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Do you want to create your own bishoujo game? I wanted to. Having been playing bishoujo games for nearly a year, I came across a web-site in which the users where attempting to form a group to create a bishoujo game. Deciding that this was a good chance for me to practice my musical skills and maybe get some recognition in the process, I decided to ask about joining so that I could work on MIDI music that could be implemented and used in the game. So far, so good.

I have since decided that making a bishoujo game is not easy! The idea behind the project, which was originally called Arevainna and later changed to Zero was to show that we could, for free, create a bishoujo game of a higher standard that what is commercially available. The fact that the majority of commercial bishoujo games that existed back them made this very feasible, or so I thought. Now, at least one and a half years later, what do we have to show? Practically nothing. A few sketches drawn by some of the members, a lot of documents, maybe a couple of executables that do next to nothing and I myself wrote around ten songs. The number of people on the team during this year and a half? About thirty!

So having not made very much progress at all, I still insist that it's possible to create a good bishoujo game for free. What went wrong then? Well, lots of things. The group organisation was incredably bad. We had a private group set up on Yahoo for sharing files and ideas between the members who were working on the project; a good idea in theory. The problems began right at the start of the project. There was no leadership at all. The shared group was a mess and no one had any respect for compatiblity whatsoever. For example, there were at least eight directories containing various pieces of artwork. I had suggested many times to the moderator of the group that something be done in terms of organisation, but nothing actually ever happened.

The second problem came in the form of compatibilty. As you would probably assume, it's vital when a group are working together on a project that the members can easily communicate their ideas so that the works produced can stay consistent within the main project. The number of people who uploaded documents written in Microsoft Word was immense. Now this might not sound like a problem if you have Microsoft Word, but what happens with those who don't? Simple. Those will find it impossible to read them. Needless to say, the end result was that those who actually produced any work (myself included) ended up going in their own directions due to the confusion. What we ended up with was a mess.

Now, while the work of individual members might be nice (Some of it maybe even moving into proffesional quality), how do you put these pieces together to make a game? The fact is you can't. Especailly considering that there were at least three (or maybe more) different story lines floating about within the group. Who's to even tell which one we are supposed to be following? Most of the time, I wasn't even aware when a new important change had been made to the storyline. So while I'm sitting there composing (or at least trying to compose) haunting melodies for a different and darker world than our own, the other half of the team have decided to switch the storyline to realistic dating simulation set in the modern day in a school, or maybe something completely different now. In fact, I've reached the point where I don't even have any idea what the game is supposed to be about. Needless to say, I've quit the project.

Do you still want to create your own bishoujo game? I will say this, it's a lot of work, but if you are really interested in doing so, an ongoing project called Ijima High is currently in progress. I'm not a member of this project, but I hope to join. It seems roughly structured in the same way as the previous project that I was involved in (i.e. each member works on a certain aspect; storyline, artwork, coding, music etc), but I feel that this project has much more potential. The look of the website alone leads me to believe that more organisation and thought has been put into this than was ever put into Arevainna or Zero (or whatever it happens to be called today). If you're interested, I definitely reccomend that you take a look at this, and maybe someday, we might have the first good non-Japanese originated bishoujo game! It's worth a thought at least.

Ijima High - The Bishoujo Project (External Link)