Reflecting on Lovely Spirits
My First VN
In my senior year of college I took part in a Valentines themed gamejam. For those unaware, a gamejam is an event where people need to make a game fitting a certain theme by the deadline. Since it was Valentines themed, the focus was on romance. Teams had two weeks to work on their game.
Although I lacked experience with game development, the club that hosted the gamejam had previously shown off the visual novel engine Ren’py, which is both fairly simple to use and has many resources available online for when it isn’t simple. I decided I was going to make a visual novel, and so Lovely Spirits began development.
My mind is a maelstrom of ideas, so I already had concepts to work off. In this case it was a game where a demon summoner could romance a demon from the Ars Goetia. I made my pitch in the discord server for the gamejam and hoped it would get people interested in joining my team, since I knew I couldn’t create any assets by myself.
[Eligos, one of the four possible love interests. Having art like this does a lot to increase the quality of the VN.]
Starting out my team was just me and a composer. Then my team was joined by another composer and an artist. Together the four of us were able to put out a complete game in time for the gamejam. Lovely Spirits has four character themes, six characters with artwork, a set of sound effects to play as text appeared, and four distinct story routes, each focused on a different demon.
Browsing Lemma Soft Forums helped me with all of the programming issues I ran into, though what they were has already been forgotten. What I remember is learning that having good resources can make lack of knowledge a non-issue.
Writing the game script was what really took up most of my time. I wrote each story route one after the other. You can tell which one was written last and didn’t have the need to move on to the next one hanging over it, because it has a minor choice for the player, something I didn’t have the time to write and code for other routes.
[Andras, one of the four possible love interests. He and Eligos are easily the most popular of the four.]
One part of the process I remember is the artist quickly creating an alternate Andras sprite without his sword to reflect him giving it away, and also pointing out how another line seemed to require another sprite for him with a different expression. It made me realize that on a team project I needed to be conscious of how my writing intersects with other aspects of the game, that it was possible for me to unintentionally make more work for others with a careless bit of prose.
I also learned a lesson about the importance of writing my script outside of the code first. Without a spell checker it turned out that I misspelled ‘physical’ every time, and not always in the same way. Once that was pointed out by a friend, after I had submitted the game, I was so embarrassed that I rushed to review the full script in a text editor and upload a new version.
Looking back on it, I continue to be embarrassed by other aspects of the game’s writing. Then I remember it was written on a two week deadline while balancing class work for college. Still, rereading pieces of my own writing that I’d consider clunky isn’t much of a pleasant experience.
[Foras, one of the four possible love interests. The artist took his design in a direction I didn’t see coming but quickly came around to.]
I value accuracy when drawing on already established characters, mythological inaccuracy can be a dealbreaker for me. Yet in Lovely Spirits I ended up mostly developing my own lore around the demons rather than following everything in the texts I took the demons from. The excuse in story is that the original demon summoners were biased and the demons don’t follow or contradict any religion.
In my defense, a two week deadline where you’re learning brand new skills isn’t a conductive environment for careful research. I also don’t think playing loose with occult concepts like the Goetic demons is as bad as warping mythological characters beyond recognition (like demonizing a certain Aztec god for the hundredth time), but that might be unfair to demonology.
[Agares, one of the four possible love interests and the first the player meets. Some question his fashion, but I support his choices.]
One theme I came upon with this story was the idea of immaterial vs material, where the demons are spirits that want to exist in the material world by creating a physical form. I have noticed a shift in attitudes, where it feels like most ancient religions insisted the physical world was either outright false or only a small piece of existence, but now that the internet is around the standard intellectual take has been to praise the physical world and what you can touch.
Of course that wasn’t fully explored. I do have some other ideas in the same vein that would have a chance to properly dig into that theme, since they most likely wouldn’t have as strict of a deadline.
For the player character I tried to give him a personality because I dislike mute self inserts. At the same time I wanted to make it easy to project on him. The intent is that he’s customizable in the player’s imagination, where you can fill in various blanks about the vague backstory and his unseen or described appearance. But he does have his own dialogue and dynamics with the demons.
Meanwhile for the main villain I knew there wouldn’t be time to write an interesting nuanced villain. So instead I opted to make him obnoxious and the kind of character who is fun to hate on and mock. Which you can probably tell from the design the artist gave him, which is right below this paragraph.
[His name is Garrett, and if I recall right, the artist used pictures of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as references when drawing him.]
Part of me would like to revisit this game when I have the time, if the other members of the team have interest as well, and rewrite it. Which would involve doing more research and thinking through the world building more, and getting proper backgrounds to replace the royalty free images we had to use it. Or maybe I should learn to be content with what I made. Or make a fighting game with these characters.
Regardless, the fact remains that I do have a full visual novel under my belt and the skills needed to make another one. That’s something I can be proud of. If you want to play it yourself, you can get it for free on itch.
Optional Discussion Prompts: Do you have anything that you look back on with a mixture of pride and embarrassment? If you’ve played the game or plan to, whose route did you go for first?