Postmortem + New VN Announcement

Thank you so much for trying out our first-ever game, “Swing and Miss”! The response to the game was far more positive than we thought it would be, and we’re so grateful that so many people played and left reviews + comments.  (Apologies, this was definitely long overdue XD )

How it all started:

We’d been planning on making a game for a while, with multiple fleshed-out stories in the drafts prior to creating our itch account. The first story we planned thoroughly was one we were invested in, but we realized it was growing larger and more complex the more we worked on it. 

So we decided to put it aside for a bit to start on another story in hopes of creating something shorter and much simpler as our first finished game. Unfortunately, this one started growing complicated (anyone noticing a pattern?), so we had to put it aside too. Eventually, we figured we needed to look for a jam that forced us to work on a smaller scale and came across the O2A2 Jam. 

The Process:

From the start, we knew we wanted our game to be on the creepier side, but we also wanted to somehow incorporate a plot twist within the 1000-word limit. Our first step was to decide on a setting. Our thoughts immediately went to anything related to the countryside at night (we’ve both spent a good amount of time in villages in the middle of nowhere and can confirm that demons come out at night :’) ), and we settled on a desolate bus stop as a location that felt isolating enough. 

We originally thought of having a story where the MC attempts to escape the clutches of a stalker (and just abandon our dreams of a plot twist) until we thought we could switch it up a little and have the MC be the villain of the story instead. This meant the “stalker” had to be one of the good guys; thus, Jason was born.

In order to make the MC appear innocent at first, Jason had to seem extremely suspicious. So we tried our best to make him come off as a proper perverted stalker through the sprites and some oddly worded dialogue in the first half. 

As a police officer, his methods seemed a bit unconventional from the start, so we just decided to lean into that and make him a smug, somewhat trashy police officer who just barely toed the line. For some reason, we also find trashy characters very easy to write, so that may have also played a part in his characterization…

As for the audio aspect, rather than using background music, we made the game more immersive by using audio of crickets, cicadas, and whatever other creepy critters make a racket in the evening. We also added the sound of heartbeats to make the vibe more unsettling and to signify how stressed the MC felt (the more heartbeats in a row, the more panicked the MC was). 

As far as how the plot went, once we settled on having the MC as a murderer, we tried to think of a crime that didn’t require too much effort but still did a decent amount of harm. We ended up choosing poison and did what was probably an unnecessary amount of research (one of us googled things that probably put us on a watchlist, but that was a risk we were willing to take for you lovely players <3), and we eventually decided the clues should be an object that tied MC to their company, MC’s whereabouts during and after the crime, and a physical indicator that showed that MC handled the poison recently.

As we were nearing our 1000-word limit, we realized that we didn’t have enough room to convey everything we wanted. We realized that we’d either have to sacrifice some of the clues/context or remove the alternative ending we had in mind. For the sake of the flow of the story, we unfortunately removed the ending where the player ended up killing Jason through a stroke of luck.

Overall, making this short game was a very enjoyable and educational experience. We’d again like to thank everyone who played and took the time to leave reviews and feedback. Thank you so much! And we hope you’ll stay tuned for the future projects we have in mind!

Upcoming Project:

We’ve actually decided to enter the Once Upon A Time VN Jam! This time,  we’re in the process of creating an otome game called Nuitépine (Nightthorn).

 It's a loosely inspired gender-bend of the classic Sleeping Beauty (with a few horror elements!). So far, we’ve planned out the prologue and loosely planned the 3 routes. We are currently working on the script and art simultaneously, at roughly 50% progress. There’s no word limit, so we’re definitely going to have more than one ending to make things more interesting for you guys this time. 

An excerpt about Nuitépine:

There was once a flourishing land, kingdoms ruled by human and fae alike.

But one day, the land began to grow sick with a terrible disease. A dark and heinous forest had grown overnight— Nuitépine.

Starting as a small cluster of vines, it soon grew over towns, villages, kingdoms. Even the fae couldn’t use their magic to cure the land.

Eventually, monsters emerged from the darkness of the cursed forest and devoured the kingdoms’ subjects. The forest continued to grow. The people grew fearful.

As the years went by, brave souls would venture into the forest, hoping to find a way to destroy it and restore peace to the land. But none ever returned...

Many centuries later, a lowly Prince from a faraway kingdom is sent into the throes of the cursed forest.  Expected to perish by all,  the Prince accepts their fate.

Until...  

As a sneak peek, here are some portrait sprites of our main character, Perrin Navarre: 

Our plan is to release the demo/Prologue by the jam’s deadline on January 2nd, 2024. After the prologue, we’ll release the routes one by one upon completion and most likely include a DLC for each route. If you would like to get more frequent updates on this project, please follow us on our Twitter!

Sidenote: Nuitépine isn’t one of the two stories we planned prior to Swing and Miss, but we promise those stories will see the light of day someday!