Nova's Diary #20 Still around

Here we are, a new Nova's Diary. It's been a long while.

You're probably wondering why we're here now. You're also probably wondering where we've been these past few months, and what we plan to do.

But before we delve into that, I would like to give a huge thanks to user Sekoree on behalf of Safe Place, for developing a solution for the infinite loading bug in the meanwhile. It shouldn't have been your duty to try and fix our game, but we were glad to see this act of initiative and selflessness.

Now, allow me to give you a little bit of a rundown from where we left off...

[ RE: PAST ]

After the release of Venice 2089 back in October, we were admittedly pretty much done.

We had been working on the game for three years with little to no pause, so when it finally released, all we wanted to do was lie down, rest and find something to do next.

And so, while we were snooping around for opportunities, sidegigs et cetera, Venice 2089 won the Red Bull Indie Forge.

(In the back are some of us in Milan, after a post-win interview in December 2022)

For context: The Red Bull Indie Forge is a contest organized by Red Bull, open to all italian indie developers with the intent of promoting the italian indie scene both nationally and abroad.

It was very much a surprise to us. Our competition was strong, and personally speaking, with much more experience and budget than us, so I didn't quite expect us to win.

And yet we did. We won.

The next few weeks have been all about interviews and livestreams, as well as enjoying one of our prizes: a team of modelers, concept artists and VFX artists who would work with whatever we wanted for a fixed period of time. (We may or may not asked them to produce material for something we are working on 👀)

So yeah, Venice 2089 is now literally an award-winning title.

And while all that was happening, we also started working on a joint project with different schools in our region of Veneto, where after some introductory lessons, kids and teens created a point-and-click adventure type game with our guidance. Some of us are already working as teachers and educators on the side, so this project was right up our corner...

The game turned out pretty nice too! It's a visual novel featuring a young student traveling to the past through videogame, where after meeting the famous painter Giotto, they work together so that the protagonist can return home and finish his homework that is (ironically) about Giotto. Maybe a little cliche, but considering the game's been created by young students too, it's rather inspiring!

[ RE: VENICE 2089 ]

Now, let's talk about Venice once again.

First of all, sorry for how we handled the communication these recent months, especially when it came to bug reporting, but also generally engaging with the community.

Regarding bug-reports and fixes per se, the reason as of why we's been very slow in our response is that as of now we are down to just one programmer, who works on bugs on his spare time, whenever he's not needed on other projects. Our previous strategy of fast fixing cycles did not work, as well as our intention of incrementing our presence