The visual novel project I’m working on is one I started on in my Senior year of college. It was part of a course that was very openly-structured, where the goal was to make three personal projects that we could publicly release. I had the idea to try not just 3 projects, but 3 projects in different mediums- a bit ambitious, for sure, but I wanted to work my way up in terms of writing intensity- the first would be a fair amount of writing with more focus on image editing, the next would be more tightly-knit writing with minor programming, and the last would be focused on direction, writing, and a significant amount of programming.
The first one was a solo fanzine about the Square Enix franchise SaGa, titled A Permissible Act of Selfishness- Falling in Love With RPGs Again, Through Romancing SaGa. I had played the series over the pandemic after a long-deserved break after playing Persona 5. After going back to one of the wildest, most ambitious games of the Super Nintendo, Romancing SaGa 2, I did a deep dive into the rest of the series, playing 3, Minstrel Song, and the Frontier games, as well as other titles by the same director. All of them captivated me in ways I had never felt with a classic game, even when it came to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and had finally found an RPG to be “my thing that I push”.
So, because of that, I made a short zine talking about what it does well, its roots, and what sets it apart from its contemporaries. Alongside the remakes, it got most of my friends interested in the series!
Next up, I decided to learn a tool for making microgames. I had played a fangame of Yume Nikki called Madotsuki’s Closet, which had left a significant impression on me after replaying Yume Nikki that year, and decided to try making a similar game in that vein using the engine, Bitsy, as well as addon tools like bitsy3d and sound additions alongside it, while jumping between gameplay and twine game segments. It was about my personal experiences playing Grasshopper Manufacture’s Flower, Sun and Rain in high school, and how my mental and emotional state at the time that made me appreciate the work more in the moment as time went on. It’s a game that still holds a special place in my heart, and I highly recommend the series its in, both because of and despite how I felt afterwards.
Lastly, this final project was something where my plan was to develop a prologue for a project I wanted to make in the future; A visual novel in the style of something like The Silver Case that used 3D assets, while being visually inspired by early 3D visuals in games like House Of The Dead and Alone In The Dark- lowpoly 3d and flat shading.
This one was the most difficult of the three to make, so it’s more of an introduction to a story about a person whose classmate gets killed and replaced by a body-snatcher, but nobody remembers the original person anymore. Low texture detail with stark visual contrast was a bit of a challenge, but I think it can work for a small-scale solo project. I’m working to rewrite and remake the intro, and continue from there with writing it in parts as a semi-episodic release!