The Future of Villain Rehabilitation

This is my very first attempt at making a visual novel.

I have no prior experience, and boy has this project been an experience

I've been working on this beta build since 2017. Visual novels have always fascinated me and I've been enthralled with how different mechanics have come and gone through the years. One of the things that caught my eye was Hatoful Boyfriend. A game that used story decisions to build up stats and integrated a turn-based battle system to highlight a climatic ending.

It got me thinking; what if you had a game that combined the drama of the RPG boss battles with a story focused playstyle? This beta was my rough draft of sorts, to see if I could possibly make something like that. My wish list for features was quite long, and like many before me, I bit off more than I could chew. It meant scaling back a lot of what I wanted in the boss battle, and other smaller features.

I ended up going with Unity, since it could include mechanics and scenes that are hard to replicate in things like Ren'py. I enlisted the help of Fungus (a free Unity asset) and a freelance programmer to help me set up the menu system. I honestly took for granted how many moving parts go into making a multi-slot save system and gallery. After months of troubleshooting, I found that implementing a fully functioning save system in this particular build would take months and risk breaking the entire build.

All things considered, I was able to get most of the main concepts I wanted to function beta (fully voiced cast, the investigation mechanics, and a turn based battle system). Though unrefined, seeing what worked and didn't has helped me gear where the full script for the game will go. Seeing my art come to life is like a dream come true. I'm eternally grateful to the voice cast, beta testers and my freelancer for being so patient while I tried to make this silly beta work.

Thank you for taking an interest in the beautiful labor of love.