Hi, this is Altila.
In this post, I'm going to talk a bit about the production process, and the rest will be about the lore.
This is going to be long. I warned you.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Production Process
O2A2 is probably my favorite game jam because everyone makes equally small finished VN, so I've been looking forward to this year's O2A2. The idea of the game, however, only came to me a few days before the jam started. I already knew what I wanted to make before the jam started.
The jam started on Friday, according to my region. During the jam, the first thing I did was write. I was writing in gdoc with my phone because Friday is actually my busiest day of the week. I fell asleep after writing. Most of the things I wrote that day wasn't used, I think.
The next day, I started drawing. I had so much fun drawing Evan all bloody. I feel like he is more handsome in Salvation compared to in Unsent Letter. But really, I cannot draw armor. Forgive me for that one. I actually didn't plan to draw that big of an image like in the main menu, but I did anyway because I was having too much fun. In the story draft, he died from slash wound instead of stab wound, but I changed it during the drawing process because I got the idea, what if Clarissa stabbed him and she was reflected on the sword. Genius, I must say. So, I changed the script instead. This is the absolute PRO of doing everything by myself; I can make any changes any time.
After drawing, on the very same day, I put the script in aaaaand word limit :DD !! To make sure I get the word count within the limit, I ended up cutting many things. I erased and rearranged a lot of things. A HUNDRED WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH.
I didn't make GUI because it's the bane of my existence. As for music, somehow I found the nice BGM quite immediately. Blasting that music while looking at Evan on the main menu felt so great. I couldn't stop staring, really.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things that I Wrote, Things that I Scrapped
Now, I'm going to discuss about my messy writing.
- The fun ones first. The dialogue about the path of destruction is because I was building Phainon from HSR at that time.
- Now, the not fun ones. I think most people notice that the writing is kinda all over the place and sometimes jump to somewhere you don't know. It can be because of the rearranging, the word count limitation, and because I just really really want to write about the world situations.
- Oh, right. I know that in old times, the soldier would bring the head of the enemy as proof of kill, but we don't do that here. There is no such custom in Arvis Kingdom. I actually considered it before, but I decided not to do it. One reason is that it will make the game too guro. I don't want that. Actually, many guro things happened in the story, but not on screen. For example, Claude, after he died, the enemy (but not Evan) decapitated him and hung his head with other soldiers on the front gate. The Thyrs Empire is slightly insane while Arvis is more civil. But, we don't talk about that in-game.
- Why dual POV? Well, various reasons. First, my head was trying to reason that Evan was dying, and he couldn't talk for a long time even if he wanted to. Second, the real MC of this universe is Clarissa. It's originally from Clarissa's POV. Evan was the antagonist I made because I was obsessed with Fire Emblem's Reinhardt. But, I wanted to tie the story to Unsent Letter, which was written from Evan's POV.
- Looking at both POV, you probably noticed that Evan and Clarissa are not that different. Evan was just more miserable. The two of them actually disliked war, but fought either way. They were just broken inside and equally lost after losing a certain someone. In Clarissa's case, it was Claude (and a bunch of her close friends, actually), and in Evan's case, it was Edgar (by the way, no, Edgar didn't commit treason, he was framed). Also, I erased it, but Clarissa, much like Evan in Unsent Letter, had nightmares.
- The times when they met outside the battlefield that they mentioned in the game were something like formal events. Also, there was a time when Clarissa was saved by both Edgar and Evan in the forest or something.
- This game is actually Evan's bad ending. Yes, he has a good ending. This OC universe of mine with Clarissa as the protagonist actually has branches like VN. Clarissa can be like this game, a Bloody Valkyrie, but there are also other possibilities. She can be a sane knight too (still under Harold), but she won't be as strong and won't be confronting Evan. Actually, there are other guys too, just like otome game. In this game, Clarissa basically went mad. I erased it from the script, but Clarissa was using Evan and her hatred towards him as an excuse? coping method? so she could keep living. That was also why she felt so lost when Evan died. By the way, since this was from an otome-esque bad ending, in the actual plan, they had feelings for each other. BUT! In this game, they are not, because romance out of nowhere is kinda weird.
- About Valhalla. So, Clarissa's nickname has valkyrie in it. From what I know, valkyrie brings the souls of dead warriors to Valhalla, and Valhalla is something like Heaven (warrior's heaven or something). If we take it as a warrior's heaven, those two are tired of fighting already. A place where you go to fight after fighting to death sounds like hell. And if we take it as heaven, Clarissa and Evan don't think they are going to go to heaven. So, Valhalla here is hell.
- To prevent this post from becoming even longer, I will stop here.
Thanks for reading (if you actually read until the end)!
Altila