Hi hi!

Normally I use this space to talk about my current game, PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE, but today I wanted to dissect the little VN I made for the TOXIC YURI VN JAM 2: A field of broken glass. It's been about a month since the game came out, so I wanted to talk about how development went. It was quite hectic! Spoilers ahead for all 5 endings (but mostly ending 5).

GAME JAMS?

I became inspired to do a game jam myself very suddenly at the start of July. I had just played Today, I’ll Be The Hero, a short VN made for the Battle Action Fantasy VN Jam. I won’t say much about it for spoiler reasons, but suffice it to say it is very good and I thought about it quite a bit. What I was most impressed about was how tight the script was — there’s seven different characters, and all of them get fully explored just in their tiny, minutes-long routes. I wanted to try my hand at writing a smaller concept like that.

From Today, I’ll Be The Hero, made by mokadevs, ministarfruit, and cerafish. My favorite character was THE MAGE.

I started browsing jams on itch.io when I stumbled into the 02A2 Jam. In the 02A2 jam, you have 10 days to make a visual novel using Only One of Any Asset — so only one sound effect, character sprite, background, etc. I brainstormed potential ideas, and I had the idea of making a game where a girl (one character sprite) was cleaning up her girlfriend’s corpse (one background) and reflecting on their relationship. I was really excited about it, but the 02A2 jam wasn’t starting for a few more days… and there were still seven days left in the toxic yuri jam… I decided to just go for it, and submit to the TOXIC YURI VN JAM!

WRITING GIRLS THAT HATE (LOVE?) EACH OTHER

One of the reasons why I chose to write for this particular jam was because I don’t consciously write romance very often (toxic or otherwise). It’s just not something I consider myself to be good at… I worry a lot about writing something generic, or writing people without any chemistry. I needed to push myself! I needed to write some terrible girls.

When I started, my process was admittedly all over the place. I first imagined the protagonist as someone who was completely enamored with her girlfriend — enamored to the point of considering her girlfriend to be an object she owned. Here was my initial idea for the mystery:

Players would meet the protagonist (at the time, I just called her “K”), who would declare the corpse in front of her to be her own (implying that she was viewing it as a ghost). Over time, as the player looked at the corpse’s body parts and got more clues as to what happened, they would come to realize that “K” was actually alive, the culprit, and that the corpse was her girlfriend, Clover. That would be the answer you selected in the solution room, and that would get you the game’s one ending.

“That body…”
“…that’s mine.”
from K’s old opening lines

If you think that sounds confusing, then I agree with you. I ran with this idea for two days, but I didn’t think I’d be able to tighten it up in time for submission. I also didn’t really like that it was such a logic-based mystery, where physical clues were the only way to solve it. She’s looking at her girlfriend’s corpse — shouldn’t the way she feels about her be the most important part?

By day 3 of writing, I knew I needed to take a different emotional direction with the story, so I pivoted. There would be no false pretenses about Clover being the corpse, and players wouldn’t be looking for the culprit. Instead, they’d be asked a simple question: why did the killer do it?

This let me focus on the girls’ relationship more (you know. the thing the jam was looking for). Plus, the structure felt a lot better — I could have multiple endings, where each one focuses on a different facet of their relationship, and the “true ending” would have Camellia reconcile everything she’s remembered from these other endings. I felt really good about this direction, so I started drafting the different routes and got to work on art.

MAKING THE ART

With its origins in 02A2, this project ended up being pretty light art-wise (good job, me).

I started with Clover’s body. Her face was obscured because of the killer-victim confusion of the initial draft, but obscuring faces became an important part of the final draft, too.

The initial placeholder sketch from Day 1. I hadn’t decided what either girl looked like yet, so this sketch shows Clover as a bunny.

From there, I cleaned up and lined the near-final version of Clover. Each part of her body was drawn separately, then stitched together as buttons during the investigation segments. It wasn’t a one-to-one fit (you can visibly see the buttons shift between dialogue and investigation transitions), but I don’t mind it all that much.

The near-final version of Clover’s body.

I ended up pulling most of the game’s visuals from this drawing… for example, the textbox is meant to be reminiscent of Clover’s hair!

She’s all tangled up.

I would briefly come back to the main illustration on the final day to grayscale Clover’s fur, just so it matched more with Camellia’s sprites.

The final version of Clover’s corpse, for the sake of visual consistency.

Speaking of Camellia’s sprites, I worked on those next. These went through a few iterations…

The evolution of Camellia’s portraits. From left to right: v1 (the Day 1 placeholder), v2 (with color variations), and v3 (final version, with color variations).

It was important that Camellia’s face was always obscured until she remembered her name in the true ending. v2 was drawn extra-large so that her face would be cut off at the top, but I realized it took up way too much space on the screen. Fixing this took me a while — I didn’t end up drawing v3 until Day 6 of 7!

After settling on her default sprite style, I was able to make her “revealed” versions. I made one body base for these, which gave me the wiggle room to make a ton of expressions for the true ending. She’s a cutie, don’t you think?

Camellia’s sprites in the true ending. I didn’t end up using all of these, but it was good to have so many in case I needed them.

I wanted her to feel a wide range of emotions to balance out her overwhelming bitterness for most of the game. She gets to be angry and worried, but also she gets to smile. It’s her right.

TIME CRUNCH

Even though I feel I scoped the game pretty reasonably, I think my biggest issue with this jam was being indecisive while writing the story. I would keep going back-and-forth on character decisions, phrasing, ending lengths, and so on and so forth. I just couldn’t make concrete decisions on Camellia some days — and not only did that give me less time to do music and art, but it made Camellia’s overall characterization a lot weaker in retrospect. Plus, with so much time dedicated to me fiddling with minor details, a lot of important stuff got pushed back. Music and sound design wasn’t even started until day 6, and I didn’t get to implement any of it until about 2 hours before submissions were due. I was very frantic!

To be frank, when I (finally) submitted to the jam, just under the deadline, I felt pretty disappointed. I thought “this isn’t my best writing. This isn’t my best music. This isn’t my best art.” …yeah? Obviously it’s not. I wrote it in a week, on a whim, with almost no Ren’Py experience. It’s a miracle I even made a game at all. Post-release, I’m a little prouder of it. It’s not a perfect game, it’s not my best prose, but I made it. I haven’t made something completely new in a while. Why not just enjoy it?

GUH

In the meantime, the game’s gotten a small update. Updates after the submission period don’t count for the jam, but I was able to clean up some visual bugs, tweak some phrasing a tiny bit, and add some more music. Now you can play it in-browser, too!  I’ve never built for browser before, so that was fun to learn.

CONCLUSIONS

I (mostly) had a good time making it, and it seems like people found something meaningful in it. That’s all I can ask for. If you did end up reading through, thank you!

It was really cool to see all the people who came together to make their VNs, too. 482 submissions is a lot!!! I wanted to shout out a couple of my favorites:

• rot with me - beautiful EDS yuri about the difference between resting and rotting. It has a built-in hEDS screener, too!

• Keep in Touch, Okay? - college roommate yuri. Zoey sifts through her memories of an intense relationship with her roommate. You should read it for the art alone!

• Eighth Heaven - bittersweet end times yuri. Two parallel stories about girls trying to love and be loved. Really lovely music, and the prose was excellent!

• C•ko•fn•ta•C - oh god. Some truly, truly haunting yuri. Disgusting and horrid sound design (positive). Made me reflect on how I think about fandom and how I present in online spaces.

Thanks for reading. Make more games and write more yuri!