Hey y'all! Before I address the title of this devlog, I'd just like to take a moment to express my gratitude to everyone. It's been a while since the release of Mura Oni (The Village Demon), and I'm so grateful to the 4k+ people across multiple platforms, who've played it and done playthroughs/reviews of the game. It's still surreal to me, even to this very day.

I never thought I'd be able to finish this game, much less have people create playthroughs on YouTube. Someone even made an entire endings guide for my game which is baffling to me, that someone would endure this slow-burn game over and over to get every ending! It means a lot to me, so I would just like to let everyone know.

Even though I'm proud of the fact that I finished this game, I published it knowing that I was unhappy with a lot of the things I put into it. The story being one. After watching several playthroughs, I realized how unnecessarily-convoluted the story is. My initial intent was to make it as confusing as possible to force the player to focus more and replay the game to hunt for lore clues. I realize now that I was just artificially padding the game's play-time. This isn't true for every game, but in my case, I had every intent on making the story confusing at the time.

In this day and age though, where people have less time on their hands than before, people probably wouldn't want to play a game over again only to get a few more minutes of new content. There are people out there who will strive to those lengths which is incredibly commendable, but I would like for the game to be accessible to the majority of players.

Therefore, I am currently developing a retelling of the game that will introduce a lot of changes to the story and characters. The base story will remain the same, but a lot of the details revolving around that story will be new to players. That means reducing the number of endings, shortening dialogue, removing it where it isn't necessary, attempting to fix plotholes, etc.

The main four's character designs and personalities have been revised as well. Along with making the story more linear, I also intend for a heavier focus on character interactions and development. I realize that does change the nature of the game a bit; shifting the balance from horror/gameplay to story/characters, but that is why I'm treating this as a separate game.

Appropriately, this game will be rebranded as Mura no Akuma, it is no longer Mura Oni (that old name wasn't as accurate to the story anyway). It is still called The Village Demon in English, though. The current game's page has unfortunately been deleted but I hope to use this new page regularly for future devlogs.

Anyway, I think that's all for now. Hope to update y'all soon on the game's progress.

If you're interested in playing the original game, you can find it at: https://rpgmaker.net/games/9156/