Onyx Heart Post Mortem + Soft DIISIS Announcement

Game Data

• Jam Submission Date: 2024/02/20 (https://itch.io/jam/queer-vampire/rate/2540381)
• Genre: Visual Novel
• Project Length: 1.5 months
• Project Budget: ~220 USD for artwork
• Peak Team Size: 2 people: 1 writer/programmer/background artist & 1 character artist

A massive game

Onyx Heart is probably the largest game project I've finished, after I started it on my own. Heavily inspired by the general vibe and modular storytelling of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, it was really interesting to experience the development cycle of such an interactive story. Keeping track of all the story branches was starting to prove fairly challenging at some point, which both tells me that

a) I need better tools, and,

b) I might look into getting co-writers for equally- or larger-sized projects in the future. (This already worked pretty well when Ænthroppe and I worked together on Sunless Horizon)

And speaking of collaborations, I really like this mode of working with actual 2D artists for sprites. Eventually, I may go back to doing 2D art myself, but just the volume of work that gets lifted from your shoulders when you have a dedicated character artist is really nice. Plus, you get to work with cool people and their art rocks too. I really want to thank D3ADPSYCH3 at this point because her reliabilty was outstanding in this project!

Modularity...? ...more like... cringe...

Writing this story was... something. I started this project by just making a rough story flowchart on my personal figma board, just to give me a rough sense of where the story would go, and which characters I'd need along the way. This worked well enough, but like all documentation, this eventually became outdated, and just difficult to keep track of. Especially the last ~15% of any playthrough will have been completely freeform / flow of consciousness, and not planned in advance (mostly because of time constraints.)

Eventually, during prose writing and polishing, it often became a balancing act of fleshing out one scene, but then having to also visit other parallel scenes to give them equal content volume. Additionally, having every permunation of playthrough be coherent is a thing I hope I succeeded at, but with combinatorics you can never be sure (And I just didn't have time / patience to test all paths). (lmk if you encounter any inconsistencies lmao)

(A funny side effect of this is that I now have a way more delicate radar for when other games have these little seams in their dialogue where they switch between general lines and reactive lines.)

During the end of this project I also stumbled across this tumblr post, which might prove valuable in future narrative-focused jams! Something new to experiment with, hehe

Hiding the goodies

Another consequence of this modular approach is that some players will not see all scenes. When you have personal favorites, and players have different tastes, this invariably means that the "best" scenes (either from their or your perspective) might never enter their screen! Personally, I am okay with this and the option to not meet entire characters is part of the metanarrative I envisioned for Onyx Heart, but it is a sacrifice you have to be willing to make. (I now feel the thrill of FromSoft devs that hide really cool stuff behind very obscure paths)

The only thing that bugs me about this situation is that there definitely are story paths that are weaker than others, and I want players to enjoy themselves as much as possible :/ I just gotta get better at writing modular stories then, I guess, lmao

Writing and inspiration

One big thing to remember when writing narrative-heavy games is that unless you have a scene materialize fully-formed in your head, it is way more about the general shape of the story, and less about the individual phrases (and even then you will revisit it again eventually). This isn't to say you can't have memorable lines, just that you need something to embed them into, otherwise they lose narrative context -> weight -> importance, which squanders their potential.

That being said... I still often just strung together scenes in this game, which is both willed and due to time budget constraints. Capra as a protagonist is very mentally ill and not 100% in tune with reality, so fragments being incoherent or missing is fine from a perspective of unreliable narration. But the most notable reason for this pastiche of story fragments, is that Onyx Heart is an homage to my life, in a way.

A big cluster of inspiration for many of the scenes in Onyx Heart are actually just the real-life lived experiences of my friends and me. (I will leave it up as an exercise to the reader to determine where the fiction starts taking over.) This game is part traumadump / loveletter / diary, because I also find it important to document our queer lives, and our existences.

DIISIS

Personally, I think Onyx Heart is an inferior game to When the Sea Received the Sky (WTSRTS), compared on general storytelling, worldbuilding, etc. The biggest personal gain I had from this project was simply using the custom dialog system I built for wtsrts for a second time, making this really about stress-testing this tortured system. I am currently still looking into making it available publicly in the future, adding more features, making it more usable, etc. but for the time being, it works well enough for internal fuckery.

During a work trip at the end of January this year I even finally had inspiration strike and the cosmos itself delivered a name into my cerebrum: DIISIS. The Dialog Interface Sister System is what is the current "engine" for my visual novel work is called. This a post mortem, so I won't go into technical details, but I might in the future, in a different blog post. I will say however, that tooling is incredibly valuable (something you can learn from this GodotCon 2023 talk by Sander Vanhove too), and without the existing infrastructure to just... write a VN, a game of this scale would not have been possible.

Conclusion

Working on Onyx Heart was an interesting challenge. It is a big game, and almost-overscoped, but a very very valuable learning experience. I will take a bit of rest now, after working almost every day on this since the start of the year, but hope that you can find intrigue in the world you get to see in the game.

Fun fact: The resulting JSON script file for the dialogue for this was about 1 MB in size, making Onyx Heart approximately 5 times as big as WTSRTS.