The demo for ONHAcademia – MINA. The starting point. The first taste of the path the game will take towards its completion. It’s been a long winding road, with changes in scope, tone, themes, art style… More than JPDE – Sonata of Fire, ONHA has taught me just why pre-production is such a long process in Game Development.

You can spend months, years even, just discussing and going back and forth over what exactly you want to do with a game. Doing, drafting, crafting, canceling… And then, all of a sudden, everything unlocks and you push out something definitive in a couple of months. In our case, the missing piece was the new engine: NARRAT.

Created and regularly updated by one person, the NARRAT Engine is a narrative RPGs oriented piece of technology, meaning that it’s got the functionality of a visual novel but also already has RPG elements built in it (skills, experience, rolls, item inventory, quest log…). Simply put, it was exactly the engine we needed for ONHA and it jumpstarted development.

To give you an idea, we discovered the engine on the 14th of July 2022. Little more than four months later -with summer vacation in the middle-, here we are. The Demo.

This is, as specified, a starting point. From now on, the game will be updated periodically -and the engine is still being made better and new features added- but the Demo will give you an indication of how most systems in the game work, the basic setup of the story, and the tone. Big shoutout to the new artist we’re collaborating with for the game, Bennee.

There are two versions of the game: a web-based one, where all you’ll keep on your computer is the save files; an app-based one, where you’ll download the entire game.

Warning: the Narrat Engine is still developing, so please make sure to report any bugs. If you’re interested in the engine’s development or you’d like to make something yourself, it’s free to download and easy to learn!

Hope you enjoy this first foray into the world of ONHA. And happy spooks!

– Meinos Kaen