Dev Log 2.5: History of the End of the World - Part 2

The practical reality of Achlys would be much simpler to explain.

In late May 2021, I would begin to try to create a H VN with a friend who had gotten into game dev. You can imagine how once I got to work, the ideas began to flow and wouldn’t stop. When I decided to use a campaign setting that drew from deep personal roots, I would begin to work like a man possessed. Eventually a split occurred where the work I had been doing completely diverged from what my friend was doing. I worked on the story and characters and he worked on the Vn engine and setting up the method to make renders. I just kept working ahead to buy my friend some time as he caught up with engine work, only to realize at some point that he wasn’t working on it. He admitted to me he felt pressured (quite reasonable in retrospect, mea culpa), and then quit to work on his own projects.

I was devastated.

In a fit of anger, spite, and disappointment, I would double down and create what I wanted deep down. The perfect game to encapsulate all of my ideas. In hindsight unwise, but I wanted to create such a complete work that if it was the only thing I had ever written, I could be satisfied. So, I would tear down what I had developed to build it up again. The entire game was restructured, the characters rewritten, and the dialogues expanded from simple 200 word blurbs to what you see today. I started off writing the characters as if they were just portrayals of common anime girl archetypes, but when I rewrote it, I had this longform document to answer a simple question. How do they respond to the Fog/COVID? (Not to conflate the Fog as a COVID analogy when it clearly evolved beyond it.)

Because it had started off as an H game, I actually have versions of some of the characters made in Koikatsu. (No I don’t plan on sharing the character cards if I didn’t delete them outright in shame.) Honestly, I regretted suggesting it as an H game early on and kept trying to change it, which wouldn’t happen until this became my solo project and I re-did everything. Then I had to find a new model creator, which ended up becoming VRoid Studio, and modeled all of the renders that you see now in Unity.

Admittedly, if it’s not abundantly clear, writing was my favorite part. I started this journey off as someone who frankly had never written anything of length or significance but wanted to believe I had the soul of a writer. My schooling went away from the liberal arts, so I had to rediscover it myself. In fact, I felt that I had been struggling during the rewriting process until one fateful morning when I had written one of the later Jessie dialogues. I looked at it and thought I had finally written something I could be proud of. It made sense. 

After that, the writing process ballooned quickly. I had taken tons of notes all across a library of google documents and personal discord channels, sometimes in long paragraphs, or just short phrases, hoping that I could remember what they had meant. Highly intelligible notes such as “facing the blue wall,” “What’s your opinion on jaywalking,” and my personal favorite so far, 

“When life gives you lemons, make Laurenade!"

However, the renders had quickly become a personal nightmare for me. My insistence on creating new and custom renders for every slight variation and pose have caused me to work countless nights to make Lauren shift slightly in a chair when she ends one paragraph and begins another, but I am still unsure if people will notice. I just had personally become frustrated with character sprites floating above a flat background, only to realize quickly why it was the case. It felt like renders took a year. Then in fact it felt like renders tired me out for so long it took me another year. I felt like if I didn’t have to render I would have made book 2 by now. (Like a script writer and director with a well funded post production team, I would have upped the crazy even further if I didn’t have to render the results of said craziness.) There’s a Chinese adage that roughly translates to, “Three Minutes on Stage is worth Three Years of Practice.” I understood that a little better now.

The dev process also reminded me of this comment on this YouTube Clip from the movie Oppenheimer that can be paraphrased as, “They had to add all the strange imagery because the real work of staring at a whiteboard was too boring.” Frankly I felt as if I sometimes came close to the scene where Oppenheimer throws glass cups at the floor, and any point where he can’t sleep because of ideas. However, as much as I would like to romanticize it, the reality of my dev process mostly boiled down typing dialogues (honestly more like monologues) in the mornings, and clicking away at renders in the evenings.

To that end, I felt that there was little to note within the actual development of the game. I had always felt confident in my capabilities to create it from a technical point of view. (After all, it doesn’t get much simpler than a VN) Instead, Achlys, from its conception and throughout its development, was more of a spiritual activity, and the toil itself was spiritual. I had been fueled off this artistic spirit, and burned out when that spirit was used. Ultimately I had crashed for a long time from the renders, and it took a while for me to build up the guts to return to the game, something which I hint at in Jessie’s dialogue. (Mind you I wrote that before I crashed, expecting to crash.) For a while the game began to represent personal failure, inability to follow through, disappointment in others for abandoning the game, and a failed dream. After taking some time for myself recently, I found it in me to finish, and with the help of some friends, here I am.

And that’s Achlys up to today.