May DevLog

Otome games, literally “maiden games”, are a popular Japanese genre of plot-based video games marketed towards women (Kapell). The protagonist, usually female, explores a romantic relationship with male love interests over a main storyline. Courting hearts is a game I made for the Otome Jam 2024, however, I ended up not uploading the beta. T^T

The Otome Jam 2024 started on April 30th and ends on July 1st.

The requirements were:

• Female Protagonist (protagonist can be choosable, but a fem or fem-representing option 
• Romance (You have to end up romantically with one of the characters in some way)
• Male Love Interest(s) (Female, nonbinary, and other ones optional but not necessarily included, the focus is still a masc-representing love interest)

### Week 1-2

Because of my exams, I couldn’t spend as much time on the project as I wanted. However, in my free time, I brainstormed many premises, though I had to eventually drop most of them.

### Week 3

I settled on a simple premise about a tennis girl asking a guy on a date! Once the premise was set, I made some rough character sheets. For a while, none of them had names. Afterwards, I wrote the first and second drafts.

Initially, the game was supposed to have four love interests, but I remembered the deadline and settled for two.

I’m more of an artist than a writer, so I really want the visuals to pop. I need to give a lot of time to that part of the preproduction.

### Week 4

Week 4 is all about the visual part of the visual novel. My goals for the week are:

- Design the love interests and their sprites

- Design the background

- Design the UI

- Design the side characters

- Sketch the illustrations

Coming up with a story in that timeframe was hard because I felt crushed, but now that part is done, I realize that the drawing part might be the hardest!

That’s all I’ve done so far. In the next dev log, I’ll show the final results of week 4 and talk about my progress.