IHHTAGTTTY - Launch Afterparty
Hello! We've officially published our second game! This game was made entirely by the PM Studio team.
Play it here : https://pmstudio.itch.io/ihhtagttty
Ren'py is really fun. In the future, I'd like to customise the GUI more, but with this game, it's nice as it is!
I've already mentioned this before, but this is an adaptation of a short story I wrote when I was 15. It was a short vent story about how I would often escape into manga, anime and games. In those stories, they will always return to the status quo even when things go wrong.
Obviously, it's fiction.
I desperately wanted to crawl into books or visual novels at the time. In real life, when things go wrong, they stay that way. If you die, you die. You don't always get the girl. You don't always win the championship.
I felt really disillusioned about that. I wrote a story about this girl who escaped into visual novels but was harshly pulled back into the real world.
The story ended at the line, "And there is no hero."
When I was adapting that short story into this game, I had a realisation that my feelings had changed. Five years ago, when things went wrong and they didn't return to "normal", it felt like the end of the world.
Nowadays, things go wrong all the time. Yet, somehow, it's okay.
So, after five years, this beloved author-insert finally has a happy ending. Things go wrong. She's stuck in the code but finds a way to make her own happiness despite everything.
I guess that's still a little messed up, but she's doing okay.
Inspiration
Treasure Room (2010) / Nemu Youko
This is a oneshot from Nemu Youko's anthology manga. This story is about a girl who is a huge hoarder. She is then transported into a world (cave?) full of everything she's ever collected.
As always, reading it yourself is way better than me describing it, but it was so perfectly dreamy and whimsical. When I first read it, I related so much to the girl. I also dreamt of being teleported into a pillow collection of everything I love.
The adaptation more closely resembles Treasure Room because both protagonists never leave the "treasure room". But it's still a happy ending.
Dear Life / Maya C. Popa
This poem is very recent, but it had the same themes as my original short story. Small reminder for our readers, it's not wrong to be selfish.
Dreaming Mary (2014) / Accha
The original short story was similar to Dreaming Mary. Where the girl starts in the dream world and then is mauled back into the real world.
The scenes where you're talking to Claire were not present, and neither was the happy ending. The short story was an entire real-world scene with a bad ending.
I loved Dreaming Mary then and still do, but I couldn't stand giving Claire a downer ending.
Early Iterations
The original concept that I had for this game was a chatbot. If anyone remembers the game dev Pacthesis' old flash games, I wanted to make similar to the Tomo/Oz chatbot. (I was a real Deviantart flash stan). It would've felt more like you were really talking to Claire and that she was really living in the code.
However, something I realised very quickly was that I had no idea how to do that :P
I initially tried to create an AI chatbot (like Neuro sama or Facade), but the talking style was difficult for me to "train".
The dialogue felt strange, so I scrapped that idea and went for an IF game (Anchorhead, Untold Stories or Seirra games). While it was fun and definitely what I was going for, it was just so much to code.
Someday, I would like to try again at creating an IF game, but currently, I'm too busy to be able to work on it fully and release it within a year.
So I went with Ren'py!
Ren'py was familiar since it's Python, but the downside of using Ren'py was that the final game wasn't as interactive as I had originally hoped. I didn't want to restrict the dialogue options because I wanted it to feel like you were talking to Claire and not selecting pre-set dialogue options.
But with my current schedule, I had to make that sacrifice...
Thus, the final iteration of this game is a visual novel! While it wasn't my original plan, I'm still happy with how it turned out!