Project history

By Michael Kumpmann

The Story Concept behind the project is rather old.  I developed the idea at the end of the 11th grade when I was at school. I discovered tons of older 90s and 80s Sci Fi Anime with a rather philosophical story. And which almost always had an apocalyptic premise and almost always a cyberpunk theme. I loved these stories and wanted to write something similar.  I even included philosophy I just learned in class. (The joke is that this project and all related development caused me to get only As in Class. And indirect, due to this philosophy knowledge I gained (especially about a philosopher named Martin Heidegger), I got my first jobs at political magazines in germany and on a philosophy website by a quite famous russian professor of philosophy.) The first version of the project was a 11 part short story published on german fanfic sites like Animexx, Animemanga.de and so on. (This was the only thing I published on these sites, which actually got read by people.)

One of my first (and rather crappy) drawings of the Character Madoka Michael

I worked on the original story for a year and then, I largely abandoned it. I returned to it when I enrolled in a computer science subject at university. There, at first, I struggled somewhat with the topic of the Machine Epsilon Problem. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_epsilon ) 

This gave me the idea to completely rework the story to turn it into something about mathematicians needing to solve a machine epsilon problem to stop the apocalypse. And I wanted to do the story this time in CGI Comic form instead of drawn or as a book. This reworked story was the way where I first learned to do humanoid figures in CGI. One of the very first Renders created for the new project

But. People hated that. They strongly hated it. It did not help that my father pressured me to "abandon that childish anime design and develop a realist head" which in the end, looked more creepy than realist.  I tried to develop that for several months, but people hated my project. Because of that, I started to rework my project. I increased the horror element, threw out the Kaiju Monsters of the original planning, read books about how to have better camera angles and so on. And I started to develop new 3D Models of Characters from Scratch. (I had a rather silly idea to test my character designs: I made the model and posted nude pics of the female characters. I thought if men would like these pics, then, I would probably be on the right way.) And I finally learned how to use volumetrics. These helped a lot to make my scenes scarier. My first use of volume light.

Because people seemed to like the new Character models, I reworked my comics. My reworked comic was praised and got a positive review on Cyberpunkreview.com. At the same time, on the german site sf3dff.de, I started to write a new improved novel version of the story. This formed the base of the text in the Visual Novel.

I tried to write a continuation fo the comic. But this was disliked by fans. Afterwards, I redid my project as a Youtube Animated Series. This was my most viewed project so far. And this animated series, along with the novel version became the second part of the base for the visual novel. I stared to create the visual novel because I wanted to go back to my old project.