In Summary
- 2D visual novel
- Horror story. You are attending a competition that lady Bella is holding for her hand.
- Made in team of four for Spooktober 3rd Annual Visual Novel Jam
- I did a lot of the writing, all the coding, and most of the producing
Story of the Project
I sent a message to the game jam Discord that I was looking for teammates, and found the composer that way. I had the story and some character concepts already, and the composer took some of the concepts for characters and events and really made them come alive in music, which was the moment I knew I’d have to do this. I needed help with the art and writing as the second university year started alongside, and the composer ended up bringing his friends along to draw and later on to write some of the scenes.
With this team, we brainstormed the structure of the story all together, bouncing ideas off of each other. The team (members of which are linked in the itch page) was very good to work with, everyone was positive, supportive and enthusiastic.
When we had most of the story, and some more character concepts as well as soundtrack, I started writing the scenes. Now a lot of this was done on top of a busy start for the university year, but I was determined to finish this game come hell or high water. So I wrote some of the scenes and had a teammate write rest. The story was solid (originally my concept, we had brainstormed together to end up where we ended up, and had teammate’s help with organising the story properly too) and had a lot of endings, so it was just a matter of writing it out. I felt it could have done with more time and editing, but it still makes an entertaining game and I’m proud we got it completed.
After having all the music, sprites and dialogues, I programmed it all in. This was a speedrun, as I was balancing it with lectures and was surprised to find out the manual labour of putting each dialogue on place is actually pretty time-intensive. But we got it through in the end.
Since it was game jam we also had positive feedback on it. People had gotten the foreshadowing, which was great! Despite how busy the project was, it was so fun to do, and it had a team who was great to work with.
Milla's Game Writing Portfolio 