#devjournal

A. Community Canvassing

Identifying and learning our target audience.

Identify personal wants from our game.

We have to stop and think: what kind of game do we want to play? If you want something, chances are, there’s a group of people out there who want the same thing. They are our audience.

Identify the type of media and genres relevant to our game.

Our video game is a visual novel, and its market genres are predominantly adult, drama, and romance. Because the medium of visual novels originated and is popular in Japan, we use the term otome (Japanese for “maiden” or “girl”) or otoge (portmanteau of “otome” and “game”) in our genre list. So, our game is an adult, drama, romance, otome—or focused on a female main character who deals with a cast of potential male partners.

Case any census data and statistics on target and related communities’ research blogs.

This one was important to us because we like considering quantifiable data that gives us the bigger picture. Statistics blogs and databases helped us get a clearer view of different demographic subsets of the visual novel community. It’s also important that we read material about sister media like the general interactive fiction community, as both deal with reader input and resultant story-branching.

Inquire fans in those genres for game recommendations and any opinions.

Community hubs are a click away. We connected with others via forums like Reddit and instant messenger servers like Discord that specifically revolve around fans and game developers of the visual novel medium.

Read game reviews in those genres by other fans and critics.

The most interesting thing for us when we read these reviews is not so much what someone did or didn’t like, but what aspects of the game they focused on, and what other topics they decided to connect to their original answer. You may be surprised how people decide to expand on their answer and where tangents lead, which is very telling, valuable associations.

Connect with other developers for support and networking.

The Western visual novel community is a small community, but commercial success is not confined to said community. Building a rapport with other hardworking devs is important, as it follows us in such a small space—for better or worse. There’s a lot to learn from the wider indie development community, too.

B. Story & Character Development

Creating an organic experience.

Real-world parallels to inspire for or reference in game direction.

Whether we take a trip to the city with a camera and sketchbook, rent and buy books from libraries and bookstores, or visit Google Maps in satellite view, we are pulling up everything we need to inform our game’s locations, people, and events.

Observe and converse with people.

The behaviors, quirks, appearances, opinions, and feelings of people are abundant, and it’s not until we observe and sometimes familiarize ourselves with others that we catch some of the concerted expressions that create a nuanced individual. 

Interacting with others is first-hand experience, and listening to or reading others’ experiences is second-hand. If we can't write from first or second-hand experience, we must inform ourselves with other sources, as it’s crucial in writing characters with whom we may not directly or easily identify. We often defer to interviews and documentaries to start.

Psychology and sociology research.

Sometimes reading from experts about general trends and triggers of the human condition makes it easier for us to understand, verify, and better portray things like addictions, behavioral disorders and mental illnesses, fetishes, and cultural stigmas for our character development and world-building. Though this isn’t limited to negative or abnormal things we cannot identify. It can also be in what ways the values of a person or society evolve, or how players interact with video game avatars!

Read and deconstruct critically-acclaimed novels in our genres

It’s understood that if people want to become better writers, they have to become better readers. Being able to settle down with some traditionally-published, well-received books relevant to our interests will help us build on our knowledge of suitable writing conventions, as well as analyzing broader narrative elements, like plot pacing. We even have a list of writing resources saved to help us break it all down!

C. Team Management

Standardizing ways to increase workflow efficiency.

Pipeline development.

Know a general end-date to keep in mind for the finished product. Setting a scope for our project and a timeline for production challenges us to keep on task as we work towards that date. We’ve set ours up by month and refer to that document for phase estimation.

Time management, task delegation, task tracking, and work logs.

Whether your team is me, myself, and I, or made of employees and contractors, it’s important to stay synchronized and keep record of that progress. Quiet Days has our own GitScrum board to help us with assigning tasks, timing how long a task takes us versus the amount of time we expected it to take, and streamlining the process from start to finish. It also keeps track of percentage of overall project completion and key performance indicators (KIP), or the metrics of a user’s personal contribution and work ethic over a period of time. There are a plethora of other task management sites and apps available to use too.

Style guides to standardize writing and art.

Between the two of us at Quiet Days, we both work on the 2D art and writing, and we both default to different visual and writing styles. So, we’ve set up and continue to add to our respective guides, keeping the art style and narration and character portrayals consistent. This is especially helpful should we take up other artists or writers, so that they can easily assimilate into our workflow. 

Account delegation for social media and company correspondence.

Understanding who does what for cohesion under a company brand is important for its image. We share all accounts under the company name, so technically both of us have access, which works well for our team of two. It’s early, but so far “delegation” seems to have taken on a natural division between Coda and Elm—the former taking to micro-blogging, and the latter to streaming and forum correspondence. While this dynamic may change in the future, we both refer back to each other under the Quiet Days brand.

Potential for contracting help.

We’ve considered that there may be a time in production where a helping hand is needed. Additional considerations like the freelancing market and pricing are kept in mind for the future. 

D. Game design 

Scrutinizing game elements from a developer’s lens.

Consider for which platform to design.

PC? Mobile? Console? Cross-platform? While we are primarily designing our game to be played on PC, should we want to capitalize on popular handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch, for example, things like game engines and builds, game optimization, resolution, encryption, touch capabilities, and content guidelines for their private company platform all need to be considered. These things change between platforms.

Consider designing globally.

There are people different from us who would like to enjoy our game too. We consider the user experience (UX) for things like the possibility of game translations and using fonts types that read well for different language characters like Chinese or Russian. We also consider how to customize the experience to accommodate for players with different cognitive abilities, which falls under accessibility features.

Play what’s commercially un/successful and community-recommended.

We can learn a lot from both good and bad game design, and what the community mostly consumes. We engage with these games and take notes on graphics, accessibility features, user interface (UI) designs, game mechanics, soundtracks, and overall presentation and aesthetic. What did we like and what would we have preferred?

Stay updated on game design development tips from industry heads

There are people who have been doing it much longer than we have, and a number of them are setting industry standards. We can learn a thing or two in how they handle a problem and find solutions.

E. Marketing 

Methods for optimizing outreach and return of investment.

Social media strategies for engaging and involving our audience.

We’ve laid the groundwork for character accounts on social media to launch as a way for our audience to interact with characters from our game. While role-playing is a fun marketing and meta world-building device, we’re exploring other cool avenues like exploitable images and audience challenges to drum up future participation. 

Types of advertising and promotional materials.

There may come a time when word-of-mouth may not be enough. Would we consider purchasing ad space on different sites for greater visibility, or spend money on “promoting” features on social media? Would we commission or create and sell promotional merchandising for our audience?

Crowdfunding platforms and prospects.

Popular ones like Patreon, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo all have their draws and their drawbacks for creators and supporters alike. For what expenses would we crowdfund? What additional rewards would we provide for the financial support, if any? Do we want financial support for our project, or continual financial support as a company creating content? Some developers don’t actually use these platforms to request funding, but as another way of advertising their game. Would we do that?

Cross-exposure with other devs.

Interviews, public events, and collaborations with other game developers is a win-win situation with everyone involved. We want to be able to not just network, but allow each other to introduce our products and skills to a greater audience, creating and sharing a unique, dedicated fanbase in the overlap.

The Takeaway

At the time of this post, we’re still in the production phase, so some of this information isn’t applicable right now, but no knowledge is wasted: these things will always be handy to know and consider for later. We’re making our decisions in lieu of—and even despite some of—our research, in order to create a game that we’ll love and hope others will too. It’s important that as a game developer, you too keep yourself informed!

Our Motivations

How it started for Elm:

What motivated me was the current visual novel market. Visual novels have always had a special place in my heart, but man was I getting tired of what was on my plate. It didn’t feel like the medium was maturing with it’s audience. There was no shortage of amnesiac clueless protagonists, where all you had to do was marry the love interest and get the good ending. (That’s not to say there haven’t been some truly great games in the medium, but they often go unnoticed.) At the end of the day, I wanted to see playful interactions, deep character relationships, rich story-lines and strong atmospheric narrative in more visual novels.

Thus, Primrose was born, partially out of deep-rooted frustration but also partly out of excitement for the idea. I wanted to create stories that allowed others to feel the way they made me feel. I wanted to use my love of narrative in games to create atmospheric and meaningful choices, and Primrose was quickly becoming that opportunity. What started as a joke had quickly become my favourite project to work on.

Personally, I love growth and project management. When I entered University for 2D animation, I wanted to improve my illustrative skills. I switched to 3D Games Art when I realised there was an entirely new skillset for me to learn. Afterwards, I dipped into sequential and comic art, and learnt so much from that. The end result led to me having an understanding of the unique combination that is cinematic composition and text, 3D pipelines, 2D animated workflows, and the use of interactive narrative to create endless and unique experiences. Ultimately, I knew I would end up making a visual novel at some point, I just didn’t know it would be now. 

As for Coda: 

This became an opportunity. It didn’t feel like it at the time. It was all brought up in a kind of joking context, and so I jokingly took Elm’s “seven deadly sins” tripe and wrote up some mad predictable character types to match. I shared them back. And when it was received well, a back-and-forth ensued for more creative character building. It grew into an organic exchange and it kind of fueled an already small fire in me. Maybe this was a chance to create something and leave a mark, but I would have never anticipated it’d develop into the scale currently planned. It never crossed my mind what kind of outreach was possible, just that I wanted to collaborate something fun for a change.

But what motivated me to even continue past the point of brainstorming? When did I decide that I’m willing to hunker down and take this into production? It was a culmination of things. I’ve attended college as an undergraduate working towards a Fine Art degree with an interest in illustration, but I never had an opportunity to be employed within my field of study or anything administrative. I wanted to break out of my retail history, but I had a recent streak of being passed up by lot of potential employers for someone with more experience or a college degree—any college degree, at times. With all these perceived dead ends, I felt the need to create something myself in my own field of study, to proudly be able to show others as the peak of all my talents. I had to take control over what I could control.

Our Interests

Both of us have an interest in art and talent in illustration, with Elm specializing in creating 3D designs, and Coda with 2D animation. We both enjoy the art of storycraft, combining Elm’s penchant for outlining and analyzing story arcs and plot pacing, and Coda’s interest in crafting prose and character creation and dynamics. And we both love to prove ourselves to ourselves. We can get pretty competitive if you challenge us!

In the end, it was clear we were driven by our passions, improving our portfolios, and garnering a publicity that’d lead to eventual profit.

Our Relationship

It’s important to understand too the unlikely fortune of how easily two strangers—who, at the time, barely knew any of the other’s artwork!—are able to work together. We had an existing relationship in an online chat for artists, both being active and talkative community members and easily riffing with each other, so it was clear we were both casual and approachable people in the first place. We didn’t seek each other out to contract; this just naturally developed between two ambitious, complimentary personalities. In private over more involved matters, we both know how to speak respectfully to each other, talk through disagreements, and compromise. But we absolutely want to stress to anyone hoping to collaborate with other people:

Clear, consistent, and upfront communication with your partners is extremely important! 

The moment you know you want to create a marketable product and need to work with someone else to get you to your goal, you absolutely have to communicate that. For us, we established very early a mutual recognition of what we personally want out of the project. While we both wanted the same things, it’s important to know what the project represents to each of us so we can measure out and balance each other’s investment. 

If you’re in a binding partnership like we are, there should be an intrinsic investment in every partner involved. If you’re working with contractors, while money may be a factor if either of you charge, they also willingly create quality work if they believe in you and the product. Check with and update them actively, make sure they understand their roles and project duties in your pipeline, give specific and constructive feedback, and socialize to build a comfortable and trustworthy relationship. And if you feel like someone’s not pulling their weight, you need to be direct about that too, in private and tactfully, because in the end, you need to look out for your goals and maintain those positive, worthwhile relationships.

5/7 character designs completed.

I’ve finished up most of the character designs and have a basic outline for everybody’s personalities. Only a few of the characters have names as of right now but the cast is so far:

Apega - the protagonist.

Nabis - The Dollmaker (your creator)

Ace Harper - The Mafioso your creator pays protection money too.

‘The Robot’ - A secretly self-aware dragon-like robot who wanders.

‘The AI’ - A siri/cortana like AI who runs the setting’s appstore for users.

‘The Cyborg’ - A full body combat cyborg who comes to the doll maker for repairs.

‘The Security Guard’ - He works as a security expert as a mega-corp

The general outline of the plot has been finalized. There will be three major acts followed by a conclusion. You’ll be able to romance all six characters with one of them having two different endings.

The goal is to have an actually interesting plot, with the bonus of some cute romances. The actual story itself will have at least two different endings. 

I would call the plot 10% complete at this point.

This coming week:

-Get the characters bios and personalities finalized.

-finish up the last of the character designs.

-Start planning out the routes for the main plot. 

-nose around in the legalese department.

Long Term:

-Concepts for the game UI

-Music?? Look into finding someone who takes music commissions.

-Decide how hacking mini-game will work. Plan for other minigames. 

-start character sprites.