Hi there!

It's been a month already since the release of Last Time I Saw You. How's everyone enjoying the game so far?

Even though the game hasn't yet reached a wide audience, the response from players has been wonderful, especially with this being our very first game as Maboroshi Artworks!

We are reading your comments and reviews and we're loving every second of it. While creating Amatsu and the forest was enormously exciting, watching you all experience it has been truly beautiful 🥹🥲

And to now give EVEN MORE PLAYERS a chance to experience the game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3240960/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Soundtrack/

This sale will last from November 18 - 25 and then will continue to the Steam Autumn Sale from November 27 - December 4. I hope this new temporary price will encourage new players to try the game and discover for yourselves the beautiful story of Ayumi and his town!

Seriously, once again, thank you so much for this incredible journey 😊 (And what's yet to come!!)

Thank you 🧡
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

The time has finally come. I really have no words to express what this means, almost not even fully aware of what an accomplishment this actually is. Who would have thought that, in 2018, when I began to draw some sketches on a notebook, that this was going to end up becoming a proper game published on Steam and consoles...

From the bottom of my heart, I really hope you like what we have created. Remember that Steam reviews help us a lot to give visibility to the game, so, please, consider writing a review after playing it.

I'm really looking forward to read your thoughts and feedback!🧡

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/



The Last Time I Saw You Soundtrack is also now available to purchase, alone or with the game in the Soundtrack Bundle with a succulent discount!💸✨

Featuring 19 tracks composed by Laryssa Okada (Manifold Garden, Dorfromantik), this soundtrack will transport you to the melancholic Japanese countryside of the 1980s in which this charming coming-of-age adventure takes place.

If you're into ambient lo-fi emotional stuff, you'll definetely love this!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3240960/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Soundtrack/

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/45300/


And that's not all! We've also teamed up with our friends at Mojiken Studio and Polychroma Games to bring you A Space for the Unbound, Until Then and Last Time I Saw You together with a wonderful 20% DISCOUNT! 🏷️✨

If you haven't played these two narrative gems yet, now is the time to do so, along with our humble tale of yokais, first loves and terrible curses ⛩️😊❤️‍🩹

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/45126/

I can assure you that we've tried OUR BEST for this to not happen but, you know, game development... ha! 😅 In case you experience any issues, please let us know in our Discord dedicated channel[discord.gg] for this matter or by the contact form[www.maboroshiartworks.com] in the Maboroshi website.

The more detailed and accurate you describe what happened, the easier will be for us to recreate and fix it. Videos and screenshots are very helpful!


And finally, I really wanted to thank you all for your support during all these years. As you already know Last Time I Saw You is a project that means a lot to me, and to have been able to complete it and make it a reality is something that fills me with pride and happiness. If you want to know more about the story behind it I recommend checking out the last DevLog or this nice interview[qungames.substack.com] that I did recently.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Thank you for following this journey. I really hope Last Time I Saw You brings you some happiness, that it makes you think, that it makes you feel, that it moves you or that you think about it it once you have finished it. Only with one of these things my work would have been worth it.

Enjoy 🧡
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hello everyone!

So here we are. Almost there. Last Time I Saw You will be released in a couple of weeks from now and I can't believe it's come this far... I can't thank everyone enough who has been involved in its creation, both as part of the development team and on the publishing side. It's been a huge effort by a lot of people and I couldn't be happier with the result. Thank you 🙂

But the fact that this game is coming out also means something else, at least to me.

Some of you may already know that Last Time I Saw You has a very special meaning to me. It's not just a game that I randomly came up with one day. There is a special personal story behind it, and today I would like to share it with you.

Illustration by the artist Rokurō Taniuchi (谷内六郎), whose works have been a great inspiration.

As I already hinted in one of the first DevLogs, the story of this game comes from an emotional experience that deeply affected me some years ago. A romance that... well, didn't work out. For some reason, this very brief, almost fleeting bond affected me more than other times I'd fallen in love in the past. It actually left me emotionally stranded for several months.

How was it possible that such a fleeting encounter with a person with whom I really had nothing in common could affect me in such a way? Every night, for several months, she appeared to me in my dreams, and in each of those dreams there was always some impediment that prevented us from being together.

Things at work weren't going well either. After the release of Yume Nikki: Dream Diary I didn't feel motivated to continue working on the projects I had been assigned to. That sadness and apathy came together, resulting in one of the strangest Summers of my life, in which - at least - I learned a lot. And, perhaps also thanks to this, I discovered some very good music (not everything was going to be bad!).

This experience made me reconnect with myself, with my past, with who I was, and what I had come to do in Japan. It was almost like a constant state of meditation that lasted a whole Summer.

I met new people, and with their help, I overcame that sadness. At the end, life continued its course, and I started to heal. After a long period of coping, I realized how important that process of acceptance had been, something I had never experienced before in my life, at least not in such a conscious way. All this love, heartbreak and healing was such an incredible learning process, so I started to feel that, as an artist, I had to do something with it.

The idea of making a game then came to me. I decided to take all the conflicting emotions I had inside and try to make something useful out of them, transforming them into a somewhat healing experience that other people could also enjoy and relate to.

I still remember when I first called my family to tell them about the idea of making a game on my own. I was afraid that their reaction was going to be that's too risky, you need a lot of money for that, it's not a good idea, you better keep your job, etc. But... it was the opposite. They encouraged and supported me, and along with the help of a friend who helped me to assemble the programming basics of the game and the support and joy that someone new brought into my life, Last Time I Saw You began to take shape.

And, long story short, that's how the idea of making this game started. I could keep talking about this for hours, but I don't want to bore you! Last Time I Saw You is not a "boy-meets-girl-and-falls-in-love" story. That's not where the game is headed. The game is not only about the story of Ayumi, our protagonist, but the different processes of acceptance and internal conflicts that the people around him go through. Family problems, broken dreams, unrequited loves, fear of change... There is a lot going on in the town of Amatsu, where the game takes place, and all of its stories are important and worth telling.

Tackling this from a positive place and making the game feel like a nice and charming experience, I firmly believe this game could help younger people face many difficult things ahead of them: shifting interests; how to approach love; how to accept rejection; the importance of community; the importance of selfhood; how critical it is to tune into our own feelings.

This is why Last Time I Saw You means so much to me. It's not just any project, but something born from a real life experience that changed me and the people around me.

In the end, I'm just another person, but I hope that my humble story resonates with you and that you find something of value in it to stay with.

Thank you so much for reading until the end. I really hope you like the game we made! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hello everyone!

In the previous devlogs, I shared insights into the game - the main protagonist, the art and animation, and the beautiful music by Laryssa Okada. In this instalment, it's a good time to share how we worked on the dialogues and the references we used when writing them.

For this task, I had the incredible help of Raquel de Miranda (previously DontNod and Ubisoft), who joined the team as a narrative consultant and also helped me flesh out most of the dialogues in the game. While I wrote the story and dialogues myself, Raquel helped by checking everything I'd written, proposing new scenarios, improving and adding new lines to improve the flow and pacing of the game.

One of the things I’ve learned working on Last Time I Saw You is that if you want to talk about something very personal (and I'll explain what I mean in the next DevLog), it can be difficult to convey as everyone has different backgrounds and life experiences. That’s why this process of working with Raquel has been like putting everything I wrote through a filter, so that at the end of the process everything ends up being more relatable and comprehensible - even by people who haven't gone through the experiences which inspired me to write this story.

A key game reference point - both visually and gameplay-wise - and a source of inspiration to me was Night in the Woods. It's a game I really enjoyed when I first played it in 2017 as it dealt with everyday personal issues, something I hadn't seen represented in games at that time.

Night in the Woods, developed by Infinite Fall.

While Night in the Woods acted as an initial guide when creating Last Time I Saw You, in 2020 I played Mutazione which - for the first time in a long time - made me really care about the characters in a game. All of them had relatable, everyday problems which are often depicted in movies and books, but not so often in video games. Playing Mutazione made me realize that I could talk about mature themes and subjects in a video game, such as complicated romantic relationships, breakups, family problems, etc. It was the push I needed to speak freely about what I wanted to.

Mutazione, developed by Die Gute Fabrik.

When the story was already plotted out and the narrative style was defined, I started working with Raquel on fleshing out the dialogues of the demo. She then recommended that I play Disco Elysium. What a wonderful game it is! It's hard to put into words my admiration for what the game accomplishes on a narrative level! It instantly became a great inspiration for Last Time I Saw You, and if Mutazione had given me a little nudge to tackle more mature material, Disco Elysium just completely threw me out of the window (yes, I’m talking about Cuno and Cunoesse😅). Last Time I Saw You doesn't have the tone of Disco Elysium nor deal with the same same subject matter, it is nevertheless a great source of inspiration.

Disco Elysium, developed by ZA/UM.

So this has been a small glimpse into our narrative design process and the references that have inspired us. I should also mention A Space for the Unbound, which came out when we were already working on the game and it was wonderful to see how the writers dealt with difficult themes. They did a beautiful job, especially in the final movements of the game.

A Space for the Unbound, developed by Mojiken.

I hope you enjoyed reading about which games inspired me on a narrative level. Which one has had the most impact on you narratively? If you have any other mature narrative games you'd like to recommend, please leave them in the comments!

🕹️ STEAM DECK SUPPORT 🕹️

Oh! And before I go, I wanted to let you know that both the main game and the demo are fully playable on Steam Deck, so if you have one don't hesitate to play there! The Steam Deck screen makes everything look incredibly beautiful! 😍

Until next time! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hey hey!

You read that right! Finally, after several years of hard work and some sleepless nights, Last Time I Saw You will finally arrive to your homes on October 10th 2024! 🎉

10/10! Make sure to mark the date in your calendars and add the game to your wishlist so Steam notifies you! 📅


Check out the new release date trailer we made :)

And that's not all! We have also updated the demo that got us to where we are today. The content in terms of story is the same, but includes the following upgrades:

• 🎵 New music
  
• 📓 New in-game notebook menu
  
• 🎒 Inventory
  
• ✨ Collectibles
  
• 🗒️ Mission log
  
• 🙌 Profiles of the characters you meet
  
• ✏️ Diary illustrations
  
• 🎨 Some environmental art updates
  
• 🗺️ New quest UI
  
• 💬 Dialogues fixed and updated

🌍 AND WE'VE ALSO ADDED NEW TRANSLATIONS! 🌏

• German
  
• French
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Traditional Chinese

Due to programming reasons we have disabled the save system in the demo as it could create conflict with the main game, so your progress in the demo won't be transferred to the final game, but don't worry, it's relatively short ;)


To celebrate the new demo we've also launched a Demo Page to test this new Steam feature, that's why I have a very big favor to ask you all...

It would help me ENORMOUSLY if you could leave a review on the Demo page, even if you already played it back in the day or if this is the first time you do it. This will help Steam promote the page and make more people aware of the game before the release.

Getting this release right may literally change our lives and the ones of everyone involved, so any kind of help is needed! The game deserves it, it really does! ☺️

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1986140/Last_Time_I_Saw_You__Demo/

I hope you like all I bring today and that you are as excited about the launch as I am. We'll also have a beautiful physical collector's edition for consoles, so be sure to visit our socials for more info.

We're almost there! This is happening!

Thank you so much for all your support! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hello everyone!

In today's post I’m going to talk about the music of Last Time I Saw You, which has been composed by Laryssa Okada, who, among other games, made the soundtrack for Manifold Garden.

I first met Laryssa back in 2018 as she was a fan of Yume Nikki: Dream Diary, the game I previously worked as art director. Some time later, when Last Time I Saw You was starting to take shape, I went through my list of contacts looking for a possible composer and, after listening to what she made for Manifold Garden I thought she could be a very good fit. What I had in mind was actually very different from Manifold Garden, but still I got the feeling that we could work out something together.

Likewise, although she is the composer, in a way I’m also involved in the making of the music, giving certain guidelines and direction of how I would like each track to sound as well as providing many, MANY references from other artists. It's a process I first did when I worked on Yume Nikki: Dream Diary with its composer and it was a creative process that I really enjoyed a lot.

In the case of Last Time I Saw You, I knew I wanted a strong presence of brass instruments, especially trumpets and saxophones. It's a sound that over time has become more and more attractive to me, perhaps because during many years I was very into American Football, a band that used a trumpet from time to time. It’s an instrument that I think transmits (at least to me) a feeling of nostalgia and exaltation of emotions that I like a lot. Here’s one of my favorite American Football songs from their first (and best) album where you can listen to what I mean.

Also, another good example of a particular track from the game Unravel, composed by Frida Johansson that gives me that feeling too.

Another of the main references was also lofi hip-hop music, a genre that I discovered many years ago when I was back in highschool through Samurai Champloo and the music of Nujabes. Again, the music of Last Time I Saw You doesn't go in that direction but it does base some of its sources on it.

And of course, the biggest reference of them all I would say that has been the marvelous soundtrack of Disco Elysium, created by the band Sea Power. It has not only been a great inspiration for the music of Last Time I Saw You but also for the narrative, something I will talk about in the future.

Overall I think Laryssa has made a wonderful job bringing music to the world of Ayumi. Here’s the first track that she composed for the game. It's called Sunshower, and it's the music you can listen to in the Main Menu. As you can appreciate, the brass and wind instruments are very present, and I think they give it a very emotional build up. I hope you like it as much as I do!


What do you think of the music? Does it remind you of any other artist? Tell me in the comments which are some of your favorite game soundtracks!

If you want to listen more about Laryssa’s work check her Bandcamp[laryssaokada.bandcamp.com]. She’s worked on other game soundtracks as well as a couple of albums of her own with a very different style from Last Time I Saw You. This is one of my favorite tracks from her. It’s very good!

In the next post I will talk about the writing of Last Time I Saw You. References and the writing method we followed.

Until next time! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hello everyone!

In today's post I'm going to talk about the animations of Last Time I Saw You, which have been animated frame by frame following the standards of traditional animation. There are many ways to do 2D animation. In fact, during my previous work, I did some skeletal animation using a software called Spine, which allows you to animate 2D images as if they were 3D to give them a very special look (I'm sure you've seen this type of animation in many mobile games). But for Last Time I Saw You, because of the 90's anime references I was following, I decided to go with a traditional frame by frame approach like the movies I was getting inspiration from.

Animating frame by frame is a long - and sometimes tedious - process, but it gives some very unique and charming results. If animated well, all sorts of emotions can be conveyed with traditional animation. Just look at Ghibli and Disney films to see what I mean!

The workflow is as follows: First, the animation team adapts my character designs so that they can be more easily animated (basically redrawing shapes and simplifying some elements without losing the soul of the character). Then, following my guidelines, they make what is called a “rough”, basically the "sketch" of the animation. Here is an example.

Once approved, they make the intercalations and then clean it, reaching what is commonly referred as the Tie Down phase. Here the shadow areas are also marked so they can be better understood when coloring it later.

Finally, they complete it by adding color, shadows and finishing touches. In many movies and in some games, like Cuphead, all of this is made by pencil on paper and then digitally scanned. However, in Last Time I Saw You we made it from the start using an animation software called Toon Boom. As you can see it’s quite a slow and complicated process, but the final results are really lovely!

And that's how we animated the game! I hope you liked this little introduction to 2D animation. What are your favorite animated movies or animes? Leave them in the comments!

In the next post I will talk about the music of Last Time I Saw You, who composed it and what references we used.

Until next time! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hi there!

In this broadcast I will take you through a previously-unseen section of Last Time I Saw You and answer any questions you may have.

Post your questions via the Maboroshi Discord server[discord.gg], in the comments of this post or send them via Twitter or by the email form of the studio website[www.maboroshiartworks.com]. The video will be recorded before posting it, so be sure to send them before the May 3!

See you soon! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]

Hey hey!

I am very excited to announce that Last Time I Saw You will participate in LudoNarraCon 2024!

LudoNarraCon is an annual digital event, made by the indie publisher Fellow Traveler, for people who are into narrative games. Apart from us, they'll be showcasing many other wonderful games with a strong narrative component. Take a look at the their official selection panel to see some of the big names we'll be sharing the spotlight with!

The event will take place on Steam from May 9 - 13 2024 and will feature many livestreams and talks by various developers. In my case, I'll be uploading a commented gameplay to Steam, where I'll be talking about the game while showing you some parts a bit further into the story with new characters that you may have briefly seen in the last trailer 👀


I'd also love to do a Q&A during the gameplay, so I'd like to ask you to send me all the questions you may have about the game so I can answer them while playing 😊 The best way would be to receive them via the Maboroshi Discord server[discord.gg], but you can also write them in the comments of this post or send them via Twitter or by the email form of the studio website[www.maboroshiartworks.com].

Feel free to ask anything you want about the game, about Maboroshi or even about myself and my journey as a game developer living in Japan.

Oh! And be sure to send them before May 3 as I need some time to properly record and upload the video!

Being part of this event really is a great opportunity to reach more people, so I am very happy to have been selected. It really is a great achievement! So let's enjoy it together! 🥳

I'll be waiting for your questions! 💙
.Juan

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1909750/Last_Time_I_Saw_You/

[discord.gg][www.maboroshiartworks.com]