this game. Specifically, I want to talk about how I came up with this game, why I liked this game idea, the actual development of the game, and what I want to do with this game now that it's on the back burner.

Going out of order a little, I want to clarify something that most people seemed to have not missed from my earlier devlog. In the devlog where I announced my switch my focus from BB to BYH, I specifically stated that I wanted to put BB on hold right now for more reasons than "I like money". But apparently, that wasn't clear enough for people. Let me repeat myself. I wanted to take a break on BB because I desired a good reason to take my time and work on the game later. I'll explain more about this later, but in essence, it was a big project that I plunged myself into without fully knowing what I was getting into. It was a relief being able to work on something else and be able to prepare myself more before going back to BB.

Now let's start from the beginning, sort of. When I was a teenager, I really wanted to make an RPG, as many of my favorite games were RPGs. I realized that an RPG was too ambitious for me, so I wanted to start with something smaller. I was fond of dating sims as a genre and I also wanted to make my own. In 2019 or so, I started coming up with the characters, their personalities, and their appearances. The characters were all guys I wanted to see in a relationship with a guy. Hunky guys with facial hair, old guys, and guys with children, essentially guys I don't usually see as gay men in fiction. Some were based on fictional characters while others were based on people I knew in real life. The protagonist was somewhat also someone I wanted to see in fiction as well. A horny and flirty gay guy who goes for the DILFs but is also relatable. The appeal of the project was obviously the guys but it was also a chance to have a gay story that was tailored specifically to me and didn't compromise on its vision. I decided to make the art style resemble 80s anime, after watching the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and its film adaptation. I just find the aesthetic to be gorgeous. I initially wanted to go harder with the retro style but I didn't want to distract the visuals too much. Story-wise, if BYH was a subversion of FVNs, BB is a successor to the traditional Japanese dating sim mixed in with elements from gay erotic VNs. I had envisioned a gay erotic dating sim that used mechanics from 90s dating sims and used tropes common to anime, all with bara guys. Finally, for the setting, I chose Bangladesh because it was the country my parents grew up in and I never saw any story take place there (There's Extraction but I don't really watch action films) and I think the culture there can make for an interesting story.

However, I didn't actually start becoming serious about the project until 2021, which was the year I initially thought would be the launch of the first build. I explained more about this in my devlog about All In Love, but I realized that I should try making a small VN before working on BB. So I made All In Love for BaraJam 2021, which took longer than I expected, and once I was done I finally started to actually work on BB for the first time. This was it. I was really going to show my dream project to the world and start a following of people who want to see my vision. Well… things didn't work out like that. While the release of the first build had a good reception, it didn't meet my expectations as this hit game I always imagined it would be, especially since All In Love performed generally better than BB. Hell, All in Love is still doing better than BB in terms of downloads per day. There are a couple of factors for this, the stand-out reason being that All In Love is a Jam game and those tend to do better on itch.io, I was still disappointed. Subsequent builds had even smaller responses, despite my working hard on those. Then the first build of BYH came out and we all know how that went. There was no comparison, BYH was the game people wanted to see from me. I couldn't ignore it.

So what went wrong? I don't like asking this question because it implies that BB failed and if you compare the ratings of BB to the ratings of other non-furry gay VNs, it's been pretty good for itself. And I am proud of several things about BB. But then why did I put the game on the back burner in order to make BYH my main focus? Barachoda was my dream game while By Your Hands was just meant to be a side thing, by all means, I should have continued working on Barachoda no matter what. However, I can't deny that there's something wrong with BB that made me want to take a break from it. I can't really give an exact answer why, but I'll try to explain myself as best as I could.

The first and most obvious reason was that BYH was more popular. Now, this isn't the only reason but it is a contributing reason. Let's face it, an FVN is much more likely to get successful than a non-furry VN. There's an established FVN community that is constantly looking out for new good FVNs whereas the non-furry gay VN community (especially if you exclude BL or yaoi VNs) is much more disconnected and more likely to attach to specific titles rather than all gay VNs. There are also a few more contributing factors such as the fact that it was a jam game, that it was in a more engaging genre (murder mystery), that it had more erotic content earlier, that MinoAnon actually shared the game, and that it wasn't as "ethnic". All of these things contributed to By Your Hands's greater success. Being more popular means that people are more likely to talk about the game, there's more engagement and excitement surrounding it, and there's more incentive to work on the game. It just feels better to work on a game that people really want to see.

Now being more popular is great and all, but surely there are other reasons as well? But of course! The other reason is that the scope of the game was too much for me to handle. Here's the thing. BYH is ambitious, considering I have at least five routes planned for the game and each of them is fairly long as well as including multiple endings for each of them. Now imagine how big BYH's scope is, and multiply it tenfold. That's the scope I have for Barachoda Bloom. There's just so much I have planned for BB that it's going to be a massive undertaking to even get half of it done. Not only do I have to do the writing and art, but I also want to get voice acting, custom music, special GUI, and even more stuff. Like, when someone told me that I should add sex scenes to get more attention, I told them that it's way too early to add sex scenes now. And then I realized that it was going to take a long time before I'm going to include sex scenes and it was daunting. Also, while BYH is a big project, I'm not working on it alone. While I wrote a general outline, Nemo's the one doing the writing for the script. Meanwhile, I'm doing all the writing, coding, and artwork for BB. It would be like choosing between building the entirety of ancient Crete with Heracles versus building the entirety of the Roman Empire by yourself. The choice is pretty obvious.

Another reason was that I was losing interest in the project. A lot of the stuff in the VN was created years ago and since then I've lost a little interest in them. For example, I wanted Ahmed to be in the military because I had a fascination with soldiers and found them to be an interesting subject. However, I'm not as interested in them as I used to be. It's not even because of political reasons, it's just, they're kind of eh to me nowadays. It's telling when I had to rewrite the outline at least three times. Plus, the genre isn't exactly the most exciting. I'm more interested in fantasy or adventure-type stories. Slice of life can be enjoyable, but it has to be written well. I'll talk more about this later. Working continuously on something that you just simply like for months can take a toll on you. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed writing all of the scenes in BB, but I feel like they can be improved a lot. Not to mention when I have to write something that concerns some of the elements I'm more neutral on, it's harder for me to get through it. And this makes the scope thing I mentioned even worse because then I'd feel like I have to finish this long-ass project before I can do more fun short projects. When I think about BB, I think that the guys are hot but that's about it. When I think about BYH, however, I think a lot about how their stories will unfold and how certain scenes will look.

One more reason was that I wasn't working on the game at the pace I wanted to work on. Originally I was making builds each month that included a certain amount of new content for each build. I was doing that because that's what FVN creators did. Just recently, I was in a discord voice chat with a few acquaintances and one of them talked about that whole thing. He basically explained that no one in the community has ever declared that this is how things should be and that it's the standard every FVN should follow in order to be successful. There are several FVNs I can name that don't follow that model. The reason why FVN creators do this in the first place is that the first few FVN creators decided that they needed an incentive for patrons to become patrons. Then those people got popular and other FVN creators decided to mimic what they were doing and that's how it almost became the norm. Thing is, if you look from outside the furry space, this is not normal. A video game that adds about 30-45 minutes of new content every month is insane. Yet that's what FVN creators do and why we get so many hiatuses and unexpected writer's block in this community. When you're doing this for the first month, it's easy because you're still young and pretty and you've got a lot of passion to make a new build for the game. As the months go on, it starts to drain on you and suddenly you decide to take a break from the game to write a short story about the pains of being alone and desperate and how you need a furry boyfriend to solve all your troubles. Basically, I was trying to do this model for BB and it just didn't work. The worst part about this was that literally no one was asking me to do this. It wasn't an FVN so it's not like the FVN community was expecting me to make monthly builds for it. I just used a model that didn't work for me and that FVN creators used for arbitrary reasons for a non-furry VN just because that's what I thought I had to do. Now you might be reading this and wondering why BYH has monthly builds. As I said before, Nemo's the one who's writing the script so the effort I have to make in order to make the monthly builds is far less than the effort I have to put in to make monthly builds for BB. I'm almost finished working on the game's art assets so after that's done, all I have to do is implement the script Nemo gives me into the code and maybe draw a CG. Everything else can always be implemented in a later build. Also, if you're an FVN creator that uses this model, it's perfectly fine to take multiple breaks in a year. 

The final reason is that my skills as an artist are too lacking in order for me to make the game I truly want to make. When I first started working on BB, I focused mostly on writing a script and drawing art assets and I didn't really consider if they were good or not. While I reread my scripts at least once, I didn't really edit that much and I didn't ask myself if an art asset was necessary or not. I just made builds because I wanted to get progress done on it. But it wasn't good for me to do all that. I rushed myself when developing the VN and I didn't stop to look at what I was doing. Now I realize it's more important to take my time to make sure the product is good and not just get it out to get it out. I want to focus on improving my skills and making sure the VN's good before putting out more builds. Like, when I read Tennis Ace, I was like "Holy shit, I didn't know Slice Of Life can be this good!" I now have a decent idea of how I want to write BB moving forward.

So what does the future look like with Barachoda Bloom? Currently, it's on hiatus, and there's a short VN I want to work on before I go back to working on BB. I think it would be a good opportunity to test my skills and see what I need to improve on. I then want to finish up the assets and code in By Your Hands that's currently a WIP, so I can have an easier time with creating future builds. After that's settled, I want to finish the art assets and coding in Barachoda and really polish the current build as much as possible before I can add more content. I want to edit some of the game's script and try to improve some of the game's weaker parts as well as revisit the sprites and CGs and try to make them look closer to my vision of the game. I'll also adjust some of the characterizations for the love interests in order to make them more engaging. After all, that's done, I'll go back to writing more for BB at a pace that I'm comfortable with. I hope this post was insightful for most of you and I hope that if you weren't interested in the VN initially that you're willing to at least give the game a chance someday. This has been something I wanted to deal with so I'm glad I got it out of the way. Thanks for reading all of this.

Have a good day and see you later!