Reanimated Heart dev log # 1 (Patreon)

Introduction

(feel free to skip i just started rambling senselessly here)

So! For people who don't keep up with my Twitter or Discord, I decided to make a visual novel. The origins of this is really hard to explain, but to make a long story short, I need something to keep myself busy and do something I really love and am invested in. It's been years since I tried to take a crack at writing a huge novella again, and a year ago, I tried that webcomic but it didn't "click", per se. It's only when I tried a series of interactable dialogue with my OCs that I realized my passion was in choices and dialogue. 

I really like the interactivity of it. Working on the outline, I realized there isn't really going to be a lot of "gameplay" in the traditional sense. There's no puzzles, no combat, whatever. What I want to emphasize is the "talking." Something I realized that's prevalent in the VN genre is that, for something that relied so heavily on dialogue, the quality of it is very... cardboard and static. I think the most egregious of them are the Western writers that try to adopt a subtitled anime affect, when the beauty of the original Japanese language is lost when translated. 

I think there's so much personality that can be derived from how a character talks and chooses their words, and English is one of the most powerful languages for that. The universality of it contributes to its flexibility. Not only is it old, but it's spoken by multiple countries around the world, with specific identity groups molding it to their personalities, from the rich AAVE of American Black people to the frequent code-switching of Filipinos to the campy vernacular of the LGBT community. Call it a byproduct of colonialism, but human beings use whatever tools are available to them, and English is one of the ones stretched and formed into new, amazing shapes just by the sheer diversity of people that gets ahold of it.

The setting of my VN is at a different pocket dimension from ours, but one that bears tremendous similarity to ours (save for certain elements of magical realism, like the old old tree and some characters being fucking zombies or whatever). Given that, I'm attempting a tricky tightrope between using (and in certain cases, abusing) modern trends and vernacular, but also infusing them with timeless novel prose. I don't want it to be so modern that it becomes dated in a few years, but I also want it to be very much of a product of its time. A glimpse into the mirror of the past. A transitory phase, but a real, heartfelt one. 

I'm slowly crawling into my 30s. I don't feel like I've ever done anything that properly expressed myself. I suppose that's always going to be an ailment of someone raised Catholic and conservative. No amount of "acting out" is going to give a voice to a child that never had it. But that doesn't mean you can't try, you know? Every year, I get better at talking and writing, expressing my thoughts and feelings more concisely than I ever could two, three, ten years ago. English is the bright, burning angel sword that'll burn through the haze of my traumatized mind, and I'm just going to improve more and more. 

But I don't want to simply "evolve" past this life stage. Who I am right now is incredibly important to me, I think this VN will express what I'm thinking, what I believe in, my problems and their conclusions... the person who I was and who I'm becoming... it's not going to be aspirational (it's actually going to be really, really dark) or a direct 1:1 parallel to my life (I loathe autobiographies), but rather, the most accurate snapshot of my mind state and the farthest test of my artistic limits. And what better way to get to know someone than to talk to them? 

Art is the purest form of communication. Behind its mask, you can say or think what you're not "allowed" to behind the guise of social convention. Similarly, love is the highest form of understanding, and it can never be extracted from this story, because it is its core -- from the plot to the characters... to the amount of work and suffering I'm putting into this. It's a love that's angry, twisted, spiteful, difficult and hard, but it's love all the same. 

This thing is the biggest passion project I have ever embarked on in my life. I don't care if it flops. I just want to open up the program, and say it's fucking mine.

Progress Updates

Enough drama. Here's the first development log. 

+ The HD resolution will be 1920x1080 but I'll find a way to make it look good for as low as 800x600.

+ I finished all 3 sprites, closeup and zoomed out, for the love interests Crux, Black and Vincenzo. (To-do: Make 1 or 2 more zoomed out poses for them, as well as femme Vin's zoomed out and close up.)

+ I finished 3 sprites of side characters (Hana, Grete, Dr Daigo)

+ 2 environments (construction site, Crux's living room)

+ Main character customization options

+ Concept art side characters, including Toby and Nila (Crux's parents)

+ Commissioned shotgunrunner0 on Twitter (a personal friend of mine!) for the music, she's currently working on the three mains' themes, check her out! 

+ 90% full outline finished

+ Finished writing and editing the prologue. All I need are the environment assets! 

+ I'm going to be making a small demo on TyrannoBuilder, then build the prologue demo on Ren'Py. (For the small demo, I'm just going to test out fonts and dialogue for the final game. I want this thing to look sleek.)