Big announcement: I’m planning on turning “Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim” into a full-length, commercial visual novel!
Though the project likely won’t kick into gear until Fall 2020, I’m laying the groundwork for the game now, including 1) an early version of the demo with placeholders, 2) marketing plans, and 3) an outline for the full game!
The Game
Here’s the working description of the game:
In Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim, you must collect three ghosts in a magical grimoire and return them to a mysterious necromancer named No-Eyes, who offers to bind one of them to you forever. The journey will take you into the depths of this ruined world as well as the memories of each of the ghosts you meet, but you can only give your heart to one of them. Who will you choose?
- Ru, the shy, brilliant scholar?
- Leathe, the fiery, sharp-witted conwoman?
- Ryu-Ito, the fierce but kind-hearted martial artist?
Be careful—in this world, ghosts can take on many forms, from beautiful shades to Lovecraftian horrors, so you’ll need to use your kindness and cunning to survive!
The game is meant to be in the dark fantasy/horror genre, and is planned to have some 18+ material, including romance scenes and some Silent Hill-style horror imagery.
Right now, here are some of the planned key features of game:
- Three romance-able characters
- Simple interactive mini-games
- Lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack with original and licensed music
- Hidden routes and multiple endings
- 8-hour playtime
One of the gameplay elements I’m super excited about is a feature in Ren’Py that allows the game to remember certain player decisions, even if they don’t save the game, exit, and reload a previous save.
This ties is nicely with one of the key narrative elements–chronomancy, or time magic. The player character is given the ability to go back in time and change their actions (manifested as the player reloading a save), but when they do, some characters will remember the unsaved “alternate” timeline.
Since two of the key themes are memories and blurring of reality, this opens up a lot of possibilities for weird, maddening things to happen to the PC.
Making the Decision
When I first posted about “Black Heaven” several months ago, he project was only planned to be a portfolio piece, something to demonstrate my narrative design and team management skills.
After starting work for the Loresmyth and Tales in September, I shelved “Black Heaven” to focus on my professional work, which included writing and coding the pilot for a novel-length interactive fiction series.
Once my schedule stabilized a bit and I finished up the pilot for Tales, I decided to keep working on “Black Heaven” in my free time. I felt like I really had something special, and my work with Tales had served as a crash course in writing and coding interactive fiction.
After a few weeks of thinking and researching, I decided that once my writing commitment to Tales was finished, I’d try to make “Black Heaven” into a full-length commercial game.
The Plan
The current development and release plan looks like this:
- Establish an LLC to publish the game and act as legal entity
- Build the dev team (consisting of a character artist, background artist, composer, and UI/game designer)
- Create a 30-min demo with full music and art assets
- Promote the demo
- Promote a Kickstarter campaign for the full game
- Launch Kickstarter campaign
- Create full game once funding is secured
- Deliver full game to backers (plus any stretch goals)
- Release full game on retail platforms
Right now, the estimated budget of the game is between $1,800- $2,000 and the retail price is planned to be around $7.99, though these figures may change.
I’m not planning on making any money from the Kickstarter to keep the funding goal low. If I make any money, it’ll be from selling the game commercially.
The Demo
I’ve already written up an alpha version of the demo, which is about 20 minutes long. The demo uses placeholder art and music (from Persona and various YouTube artists, respectively), but most of the text and mechanics are there.
Here’s some screenshots of the demo:
