Woo! So glad you enjoyed playing it ^-^
Yup, we worked our butts off to get it done x3 probably a little too hard, but I know we weren't the only ones pushing ourselves for the jam, haha. Seems to be the curse of Spooktober cos a lot of teams have put insane amounts of time and effort into their projects :3 I just hope everyone is taking some sorta well-deserved break now and being kind to themselves!
Basically, this was just my attempt at creating a kind of backstory/origin story for a couple of characters who don't yet exist in Darling Duality x3 So if you were to play Darling Duality right now, there would be no mention of them in there whatsoever. I hope to add them both as love interests at some point in the future though! I hope to make it so that you don't have to have played this to understand what's going on with them once they're in Darling Duality, nor would you need to play Darling Duality to get what's going on here. It's supposed to be more just one of those kinds of things that adds a little extra to the experience of both I guess :3
What I will say is that when they eventually become part of the Darling Duality world, everything that takes place in Dawn of the Damned will have happened long ago. So in Darling Duality, we'll be seeing what happened to them in the future.
As for inspiration, I guess it was a lot of things x3
For starters, I felt guilty about taking part in Spooktober Jam because I knew it would mean putting Darling Duality on hold for even longer when it's already long overdue an update >.< So one of the ways I attempted to justify taking part in the jam was to tell myself that if I could somehow make something that could eventually be connected to Darling Duality in some way, it would ease my guilt!
Some of the characters I hope to add to Darling Duality in the future have really rough little outlines, and others were nothing more than vague ideas I'd written down in a single sentence as something to come back to later. Morgen and Damme were just a couple of those 1 sentence ideas, haha. All I had written was that at some point, I wanted to have a pair of characters in Darling Duality who could use the nicknames, the Melancholy Mannequin and the Damned Dollmaker. I have a few of these nicknames noted down to hopefully prompt me into writing them into characters in the future! And these two were probably my favourite prompts.
I don't know if it counts as a trope or not, but I kinda have a thing for like dollmaker x doll relationships xD and also general twisted circus-type stuff x3 Anyone who happens to have played my first ever game will probably realise that from a couple of the characters in there, haha.
Add into the mix that I had recently been listening to a lot of Rammstein as I got to see them live back in the summer earlier this year + started learning German as a result, and little fragments of inspiration began to form! One of the songs that inspired me a little bit was Rammstein's Heirate Mich (yup, that's why I named the CGs after the song xD). I still don't fully understand what's going on in the song even after reading translations (one of the main reasons I wanted to learn German, so that I can actually attempt to grasp stuff myself rather than relying on what others have translated!) but the imagery it gave me was pretty vivid!
I tend to get a lot of inspiration from music of all sorts, whether it has lyrics or is purely instrumental. I don't know what it is about certain tracks, but I can often see entire stories unfolding in my mind just by listening to a piece of music x3 The hard part is actually pulling those stories out of my head >.<
Then there was the creepy mansion background pack that I acquired in a sale. I believe it's called something like Horror Western-Style Backgrounds. But when I named the folder on my PC, I called it Torture Mansion xD Just because of all the strange images in there, haha. Seeing all that stuff gave me so many ideas, and was the basis of Schrat's spell/curse/poem. So I was trying to write a story that tied in with a lot of the image elements from that background pack.
As soon as I had the poem sorted, it was much easier for everything else to just kinda fall into place! I knew I wanted to go for something in the style of a twisted fairytale, so that helped too.
KIND OF SPOILERS BELOW
My biggest concern was it possibly turning out too much like an otome game. Because as much as I love the otome genre, I didn't want it to be the sort of love story where the player is supposed to fall for Damme. Sure, it's still a love story, but it's supposed to be a dark and twisted one that falls into the category of horror or dark fantasy more than anything else x3 I wanted it to be Morgen and Damme's story, with the player standing by as a witness/unfortunate victim, depending on the ending that you get xD I wanted to save the option to actually get loved up with the characters for Darling Duality! :3
Heck, I was initially even hoping to have a version with male Morgen and female Damme so that players could choose. Even to have GxG and BxB options. But it became apparent really early on in the jam that there just wasn't going to be time to implement that >.< I might still do it for Darling Duality, but at the same time, I kind of like the idea of them staying as they are in Dawn of the Damned and players in Darling Duality having to deal with them as a unit.
Sorry for rambling a bit off track there anyhow x3 Thanks so much for playing and taking the time to comment! If you do end up playing my other games, I hope you enjoy them, and I also hope that you get to have a happy Halloween! :3