The Troubled Development of Gamindustri Riot

Title screen of the game

 Back in 2015, I had this idea to create the "first ever" Hyperdimension Neptunia fangame when someone at the ChronoCrash forums posted about seeing or creating a fangame based off of Neptunia U. I replied by saying that I can make it happen and development had started.

I first started with drawing the character sprites, taking inspiration from the Kunio-kun series and using some base sprites I found on the internet as a template. It felt pretty complicated trying to do the goddesses in the River City style, going frame-by-frame, but I got the hang of it once I progressed. One of the first characters I've done wasn't actually part of the Neptunia series, but from the Disgaea series. That character was Fuka Kazamatsuri, a character from the fourth game, in which I was originally going to make her a playable character, but I decided to make her a boss character instead. Then, I started to do work on the main CPUs and Candidates, and of course the makers. I've seemed to like the end results of what I've created, but the most challenging part was trying to get IF's hair right. Drawing her hair to make it look like her official art was a real pain, but I did whatever I can to reflect it and went with the final result as shown below alongside the others.

Early sprites of the playable characters

Blanc, her hammer and Gust

Early versions of the heads of the characters in Goddess form

The main eight in sprite form

Early animation of Fuka walking

 After drawing the necessary sprites, I decided to focus on the gameplay. I started using OpenBOR as an engine for the game and did some basic work for it such as adding characters, stages and music. As I was pretty new to coding since I was still in high school taking a computer programming class, I messed around with some custom code created by some users at ChronoCrash with some code of my own to see what would and wouldn't work for this game.

Some screenshots of the game:

 For the story, I originally wanted to make it as a semi-crossover game featuring characters from the Disgaea series. Here's a brief summary on what the story was going to be:

 After a bunch of failed attempts of defeating the goddesses, the remaining members of ASIC thought of a new plan to take over Gamindustri and resurrect their goddess Arfoire: create a super army from another dimension. as the group offered to recruit troops from different dimensions, A lot of them rejected, but only one had accepted to join forces: The Netherworld!

They have agreed that if they defeat the 4 Goddesses and Candidates, they will give them what they want.

Now it's up to the CPUs to stop ASIC's new super army of demons (and Prinnies, dood!) and bring peace back to Gamindustri!

 As this story being bizarre as it can be, I, with the help of a certain someone at ChronoCrash and the Nepboards, have only finished about 50% of it, with most of the stages having some or no scenes at all. There's this one scenario in Stage 3 where the CPUs meet Asagi, thinking that she's a resident of Lowee, but she's actually there to be a protagonist for the next game. This would continue around the middle of Stage 6 where they're at the Netherworld and the end of Stage 9 where they fight her for the final time. This would later reveal that the Asagi they met at Lowee is actually an imposter working for ASIC, with the real Asagi coming out to kill the imposter and join forces with the goddesses. Besides her, I wanted to have other characters join the main eight, like Fuka, Desco, Laharl, Etna, and Flonne.

 For the Final Stage, It would have Gamindustri's super army of their own vs. ASIC right at Spectral Tower where our heroes barge in and reach the top of the tower. As they arrive, they encounter Linda, Warechu and a resurrected CFW Magic standing near Arfoire's casket. The goddesses would then get ambushed by the Prinnies with Linda congratulating them. And here's a plot twist: the Prinnies would tell ASIC about their actual plan: turning Gamindustri into a training camp for the Netherworld by resurrecting Overlord Baal to destroy the world. This would be teased at the end of the previous stage where the goddesses see a prophecy on the wall about defeating the overlord. Continuing on with the scenario: As Arfoire is fully revived with a ridiculous amount of power, she attempts to kill the Prinnies and the members of ASIC, but is stopped by the goddesses who then decide to fight her. After the brawl, Arfoire ascends to Celestia, then the tower begins to crumble with the goddesses and ASIC on it. As the latter make their escape, Flonne appears out of nowhere and opens the portal to Celestia for the goddesses to follow Arfoire.

 The CPUs arrive at Celestia where they encounter some angels laying on the ground, stating that they tried to stop Arfoire from entering, but she was too overpowered. As they reach the final area, they are met with a form of Arfoire, similar to her True form in mk2. Arfoire attempts to make the final blow, but is killed by Overlord Baal.

 For the ending, the CPUs defeat the Overlord with the remaining angels congratulating them for saving Celestia and Gamindustri. As they return to the latter, the goddesses make a peace treaty with members of the Netherworld, and would have scenarios of what happened afterward. The post-credits scene would have Arfoire as a Prinny working for Etna, and teases that she will be back for revenge.

 For unlockables, I planned to have Nisa, Gust, Plutia, and Peashy as unlockable characters after beating the game just once and also a Hardcore mode where the enemies are much tougher and different.

 I didn't have an actual release date planned for this game, but one of them was a planned Fall 2018 release (I originally planned for a 2016 release based on some old files laying around), until I decided to put the project on indefinite hiatus. This was a real pain for me because I had school and work to do, and I didn't have any plans to continue the project along with its sequels and other projects, so I just left it there. I felt pretty disappointed that I never had the chance to do all this during my free time because of these reasons.

 Overall, this was a very nice project to do, except all of the development hell I had to go through, and it may have inspired other Neptunia fans to create fangames of their own, such as Hyperdimension Girl Quest, Exadimension Neptunia and Dimension Breaker.