Bleeding Heart

This is fucking personal, yo. Out of privacy I won't indulge in too many details.

ALSO THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. BIG SPOILERS. DON'T READ THIS BEFORE PLAYING THE FUCKJING VISUAL NVOEL:

swsbts turned into a sendoff of a particular time in my life. breakup. heartbreak. inability to let go. stuff like that. I am happy I made it. I do not think I am still the same person now (time of writing this section ~March / April 2025). there's no real point to this paragraph.

I wrote a lot on my general story inspirations in my artist statement so I won't repeat myself too much here. if you wanna know how the overall story took shape, go there. besides all the obvious production details, this post will discuss story in more granularity. (you can dl the artist statement on the game page)

How to work on this thing

Storyboard

it's a jumbled mess. I usually write very disjointedly (like, in general). So I'll have a bunch of disparate scenes or shots in my head that I just jot down. At a later point I figure out how to actually string them together. for the most part, that just happens in my head / in-engine. the only 2 exceptions to this are onyx heart and swsbts. onyx heart had such a tangle of options that for drafting I needed a beat chart or sth like that. if i didn't, I'd have scopecrept into high fuck and all that jazz. not good.

For swsbts, it was more an issue of scope. it's a kinetic novel, there's no choices to keep track of. However, I wanted to include like 5 sex scenes (6 if you count the ending...) and have so many cute and/or important scenes with One and Anhedonia (some of which I wrote months before development began), that I constantly forgot where anything was or would feel sensible.

Sooooo I did the one instinctual thing and printed out all my notes, got a massive ream of paper and started doing a physical storyboard.

This was a one and done thing. I had a big backlog of ideas, assembled the storyboard to get a bird's eye view of the rough story outline, and then I never altered it again. (maybe once or twice but yk. not a living document) this tracks with me generally being averse to documentation. I try to make software and writing that documents itself to streamline my entire working process. I did consult the storyboard a few times tho to generally get a feel for where the story was headed.

Oh and just to compare, Onyx Heart looked like this:

Reducing Overhead

When I made When The Sea Received The Sky, I first started by making my own dialogue system in Godot. Lmao. About 5 weeks after the yuri jam 2023 started, with like 2 weeks to spare, I wrote the entire thing. This led to it being quite short. (Which isn't a bad thing. Just stating facts)

Then, over the next few projects (onyx heart and curse you, entropia) I refined this system (diisis) into something more and more uasble. Yay.

And then I made even more progress with it as I worked on swsbts. Support for CGs. Camera movement. Other shit I can't remember right now, probably.

But in total (and by starting production a month before yuri jam officially started (and I am so fucking thankful for the rules permitting this)), this allowed me to have so much more time to just Put Into The VN, compared to 2023. And it shows! And I'm really happy about that.

Telegram group chat

My writing is scattered across several mediums and spaces. One of them is Telegram (the messenger)

Usually I use my Saved Messages as dumping ground for all my notes and links and whatever I need to save any given day. But with swsbts, there was so much text and misc writing on any given day, that I just had to make my own 1-person group chat fghjdfg

Classical Post-Mortem

For future writing-based projects (especially of this size), I will need to add another step in the production pipeline: External proofreading. When all or most of the script is done, I'll need to run this by a friend with better spelling skills than me so they can catch all the obvious ones before launch. I was too confident in my own abilities here, so the 1.0.0 version had quite a lot of typos lmao. That got fixed in the 1.0.1 version.

Mini Sub-Post Mortem Jumpscare

I just finished No Empty Threats. Did proofreading before publishing. Hell yeag

Then I forgot to upload the proofread build and only rectified it like 12 days later fml lmao

Little Treats in this post

As a little treat, I've included some screenshots from (partly really early) development in this post! See the attached images. They're sketches and moodboards and general shit from How It Gets Made (some of these had to be really compressed to fit itch.io's file size restrictions)

• 1st sketch of the ending
• me trying to come up with a name and architectural style of the clerifugium
• varyious gifs from testing out features and sketching out the game
• bonus artwork :3 (high res on my socials)

Team Comp

ok this is a post morten so im actually gonna try and fucking uhhhh write about development stuff a bit now.

Visuals

Blood Machine was goated as always and fucking delivered. Great artwork. So many CGs. holy fuck. because it's slightly atypical, I just wanna mention that despite being a gamedev herself, and this being a just-for-fun jam, I still treat her like a regular artist, so all of the art has been commissioned. I try to keep this up with most of the projects I work on. when you give me money, you directly finance future work!

Audio

The audio on this was insane!! /pos /sososopos

CØL was an amazing friend again and let me use a bunch of his music! and he even composed the original track that underscores the ending.

Furthermore, red kino is a new friend I made who is a really cool composer and showed me how to use a DAW. he was also part of the team on NEUBAUHAUS and did all the composing and audio and visual design there. He made the two tracks that play during the sex scenes, and if you have keen ears, you will even hear some track layering! instruments get added and removed based on the mood of the moment in the scene :3 this was achieved with an atrocious hack, where all the different on/off configurations are actually entirely rendered tracks and to fade between them, I start a second AudioStreamPlayer with the same playback position and then fade that one in as the other fades out. This multitrack thing was a last-week addition to the game so I didn't have it in me to set up an entire modular audio system with busses and shit besides just Master/Music/SFX.

How do you make characters feel real?

Base them on real events. ngl. There's a lot of emotions and small character interactions that are just directly from my life. This is why its important to have a life outside of gamedev!!!! And to have lots of erp or sex or whatever!!!

I go to a shit ton of shows. I may or may not do drugs. (idk can I say this on itch.io? you shouldn't do drugs btw. but lmao who isn't a little self destructive :3c) I have friends and watch weird movies and puriteen culture is just pathetically hilarious and hilariously pathetic to me. obvisously. whatever.

do not be afraid to do fucked up shit.

This actually leads us to another subsection:

Should there be a more accessible version? (aka less gore or whatever)

fuck no. I considered making a more sanitized version of swsbts, with a small checkbox and shit. But that'd just be hollow. Porpentine put it well. I agree:

ok we're getting derailed. this isa postmortem. tldr; be a gay freak online or perish

anyways, I will use this derailment to get back on track in this post mortem: story discussion!

the rape scene

I'll start with the scene I debated the most on if I should include it and/or in which form: the arrest + subsequent offscreen rape of Anhedonia

narratively speaking, I felt like the clericants weren't a sufficiently vile and horrid threat at this point in the story. So I was thinking on what to do here, and ultimately settled on Anhedonia just absolutely going through it. we had allusions and flashbacks to One's past in the prison complex, but ultimately they are from the past. We know she made it out. We know she is fine. we don't know what the actual current threat of clericants looks like. And we had never seen Anhedonia be in this compromised a position until now (so we don't know how she'll react) and it was uncertain how she'd make it out (the story was starting to head into it's final third afterall)

So this was super suspenseful and scary!! (good)

I don't think I ever seriously considered showing the rape itself. both because I didn't want to have an explicit noncon sex scene in swsbts, and because I was unsure if I could treat it properly. additionally, I could just use the technique of letting the reader fill in the blanks themselves. I'm sure that at least some readers have experience with sa and/or rape, so I could let you (the reader) fill in the scene in the most horrible way you can come up with! this simultaneously doesn't tread on unnecessary toes and is the most universally gruesome approach I think. comes from horror writing.

Spectra

On a very surface level summary, wtsrts and swsbts are very similar games. And continuing on a surface level, a glaring observation is the presence of 1 side character here!

Spectra served firstly as a character to interact with post-suicide. I didn't want to write anhedonia being completely alone post-suicide/pre-ending

over the writing process, she developed into a nice vessel to move the story along when one and anhedonia were stuck (initiating the shrine building efforts, catching one after anhedonia's capture)

I also enjoyed being able to write a character that can low-key see the future maybe a bit :3

I don't care about any of this and it means the world to me

swsbts is - in some sense to me - the best game / vn ive ever made. honestly, I'd also agree on that on a subjective quality level. The comments I've received on it are fucking insane. So others agree. Yay. PEOPLE USE ONE AND ANHEDONIA AS PFPs FFS THIS IS SO COOL AAAAAAAAA

I actively try not to think about it. That might also just be depression?

It's difficult to impossible for me to feel pride in my work but that's alright. I think I benefit from it because that means I'm always striving for more. never enough. and once I'm done with a project, it's time to move on and get even better (One's working attitude is very much based on me irl lmao) I burned out on art comms years ago because external motivation is the motivation killer. so I try to make this shit for myself only.

this also gives me anxiety about ever not living up to myself again but I deal with that when it happens ig.

The version of me that made this game does not exist anymore. Fuck this is getting existentialist, can we get to more concrete shit pls

swsbts stands as a cultural artifact that is so deeply moving that I am really glad it exists. Which brings us to...

A new type of emotion

cw: sh. this entire section will be very anonymized.

As I kept talking to people, reading comments, seeing others react to my work, I discovered a new emotion. It's an emotion not all creatives will ever feel in their lifetime I think.

If you look into the comments, you see people having heartfelt and transformative experiences. That's lovely. But especially with a work such as swsbts, there's always this undercurrent of "these are powerful but sometimes negative emotions to go through". I received what is- realistically- one of the most penultimate information short of attempts / successes of suicide or murder. I made someone self-harm for the first time. Or, well... swsbts did. And I mean Self-Harm. Not testing out knifeplay because that's in the vn. Actual emotional distress to the degree of self-destructiveness.

And... I do not feel bad about it. (side note: there are very interesting questions brought up with this situation that I do not want to address in this post-mortem)

Whatever this feeling is, it contains pride. No shame.

I am glad for the work I put in the world. Proud of my output as a creative. This risk comes with writing dark fiction. swsbts is not alone. The words "Snuff Puppy Shelter made me into a worse person" have been said to me. Directly.

Holy fuck.

maybe call it alignment? Picture me with my arm outstreched, gun trained on your head. this is correct. this is the way things ought to be. this is how we are and the power spanning between us.

it is horny and proud and somber and calm

like a jet black graphite monolith

Maybe the Stillness of empty spaces dolls encompasses this feeling as well. I cannot say. I thank everyone for being with me here.

Kill A Fascist

Be A Faggot

Peace And Love