After months of development, Shadow Girls is out!
Follow the vengeance-driven Diana as she infiltrates her school’s most infamous clique: the Four Lashes. In order to prove her loyalty to the group, Diana must participate in a series of mentally taxing activities orchestrated by the group’s leader, Sabrina.
Play the Visual Novel for free!
Coffee with Shizue is a short Visual Novel about our protagonist trying to ask a girl out when the world is about to end.
This is my devlog for my first game. I've kept a devlog for my game and I just discovered that there's a place where I can post them. My game was short so I was able to keep track of my progress. I didn't go much into detail about the story to avoid spoilers.
Just wanted to share my small journey. Thank you for reading!
-From Monday to Friday of that week, I had nothing to do. Hours went by with me doing nothing productive. Though not productive, I got to play this game called Va-11 Hall-A and I immediately fell in love with the game. The characters are really something else and I really loved the retro Cyberpunk look. Is that the right term? I finished the game that week and it left me some sort of impact. After finishing the game, they said something about the game being made in GameMaker. Now, I don't know why that piqued my interest but it just did! I've heard of GameMaker before when I was using RPG Maker but it was only at that moment where I searched more about the engine. Somehow, while I was searching, I found Ren'py! The engine was new to me so I also did a quick search. Though unfamiliar towards the engine, I recognized a few games made with it. After knowing Ren'py was free, I gave it a shot. Let me tell you, the menu actually intimidated me. There were no welcomes and I was confused. "Where's the workspace?" and "Where should I put the dialogue?" I asked myself. I opened the "Tutorials" project and it's probably one of the best tutorials I've read. From one sitting, I've learned the basics. After knowing the basics, I suddenly had this feeling I once had when I was using RPG Maker. I suddenly had the feeling to create something. I've always been fond of creating things especially stories. It was at that moment where I decided to create a Visual Novel.
Now what I was missing was the story. I wrote a few stories back when I was young. I wrote a lot and I usually based them from mythologies. I gave this one story a shot called "Masters in Chains". It was a story inspired from this one story called "The Egg" by Andy Weir. I'm not going into full detail but I wrote the plot and it took me 4 pages and I believe it doesn't even cover the whole story. I guess I was also to blame because I'm not really good at summarizing things. I realized that the story was long enough to be adapted into a VN. Neat, right? Well, I thought that maybe I should start small first. I only know the basics of Ren'py and I haven't even put my knowledge to the test yet. That's when I decided to put Masters in Chains aside and work on a much shorter project, enter Coffee with Shizue.
-I took the Sunday off and decided to write Coffee With Shizue on Monday. Now, the initial story for Coffee With Shizue was similar to the kinds of Va-11 Hall-A where your clients or customers will order a drink and from there, you talk to your customers. That's what I liked about Va-11 Hall-A: its characters. I decided to make a game like that where in game characters are the story itself. While I was writing the script, I somehow managed to stray away from the original idea thus making Coffee With Shizue. It a silly story about the protagonist not being able to ask this girl out and finally doing so at the day where the world is about to end. The names Keith and Shizue are based from the two characters in Masters in Chains. I wrote Keith and the protagonist as silly characters with them being insensitive about what's happening to their school and with their only main goal being Shizue. Their personalities changed a little throughout the development process. I wrote different endings with Shizue and different endings for the world. At that time, I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 so I had this silly idea of making a secret ending where Keith merged with the protagonist forming a mecha of some sort. Will this ending be included with the final game? Time will tell. The writing took me two days because I also started drawing the characters.
-While I was writing the script, I also started drawing the characters. I made Shizue first. Korean fashion always intrigued me so I based her outfit from this one outfit. If you're playing my game, you'll notice how you can't see the characters' eyes most of the time and it's because I'm no good in making eyes. I remembered Azama from Fire Emblem Fates so I just made Shizue have her eyes closed majority of the game. Despite my fondness over short hairs, I gave Shizue a long hair because I wanted to try it out. Her hair was supposed to be brown but I figured why brown? I know it's more realistic but what if I gave her a blue-ish hair? I wanted to give them unusual colors to make them pop a bit.
Keith's outfit is based from Kiryu from Yakuza. I liked the simplicity of his outfit. As stated earlier, I was no good in making eyes so I just covered it with round sun glasses. Like before, I wanted to give my characters unusual hair colors so I gave him a purple hair.
I always liked the pixelated/retro look of indie games like Va-11 Hall-A, Coffee Talk, and Stardew Valley so I made them retro! I decided to go with the retro aesthetic (Forgive me if I'm using the term wrong). If anyone is curious, I made the drawings using ibisPaint X.
-I'm not skilled in making backgrounds so this is where I decided to just look for premade assets and that's where the generous Uncle Mugen comes in. Uncle Mugen posted his backgrounds in Lemma Soft Forums. I got the backgrounds I needed and also gave them a retro(?) look. I got all the initial assets so I made the first few scenes. I had to revisit the Ren'py tutorial because I forgot them but it was easy to understand. Though I don't know if what I did was actual coding but it was REALLY fun. Ren'py came off as intimidating but it was easy enough to understand.
A good introduction to coding maybe? I'm not sure as I don't have coding experience. I made the scenes from the protagonist's classroom so it's not much yet but it's progress. I didn't like the textbox and the name box that came with Ren'py so I also decided to make my own. Inspired by old school RPG textboxes.
-I kept going and got two more backgrounds from Uncle Mugen. I also tried making the main menu art. I was able to finish scenes from 3 areas. I also rewrote the scenes from the third area but at its core, it's still the same.
-I drew 2 visuals for specific scenes because it would be a little boring if I just described them with words in the VN. This is also the day when I made my itch.io page. I did a little coding here. A few jumps and setting variables to true and whatnot. It was confusing because my script was all over the place but it was certainly fun.
-I still kept going and I realized I was short a background for this one area. Again, I got one from Uncle Mugen. I did a lot of rewriting and I guess this is where the most coding is done. I also revised(?) my endings. The endings with Shizue remains unchanged. I rewrote some parts of the game because I wanted to change Keith and the protagonist as characters.
-I made a new visual for the main menu as I didn't like the older one. I tried making my own soundtrack but most of what I made did not fit the game so I looked for soundtrack assets. To be more specific, I need some sort of a sad piece and an 8 bit kind of sound. I found GHOSTHVCK's music loops. The piano loops were amazing. I used them for the last part of the Visual Novel and will probably use them for the trailer. The game was nearing its end though it remains unpolished. I completely rewrote the the scenes from the third area as I felt it's out of place.
-I made two visuals for the ending. I made two more visuals for different scenes.
-I was looking for a soundtrack I found Alan Dalcastagne's Synthwave Music Pack. It's what I was looking for!
-There's a few unnamed characters within the game so I drew them as well. I did not do much writing nor coding here. In fact, I just put the new visuals and the new characters to the game.
-I made the first parts of the ending, polished a few dialogue lines and removed unnecessary lines of code or the redundant ones. My script was less messy.
-I didn't know there was a place where I can put all of these. I decided to these to the devlog forum in itch.io I'm yet to put together the final scene of the ending and I still haven't made a trailer. I plan on releasing this before Saturday. I'll post an update soon. Thank you for reading!
EDIT: Sorry for the edits. Just fixed some errors.
