This is one of those wet-my-fanboy-pants moments so pardon if the words don’t come out so well, but according to the official site of eroge magazine Tech Gian, just updated with the contents of the coming issue (due out on April 21st), eroge artist and game designer Sei Shoujo (homepage, Erogamescape) IS NOT DEAD! Work is finally proceeding on Starless, the game project that lay dormant for well over a year now at the bottom of game maker Skunkworks’ product lineup page. The game was repeatedly delayed with no explanation, and Sei Shoujo’s personal site hasn’t been updated since August of 2006, and I’ve been checking both sites weekly in fear that it’ll be announced that he died of a sudden heart attack, or was abducted by aliens, or exorcised, or smothered by a gang of nymphomaniac schoolgirls.

Interestingly the new game is not being credited to Skunkworks but rather to Empress, the brand where he released his last game Cleavage before going AWOL. Little else can be divined from the single image present on the Tech Gian page, but we do know that he’s helming all aspects of the production (art, direction, and scenario), and that we can expect another “immoral story” in the mold of Bible Black and Discipline. We’ll be watching very closely for further details on this project… Tech Gian announcement image reproduced below:

I was seriously worried about the guy… hopefully his time incommunicado can now be explained by a Shinkai Makoto-esque holing up for the past two years to produce this magnum opus.