devlog, part 1: concieving and making the first build of this game

I just wanted to write about the process of actually making the meat of this game (the characters and dialog) - a postmortem on design and actual character work.

so the initial thought that made the story was: what if monster prom was more focused? monster prom is a great game - there are a few questionable choices for sure, but I like the spirit of it. The way that it works ... oozes character. But I hate the actual mechanical nature of playing it (because what you get for your actions always feels completely random).

When you're playing Monster Prom ... it's a "multiplayer competition dating sim". And the multiplayer competition part has for me always felt kind of weird, even when playing it with friends as a contest. Everyone kind of wants to win, but also wants to see other people win? There's not a ton of ... hate contest happening, especially since each person can only go to one place at a time and actually taking someone to the prom (the ending goal) is almost impossible generally.

So, I had a 'general story idea'., and a 'general gameplay idea'. And with a story like this, the actual characters matter a lot, so I thought of who I wanted to have in the story, and how I wanted to use them.

And I had a WIP name - it was Clan Fever (because the vampire clans are competing to get you to join them). This had to change before publication for about five trillion reasons, so it did.
The current name isn't great either, honestly - you can only date two people! Two!! There are six options at the end!

... so either I'm going to lean into that or out of that, we'll see. When everything needs to be drawn, and I have more time to look at and edit the writing I did in the world's fastest writing fever dream I've ever done, I'll hopefully get some more clarity. (more about this in part 2 of this devlog!)

I had a terrible WIP game name, but character names were hard, so first I thought of the plot I wanted. Short TLDR: I needed a reason to have a setting I could split into discrete periods where your stats change. Basically, I wanted the general setting to be similar to Monster Prom, but with slightly more focus - more like a Birdland (another game that hugely influenced this one). You're away from people for a period of time, but not a massive period since it's a game jam. This also would give me some experience making content that's gated (you see perhaps 1/4th of the content on every playthrough, since the vast majority of the writing is in the interactions, and you have six 'locations' that all have characters move around doing things - and they do different things depending on if you've seen them earlier in the game).

Generally the way I instinctively write games like this is to make them sad, so that was just sort of ... the plot I thought of first. (The first draft of the intro was actually much sadder, as was the twist.) I thought of a (self-insert, of course, it's a game jam and they're the easiest to write!) main character and battled on whether to have them be 'choose your MC', where the reader would change things about them - but reasoned that the game would be stronger if there was a specific MC. The interactions would feel more real, because I can't write everything for every type of character to feel. So I knew generally what I wanted to write, and thought of ... how to deliver it.

In another game I've played that I took a bunch of inspiration from - First Kiss at a Spooky Soiree - there's basically a pseudo-MC who leads you through things. That seemed like a really handy narrative tool, so I sort of just yoinked it for this.

With those two choices, it was easy to write the game almost more like a short story at that point, which I was really comfortable with. I made up a few names (Nadia is almost certainly from Known Unknowns, which I played recently) and then actually wrote the opening part for those characters, while knowing the general arc of their plot - what was going to happen to them if you played that single story. It was actually a big issue for me conceptualizing the characters exactly, so I tried drawing them. There is, as a result, actual concept art of this game.

These drawings are terrible and unless this game gets really famous they'll remain private, but they're glorified stick figures. But this practice of actually just drawing out the idea of what I wanted to have happen really helped me conceptualize details of like who the characters were, like Nadia's Red Cross shirt. 'why am I drawing them like this? what do I want these characters to /be/ emotionally?'

From there I wrote out the intro and then wrote the endings mechanically - monster prom's "then we lived our lives" at the end really annoyed me, so of /course/ I had to copy it!

this part was actually called 'spiel' for most of the game, until I took pity on myself, slightly rewrote it, and called it 'ending'. It's just:

"In the end, the vampire masquerade was just the beginning of your new life. It was just the beginning ...
but at the same time,
it could lead to so much more ..."

... Oof. But I had the basic intro and ending of the game. I also made the basic rooms - the foyer, library, kitchen, etc, and had a list of possible stats - six in total. so all of those parts, in blank.

This is where the game sat until 5PM the day before the jam ended.

(part 2 of this is coming soon. expect a lot of panic, coming up with general character ideas, cutting a character, being annoyed at speed of testing, hurting hands, cutting every single unessential part of the game, and shipping with major bugs)