I haven’t finished a novel in at least two years. It’s a pretty shameful thing for someone with a degree in Creative Writing. It’s even more shameful for someone who originally wanted to work in book publishing. Instead, I’ve been playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club, Katawa Shoujo, VA-11 Hall A, and Mass Effect (among others).
I’ve written articles about the characters and narratives in those games, and after a long gestation period in my head, I decided to put together my own game. Or at least a demo of it.
That game is Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim. So far, it’s been one of the most rewarding and challenging projects I’ve worked on, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people once it’s complete. This series of articles is gonna talk about what it’s like putting it all together, from concept to (hopefully) final demo.
A Story of Two FAN Letters
I don’t think that any creative person ever stops being a giant fanboy (or girl) for the people that inspired them, no matter how experienced or acclaimed they become. So I wanted to start off by talking about two fan letters I wrote to the creators of two games that really shaped this project.
A big part of my drive to create a visual novel game came from playing Doki Doki Literature Club, which won over fans and critics despite being one of the most disturbing, twisted games in recent memory. After I finished my first playthrough, I opened up a window in Gmail and wrote Dan Salvato a letter. Here’s an excerpt:
…I wanted to send you a letter saying how much…I’m not sure. It’s a terrible thing to say I “loved” a game about girls committing suicide. To be honest, I felt sick playing it–it felt like it was slowly picking apart my sanity in ways I believed nothing could…
When I was done, I felt like I was looking at the whole world in a new light. For me, DDLC reignited my passion for storytelling, for games, and for creating elaborate fantasy worlds where, as Yuri might say, you can lose yourself.
You can read my full thoughts on DDLC here, but that game wasn’t the only one that really inspired me.
As the internet legend goes, Katawa Shoujo started as a joke on 4chan that progressively became more and more serious. Forum members started pitching ideas for a dating sim, which ranged from disgusting to surprisingly thoughtful. Some committed posters got together and assembled the game in Ren’py, a free visual novel engine.
The game’s story revolves around the male protagonist’s transfer to a high school for handicapped youth after he suffers a heart attack, and from there, becomes an exploration of vulnerability, honesty, and empathy. After my first playthrough (Hanako’s Path), I wrote another letter, to one of the writers behind the game. Here’s an excerpt:
“…every now and then, I come across something that illuminate my life, whether it’s a song or a conversation with a friend. Katawa Shoujo was one of those things, and I’m so thankful that it exists. I hope that one day I can write something so well-crafted and devastatingly honest.”
What was so striking about these games was how engaging they were, despite having very limited animation and relatively little player interaction. Instead, the strength of the writing had to carry the game. As a writer myself, I wanted to create something that evoked the same feelings I had while playing these games.
Brainstorming Black Heaven
I’m a big fan of necromancers. I wrote a whole post about designing a terrifying helmet for my necromancer character No-Eyes, who appears in this game. I also published a standalone short story about No-Eyes in the professional fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I’m fascinated by immortality, forbidden arts, and riding the line between being human and…something else. Horror really hooks me, and I wanted to weave that into the game.
I’m also a big fan of worldbuilding, to the point that nearly everything I write or create takes place in the same world. So when it came time to lay the groundwork for Black Heaven, I decided to set it in my shared world. Because of my love of DDLC and Katawa Shoujo, I decided to make the game a dating sim, but with a necromantic twist: you’d be romancing ghosts.
One of the guiding ideas of ghosts in my stories is that they’re shattered mirrors of who they used to be–the memories, traumas, and desires of their past warp and twist their mind, and their memories become muddled. This added an interesting dimension to the ghost characters: instead of just building a relationship with a ghost, you’d need to learn more about their past and psychology.
After several iterations on that theme, I came up with the central conflict: your character makes a deal with the necromancer No-Eyes to collect a list of ghosts from across a post-apocalyptic landscape and bring them to him. In return, you get to keep a ghost as a companion. However, as the game goes on, you realize that turning any of the ghosts over to No-Eyes may mean condemning them to an eternity of torment…
Laying the Groundwork
As soon as I had the central kernel of the plot and some rough sketches of where I wanted it to go, I started thinking about the project as a whole: what would the final product look like? How would it be framed to potential players? What would the guidelines be for the art? And what would be the game’s “pitch”?
I came up with a proposal document, written and outlined so that I could show it to possible collaborators to give them a quick, effective summary of the project. Mostly, though, it was meant to be an internal reference document: I’ve found that pretending to explain a project to a complete stranger can quickly solidify what the project is and what it should be, and the proposal did that. In essence, the doc galvanized the specifics of the game and gave me a clearer picture of what needed to be done.
In addition to the game’s description, I listed the art assets I needed for the project (such as character and background art), narrative content, character profiles, and marketing materials (such as a logo and cover art).
You can read the proposal here.
The proposal became my guide for the rest of the project, but I realized I needed to create separate docs to start outlining and designing the characters.
Character Profiles and the Art Brief
You can see the Art Brief for the demo (which includes Character Profiles) here.
I decided to sit down and sketch out backstories for each of the characters, covering their history, personalities, and key experiences, as well as their deaths. I boiled down these backstories into very short, succinct profiles for each of the characters, which listed key traits, physical descriptions, and a summary of their personality. After that, I found reference photos from real-life models to help get a clearer picture of their appearance and assist the artist in drawing character art.
Visual novels live or die based on their art and visuals, I wanted to make sure the art brief clearly expressed what I was going for. In the brief, I give some samples of the type of art style I envisioned for the game, as well as samples of character art from Katawa Shoujo. I also outlined how I wanted the concept art and design process to work.
Because of the visual novel format, each character would need at least three “portraits,” each of which would express a different emotion: happy, neutral, or sad.
In addition to their normal forms, I decided to give each ghost a “horror form,” which must be dealt with before sealing the ghost in the player’s grimoire. The idea was that the player must see beneath the horror form to find the person underneath, and then appeal to their humanity to convince (or force) them to enter the grimoire. Each horror form had its own description and set of reference photos, which were meant to guide their design.
Horror forms were partly inspired by the monsters in Silent Hill, which were designed to be expressions of the protagonist’s suppressed thoughts and feelings. Another influence was my reading into the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which described the many layers of psychological hang-ups a soul must peel away before moving to its next reincarnated form.
Key Question: ARE WE JUST MAKING PORN?
I got in touch with Joel Clapp, an artist friend of mine, to discuss creating some of the concept art for the game. I sent him the art brief I’d put together, but soon after creating some sketches for me, he brought up an important and troubling question: how sexy should he draw them?
This led to a conversation about the morality of dating sims in general and how comfortable we were with creating a game in a genre where women are explicitly treated as sex objects. Here’s an excerpt from my email response to Joel:
“From the beginning, I’d planned on Black Heaven being a subversion of your normal dating sim, but as you point out, just because Doki Doki Literature Club is a subversion doesn’t mean it doesn’t exploit sexuality to attract players and implicitly promise them sexy times to get them to play—the characters still have accentuated breasts and curves, which were designed to attract people.
This brings up two questions:
- Are we making low-key porn and putting up fancy window dressing in the form of narrative and setting to disguise the fact that Black Heaven is essentially a sex doll house, where all the characters are designed to titillate and gratify the player?
- If we’re not doing that, then are we being dishonest by calling the game a “dating sim” and marketing it like one?
In my mind, the answer to the first question is no. That’s not what attracts me about dating sims, and it’s not what I have planned. In my mind, this is gonna be a game about romance, but it’s not just gonna be about that—it’s about learning how to put yourself back together by helping others do the same, it’s about being honest with yourself and others, and it’s about choosing between your own selfish desires and what’s best for someone else. It’s not just a pretext for porn.
As to the second question, I think the answer is also no. Games like Katawa Shoujo prove that you can have a conventional dating sim, including sexuality and multiple romantic partners to choose from, and still tell a heart-wrenching story that does not boil down to you picking out a 2D sex doll. It is possible to creating a dating sim that uses romance and sexuality as part of a bigger, unified effect, and I think a lot of players are looking for something like that…
…I think, when designing these characters, we should stick to making them tastefully attractive, but with a greater focus on bring out their individual characters. It’s more important to make them memorable and distinct than making them sexy.”
Conclusion
This is a really short summary of the concept stage of the project, which went through a bunch of iterations and alterations. In Part 2, I’ll talk about the narrative design process, including drafting scenes and revising them in Twine.