When Our Journey Ends - Demo and Kickstarter!

[Morhighan]

“Wait. The train only has two stops...so where is this?”

Please consider supporting our Kickstarter!

In early 2016, there was a popular news article which detailed how a train station stayed open for a lone passenger -- a young woman about to graduate high school. Many had commented that the story was like a fairytale or a Ghibli movie. This article was the inspiration for When Our Journey Ends.
The story follows Mariko, a seventeen year old who is on the cusp of graduating high school. She is the lone passenger of a slowly dying train station. As a practical young adult, she doesn’t see why her family couldn’t have just moved closer to the high school she is attending. She is rather embarrassed by the whole situation and the attention it garners her. She just wants to graduate and go to a university in the big city.
However, life in the sticks isn’t all that it seems. While riding the train home, Mariko ends up at an unexpected stop, which changes her life forever.

The demo can be found on our itch.io page here!

Features
-Main Game with Two Endings
-One Unlockable After Story
-Five Unlockable Side Stories
-About three hours of gameplay
-Animated BGs
-3 CGs

Our lead author, Morgana Harp has assisted in the writing, programming, and other various tasks for several visual novels. She feels strongly about visual novels and is also passionate about video games in general, especially indie games. When it comes to creating video games and visual novels, she likes to think of herself as a jack of all trades.

Our second writer, Darren Kwok has assisted in the marketing and greenlighting of several visual novels. Having written, A More Beautiful World and Forgotten, Not Lost, he seeks to continue bringing the magic of reading to others.

The logo and User Interface for When Our Journey Ends was made by and designed by Camille Arana, our resident UI artist.

Our Background Artist is Pyritekite and our sprite artist is Melow.

Check out some of our animated backgrounds on youtube!

[wyverngem]

Well, I'm interested in the project. It looks very well thought out and planned. Not so sure how the story will pan out, but I really like your use on animation. I'm downloading the demo now.

Edit:

Okay! Got a chance to play the game! It's a very short demo, but shows off the game nicely. Overall it's a nice. I think it has areas that could be improved, but otherwise I'd like to play the whole thing.

Things I liked:
Opening splash screen was very nice! I loved the little animation and the voice actor.

The GUI style is also very pleasing. I really liked the choice menu, nvl background, and it's a very nice touch having a slight movement to the click to continue.

The music is lovely, and I could listen to it on it's own.

Really love the subtle animations, the snowfall, the movement of the sky in the background. The art really is balanced between background and character art.


Things to improve:
Your game isn't archived, meaning all the asset were open sourced.

The train hover image on the main menu is hard to see. Perhaps add a black outline or a drop shadow to see it better.

On the nvl screen the text touches the outer box. This is a little jarring for me to read because there's no margin. The font color is fine and I like the choice of font.

^^; It's kind of inconvenient to to only be able to change your options when a character is talking and there's no way to control how fast the text speed is displayed.

Kind of surprised there wasn't any in-game credits.

[Morhighan]

@wyverngem Thank you for your response!
I'm really pleased with how the game is coming out.

As for the things to improve:
-I took out all of the content not related to the demo, so I didn't feel the need to archive it. However I will be archiving the full game.
-I'll talk to our GUI artist about the train hover image. I think A drop shadow would help.
-I knew that the text got close to touching the outer box, but usually it has a margin. Can you show me a screenshot of where it touches directly? I'd love to fix that.
-The in-game menu was added at the last second, I'll see about adding it to the NVL screens as well.
-The in-game credits are a spoilery video, so we opted on not including it. Please look forward to it in the final release!

Thank you so much for your input!

[Morhighan]

Hello everyone! I am happy to announce that we made our goal--and then some!
Thanks to our 200 supporters, When Our Journey Ends clocked in at $3492SGD--just under 1000% of the goal.

Thank you everyone who took part in our Kickstarter! We'll be rolling out the game as soon as possible, seeing that we've been working on it tirelessly since the campaign started! We will be posting monthly updates, or whenever we have major news to announce!