Haiii~

It’s that time again… another post! This time, I want to write up a proper post-mortem for my game future Elise here, it honestly ended up being more of a game design ramble/Q&A, so, oopsie! I’ve never done this before, but here goes nothing!? I asked on Bluesky what people wanted to hear about so I’ll get to some of that as well! Oh, and also, this will contain some spoilers, so give heavensent a read first if you haven’t!

The Idea for the Story?

I’m just gonna start with the personal stuff right up front, so you can skip to the art bits if you care more about that. (I won’t judge you I prommie!)

Basically, a lot of this started when I played Thousand Year Old Vampire for the first time. I mention a bit of this in the “Special Thanks” section at the end of my game, as well as in my last post (where you can see the original 300-word journal entry that inspired my vn). For those who don’t know, it’s a solo RPG where you create a vampire and roll on various prompts as you progress through their life. Of course, over the span of their long life, they gain and use various abilities, meet new people, but also begin to lose precious memories. It can be really interesting! That’s one half of the main idea.

The other half of the main idea was my personal difficulties with BPD. It’s a really stigmatized diagnosis, and I’ve been in treatment for it since 2020. I’m trying to get more comfortable talking about it without feeling crazy amounts of shame, but I honestly struggle a lot with interpersonal relationships. I essentially keep finding myself in these troublesome situations, sometimes (often) brought about by my own mistakes, and then I struggle with traumatic amounts of grief. My family was even in talks of sending me a few states away to a residential treatment center for a couple months. Scary stuff. Expensive stuff. I wanted to find an avenue to process these feelings without engaging in harmful behaviors, so I did the only thing I know–turned to art!

I don’t necessarily want to deep dive into my intentions for Odette and Auriame’s states of mind, partially so you as the reader can feel empowered to make your own interpretations. Suffice to say, though, I feel I know both of their mindsets pretty intimately, and I wanted to present it in such a way where you could understand how they became as they are.

I hope that if you, as a reader, saw a little bit of yourself in either of their flaws, that you know you are loved, and that healing is possible. We may not get to explore those possibilities of love and healing just yet in this story, but I hope you can actualize that for yourself in this life. If you saw anything at all in my art, honestly, it makes me happy, because that means all of this pain I had to go through to create this work has some kind of value.

… Now onto the more fun and happier stuff!

The More Fun + Happier Stuff

I’ve already mentioned Thousand Year Old Vampire, but some other more visual/thematic inspirations were definitely Rule of Rose (2006 survival horror game) and Heavenly Creatures (1994 film dir. Peter Jackson. Yeah, you like him for LotR, I like him for Heavenly Creatures. We are not the same. /j).

I adore Rule of Rose aesthetically and story-wise, though as a person who has Actually played it + beat it, holy fuck. The combat. People aren’t lying when they say it's Rough. If you’ve played it you probably have nightmares of mermaid boss, too. The only other hardest game I’ve played is Bloodborne. Okayyy, maybe I’m exaggerating (I never could beat Father Gasoline even with the damn music box and he’s like the second boss). Anyways, back to RoR, the complexities of social hierarchy, and the toll of being ostracized and bullied–those are the kind of things that I would say I really took away from that experience. Of course, my playthrough was, like, a decade ago by now, but I didn’t want to give it a re-play just yet cause I didn’t want to end up borrowing too much from it for heavensent.

For Heavenly Creatures, I actually didn’t let myself watch it until my first draft was done (for similar reasons as I didn’t want to accidentally borrow too much). I had just heard about it before, and the premise of two girls (at a religious school!!) who kind of get obsessed with each other/caught up in their own world felt like something I could check out for research. So I did, and I enjoyed it immensely. I wouldn’t say I borrowed anything from it specifically that I wasn’t already exploring, but it kind of affirmed for me that maybe my story's setting was interesting enough, which is something I did worry about… A LOT.

Early Sketches + Thoughts Behind Character Design?

So embarrassingly, I feel like I didn’t do many concept iterations of the main cast cause I sort of had it in my mind already about how I wanted everyone to look. This is the result of thinking about the story A Lot over the weeks leading up to the start date. The biggest difference is that Auriame in my initial sketches, actually had more strawberry blonde hair than blonde-blonde hair… which isn’t a very big difference at all.

Something far more interesting I found that I had completely forgot about, was when this VN was going to take place in, like, the fucking Regency era…. but it’s not even taking place in England, so I changed it… and honestly I was really worried about checking absolutely everything for historical accuracy, so I moved it up in time to 1930 to make everything Just a Little easier. Even so, here’s a small drawing of Odette’s outfits with her cute little empire-style gown, pre-boarding school, and pre-incident. It is the only image of her I’ve ever drawn where she had long hair, and the only one I’ve drawn of her before she was turned into a vampire.

I think one thing that I thought about a lot was, especially because the setting is a school where everyone has the same uniform, how do you make that outfit unique to the character wearing it? Each character who we see in uniform has her own unique style. In the image below, we can see that Auriame is wearing her jacket neatly, she doesn’t roll up her sleeves or anything. She’s presenting herself as pristine as possible. She also has a little bandana which I thought makes sense if she’s on cleaning duty a lot, but also kind of nods to her potential future in the convent and donning an actual nun’s habit. Zoe has her jacket completely off, and has the sleeves tied around her shoulders. I thought this gave her a very posh look, which you might associate with someone who’s popular. Odette is a little sloppier compared to both of them. We know she suffers from nightmares, so she may oversleep and rush to get ready. She also has her sleeves rolled up, which I think gives her a kind of cool girl vibe.

Even though I didn’t mess around with character designs as much, I did do a few sprite style tests after I got the main designs down. For this Auriame on the left, I wondered about doing a style that was very painter-ly. I still adore how this looks, but I think it would have taken me a little too much time to do every body and every face in this style. Especially considering how much more time I wanted to spend polishing the painterly look… I had 0 idea yet at this point how fast or how slow programming was going to take, so I wanted to play it super safe. For the Odette on the right, I was trying to find how fast I could render something but maybe keep a few of the painter-ly elements I liked. But I also tried a new face style, and I didn’t really like it that much. I did end up rendering everything closer to the test on the right, though.

Finally, the last bit of early sketches I can share are a few thumbnails from when I was planning the CGs. I did one for each CG, though I’ve only got 4 to show here to avoid image-based spoilers for people who did not heed the initial warning. For things like this, I try to keep it simple and legible, which is why I go ahead and block out the values, as well as sketch zoomed out. Basically, how you might draw a thumbnail in your sketchbook. I honestly wished I could have had the time to go and give each CG a few more hours of work, but it is really hard for me to find time to polish while I’m also doing everything else. I was really desperately juggling tasks to avoid burnout. I also would have liked to have a few more CGs here and there. It’s something to focus on getting more efficient at for my next project. <3

Musical Inspiration?

Sit down.

Let me break down real quick what I listened to based on what role I was performing at any given time.

What did I listen to while I was writing? EXCLUSIVELY LEGEND OF ZELDA MUSIC. Specifically this. I am not much of a Zelda fan simply because I struggle with that genre of gameplay, but the music is amazing. Each day for about 2 weeks I dedicated myself to writing 2k words per day to get my script done before anything else, and this is the only thing I listened to that entire time. Because 1k words takes me about 1 hour to write, in the end it was probably a little over 20 hours of Zelda and rain sounds.

What did I listen to while I was coding? I almost exclusively listened to Big Brother gameplay analysis videos. Something about them just puts me in total focus mode. My favorite is probably Taylor Hale’s analysis. I just love her speech when she says “I am not a shield, I’m a sword, I am not a victim, I am a victor” like WE LOOOOVE TO SEE IT. SHE HAD TO GO THROUGH SO MUCH… It is well worth your time if you enjoy the social gameplay aspects of reality TV competition. All of these videos are edited so well, and the commentary is really comprehensive. I love reality television, you guys… I don't even wanna admit how much I was watching Love Island USA while playing Umamusume.

And finally, I’m sure this is fairly common, but I did make myself a playlist that reminded me of the characters. If you’re interested you can find it here. It was specifically to listen to while I was drawing CG illustrations, so I could mentally get into the vibe.

Music as a whole is really important to me, and I can always tell if I had a good mental year or a bad mental year based on how much music I’ve listened to. The name for my visual novel actually came from the Sufjan Stevens song, “Goodbye Evergreen.”

You know I love you

But everything heaven-sent

Must burn out in the end

This line impacted me so much, I feel like it’s a poetic reminder that nothing we have can last forever, but we can appreciate the beauty of the moments that are destined to be fleeting. I felt like it was not only helpful to how I view things in life, but also kind of resonated with what I wanted to present in this visual novel… maybe even in a more literal way with the angel aspects of the plot.

I will go into one more song from the playlist, because I feel like it also strongly inspired me. “Scapegoat” by ANOHNI is so beautiful. First of all her voice is incredible, and this song is so profound (check out her recent NPR Tiny Desk Concert). The content of the lyrics are so haunting and violent, but the instrumental is so delicate until the latter instrumental break. That disparity, the DESPERATION… is absolutely touching. I, too, wanted my visual novel to appear outwardly as a beautiful thing, but when you dig a little deeper you find something a bit wretched inside. 

Mood that got me best working?

I thought this one was an interesting point to address. There is no mood that gets me working. I FULLY should have been born as a nepo baby. I am WEAK, I want to quit when things get hard. But more seriously, in the lead-up to the jam start time, I had a lot of ideas. I didn’t want to break the rules by getting started, obviously, and I think that sort of pent-up frustration and desire to work on something gave me the drive to power through the script portion of the visual novel. So, about 2 weeks worth of energy. It was really rough after that point, and I had to rely on just pure discipline to get stuff done. My biggest desire was to get my story out there so my characters weren’t just trapped in my head. Also, more than absolutely, absolutely, ABSOLUTELY, anything else, I wanted to prove to myself I could make something like this.

I eventually fell into a routine of, code the chapter, draw the assets needed, swap out the placeholders with the final assets, move onto the next chapter, and did that until I was done. I think each chapter probably took me like an average of 3-4 days to implement. Being a new programmer, I was really doing the simplest code, but it took me a long time. I think I spent an average of 4-6 hours each day working on actually making the game, whether it was spent doing coding or art. Even in the writing phase, that would take me 2-3 hours per day and I was usually doing art tests on some nights. So yeah… a whole lot of time.

Also, I think taking breaks for your health is good, and necessary. I had two very, very bad panic attacks (unrelated to vn stuff) about mid-way through the jam, probably like a week apart. These are the only days I told myself I did not have to get anything done. It was at those times where I was so grateful for my past self putting in all of that work. I also reached my goal of submitting at least 1 week before the deadline.

Anyways, I think staying in the mood to work is always gonna be a struggle for me, so if you can relate, I think you really have to rely on building up a process that works best for you.

Ending Thoughts

I was originally going to include a retrospective and stuff… (oh man that's totally what post mortems are for, huh...) but I feel like I have to face my visual novel again to properly assess the 3 categories of “stuff I did well, stuff I did bad, stuff I want to do better for next time.” Right now, I’m prioritizing enjoying everyone else’s entries to the Toxic Yuri VN Jam… so perhaps I’ll make another post in the future when I properly revisit it that specifically deep dives into what I want to improve as well as what materials I’m using to improve my abilities.

For now, I hope you enjoyed this little post-mortem Q&A, which was sort of just a collection of my thoughts and rambles. If there’s anything you’d like me to address or talk about in future posts, you can always let me know 🙂

Thanks for all the support!!!

-elise