Creating a Visual Novel
This part of the course is focused on creating and marketing a larger scale product. This year the assignment was a visual novel but most years it's items for sale at a christmas fair. It was a unique challenge, learning a new medium, program and market as well as making sure to work with the concepts given to us by the short stories we were assigned to use as a jumping off point. I was assigned the short story 'The yellow wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story of a woman trapped on a rest cure who slowly but surely loses her mind.
Stage 1 - Concept
My first step was creating a mood board and doing some quick drawings while listening to the audio book.
I listened to it a couple of times, watched the Crash Couse Video on it, Looked up Charlotte Perkins Gilman and her life a little. I wondered what time period I should set my game in but the whole story is very much rooted in two things, being a woman in the late 1800's at the mercy of whichever poor sod you ended up married to and being a mentally ill person given 'care' by people who know very little about your condition and are actively making you worse. This could likely be set in the modern day but for now since it's a very intrinsic setting to the first half of the story's message I'm looking into 1890's fashion, architecture, some surface pattern designs, some advertisements for mental health help at the time and photos of the author herself since much of the story is based on her own experiences with 'rest cures'.
My next step I think should be to do another round of more focused drawings using the references I've found and see how I feel about this direction.
I went on to do some written planning of story structure and coding elements, working with the list of things we like seeing in games compiled during one of Becky's classes. I was interested in statistic features for deciding the three endings I had settled on as well as the idea of a map screen letting you choose locations and changing between the house in daytime and in nighttime. I then took the time to make some concept art of the main characters and establish a visual style. I wanted something gothic and creepy with thick linework and a lot of black filled in spots and detailing. I also produced a presentation on all the plans I had made so far to present to the class and to Ade who had not yet seen our game progress.
Stage 2 - Script and Code
After learning to use the program, It was time to write up the sotry outline and the Script while also coding the game itsself. This was the longest stage and very difficult. Initially there were to be 5 days and nights of gameplay, when this seemed unfeasible it was cut down to 3 and was cut down again to just a one day and night demo after a meeting with Conan. One aim I had with a lot of the structure was the idea of replay value with unique events in each location at each time. By the end of the first day, I calculated a total of 24 unique routes a person could have taken.
Using Tyranobuilder was relatively straightforward but required a lot of remembering to make sure certain pieces of code stopped running into the next scene which made the code bulky and at one point I had a disaster where I lost all my game code for the first half of the game. It took two full days of stress work to get back to where I had been but in the process it let me rewrite a big chunk of the script, improving it, and led to me keeping a more thougrough manuscript in future.
First iteration of the game ZIP file
When I first tried making the game, to streamline size and production time I used stand in sprites and backgrounds that were literally location names written on the screen. I worked like this until the entire code was set up, although at the point this wip was exported much of the dialogue wasn't yet polished. You'll also notice some random pictures from my laptop acting as stand in images for overlays I added in later.
At this point I also noticed that it wasn't necessary to draw more of the character than would be on the screen at a time. I made sure to make my canvas the size of the final screen so I didn't need to spend any time resizing anything once it was imported. This saved some time and made me able to focous on the background art later
The next step was the game art. I drew the backgrounds digitally, referencing some of the images of edwardian houses in my mood board. I inked it with a nice rough and textured brush and then put together a very set colour palette for both day and night. I used overlay layers to add the warm firelight to the study and kitchen in post.
The character art took a long while since not only did Mrs Fairchilde and John each have a fair number of expressions but outfits for day and night felt necessary to communicate the changes in time of day. Fortunately, Mary never shows up at night, a choice I made to avoid having to double her sprite number.
The layout I drew on the map was the first final piece for the game. This let me use the floorplans when drawing the interiors and exteriors in perspective. It made things all look a lot more unified
Once the background work was done, I switched to the character art. I had a few ways I considered drawing them but I knew I wanted heavy inked linework. I landed on the very pale yellow and white colouring instead of full colour because it made the characters the most hight contrast item on screen while the way they were inked helped them still feel part of this world. I might have experimented more if I were to try this again but as it was I sent a few versions out to some people I know and they came back in favour of the black and white.
I didn't end up needing a lot of overlays and reused the one where I'd edited multiple vintage adverts in two places since the routes didn't have much potential overlap, although in a polished version I'd want them to be different looking. I'm especially happy with the tea leaves with the skull, it's stylised and interesting looking.
Music
Finding royalty free music was a bit of a challenge that involved a lot fo googling, I used both youtube free music, the song I used in the background is called Heartless Flock by Naoya Sakamata. The other sound effects were found royalty free on a specialised website called Bensound. The sounds I made myself were when the point of view character spoke which were my own voice recorded and edited with Audacity. The hardest part was just converting everything into the right formats with a lot of the sounds being easy to find fitting versions of and many getting reused for multiple purposes.
I am glad I added them as they gave the game a level of professionalism it would have lacked otherwise.
Phase 3 - The Final Game
Final game file
Finally uploading the game involved exporting the files, editing them, and then sending it in alongside a self-description and a short blurb to let people know what the game would entail. I also added some content warnings because of the mental health and horror themes the game has. This created the final outcome and now it was time to advertise. It's not perfect, it has a few bugs and glitches but I'm satisfied with the writing and the final look and am very proud of what I'de put out
Screenshots
Phase 4 - Advertising
The final stage was trying to get an audience for our games. The prep for this started before the game was finished by trying to increase any audience we had online and learn any social media we could. I took to posting every day to instagram and learning to use Reddit as well as talking about game progress on my Twitter and Discord and even streaming on twitch a bit of my coding process. Unfortunately, Twitch deletes videos after a time so as of when I'm making this site, only the lets play stream I uploaded after the game came out and an among us stream where I also plugged the game are still up. The summary for the Game stream where I played The Yellow Wallpaper had higher user interaction than I'd ever achieved before, ran about 2 hours and gained me 3 followers and 17 post upload views, meaning people went and saw it after the stream had ended. I think the most surprising interaction was on my instagram where the instagram of a short film based on the same short story followed me and liked all my posts relating to the project.
Before the final game was uploaded I placed an unfinished version on itch.io to test interest, let people get a sneak peek at the game and to practice uploading. It only got 7 hits but it was interesting to test out how to customize the presentation of it and see what I'd need to do to make certain it got seen, seeing as even on a larger platform like itch, it's hard to gain any audience without good images and plenty of external advertising.
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After uploading the game, I made several posts to larger discords that drew in some viewers, both old friends and family as well as total strangers from large art servers where I don't usually post much. I even got two seperate strangers DM me just to tell me they'd enjoyed the game. On twitter I made use of hashtags and a few newer followers to try and get word out to medium success considering the usual level of interaction I get on there is none. My reddit post didn't go far as it was upvoted by many but also downvoted, I suspect by people simply disinterested in playing since it seems on reddit the culture is anything you don't actively like, you give a dislike so you won't see it on your feed anymore. Instagram and facebook were both a challenge as the links to my game couldn't be uploaded but I used stories on instagram and created a linktree to get around the issue. The linktree now also houses my website link and all my social media. I had intended to also advertise on youtube and Tiktok but found myself lacking the time or confidence to record any footage, let alone edit it which meant that the two were rather bare. I wish I'd been able to put out some trailers as I'd hoped to. Overall an attempt was made to moderate success considering the place I have the most followers is Tumblr and that website is notorious for posts never making it very far unless they're a single joke text post. Over time I'd like to build up more of a following for this game for when I hopefully make a second attempt at a feature length version in the future but for now I'm pretty happy with the reception I got.
