the game is afoot

When we first started thinking about our game, we initially planned it as a proof of concept, a small demo, to figure out the route we wanted to take with our games. It was supposed to be a way to have some kind of game in circulation while we worked on our more ambitious project. Just to let people know that we were here and we were going to bring magical stories to you soon.

My teammate lives in Korea, it is where we met, so we thought it would be fitting if we could kickstart our project in Korea. So I went to Seoul for a definitely-not-vacation-but-work-trip and as we walked around the city, visiting our old favorite places, and discovering new locations, we talked about our project.

After talking about our game for a little while, we agreed that we wanted a bigger story. We didn’t want this game to be something small to just release and move on from. We were still going to release a demo at one point, but we decided this was going to be our first big project.

We worked out the specifics, what kind of game we were going to make, what was the plot going to be like, what we wanted to achieve, what technology we were going to use, and so on. Then I came back to Istanbul and we got down to business on January 1st, 2023.

…or not

What we decided on developing was a mystery visual novel/dating sim because both of us wrote stories as long as we could remember, and we believed that writing was our strongest asset at the beginning of our game development journey.

I had worked with Unity, Godot, Ren’Py, and some other game engines at university but I was out of practice because I have been working in data science for the past couple of years. My teammate, who is also going to be our artist, felt more confident in her writing skills for the first project as well. That’s why we decided on making a visual novel which would be the best way to demonstrate our strengths.

But there was a problem: neither of us wrote branching stories before, or mysteries, for that matter. Since our game is going to be both a mystery and a dating sim, we realized quickly that there were a lot of moving pieces we needed to cover.

So we started researching how to write a mystery, analyzed books and movies and studied the resources the lovely people at the DevTalk Discord recommended to us.

It took us a month to finally have a basic outline of what we were going to write and we already learned a lot along the way. In my next blog, I will be talking about our outlining process and showing you how we keep track of all the moving parts of our story.

Have a lovely day!