Bigger Than You Think

I have decided that VN is going to have a lot more RPG elements than I initially decided. I blame this song. The intro to the song, right up till the part where he sings is absolutely perfect for a pre battle scene (Enia - Drayden showdown anyone?). Not to mention the theme of the song is so fitting to the game. The more I think about this game, the bigger and badass it gets. Definitely going to need to hire a programmer for this. Especially if I decided to do a little open world exploration later on in the game. I've always been a sucker for an open world platform RPG. I'm so pumped for this game, and even though it's pretty linear in story, it's going to be expansive in the routes you can get to it. This pushes the estimated release date much later though. I hope I'm able to write most of the actual script soon though. At least for up to chapter five. That way I can start seeing if I can get a more diverse team to help me.

Sneak Peak: Writing + Concept Art

This scene keeps sticking in my head for some reason, so here's a snippet of the revised prologue.

Prologue's Change

I finally figured out what I didn't like about the prologue, and that was the narrator speaking about Enia's abandonment. I'm a big proponent of "show, don't tell" and I'm not gonna lie when I say that intro was waaaay too "tell-y" and not enough "showy." But thankfully to some people back at the LSF community, I figured out what to change. Instead of having the narrator give you the basic info of their pasts, I'll have mini flashbacks of Henry raising Enia, and her going into the army to prove herself that she's not useless. It'll also give me a chance to show how much Henry had to go through just to raise Enia (I always imagined her as a super hyper little tyke raising Hell for Henry before growing up to be the chill demon she is now). *Is now thinking about cute brother-sister bonding moments between Henry and Enia*

Anyways, just wanted to give that quick update before going back into the mad throes of writing an excessively long VN.

Not Your Standard VN on the block

You know, the more I delve into the VN/KN community, the more I realize that my game is really, really weird. It's not an otome, stat raising game, it's a GxG game, which is rare in of it's self, technically it has RPG elements, it doesn't fit the shonen action VNs though because the fighting isn't the main point, it doesn't have a lot of choices that affect the ending, and it's really, really long. I'm kinda afraid no one's going to like it. For a long time I've been harboring this story, trying out different mediums to tell it, and I honestly feel that a VN piece is the best way to tell it. It's has the visual aspect that I want, but at the same time, it's very text oriented. Maybe I'm just doubting myself because no one seems very interested even though it's super early in the production phase, so of course no one is going to know about it. I don't know. I'm probably just getting way too ahead of myself. Besides, maybe my super weird, long ass VN is gonna be so different that people may read it just because it's not your standard fare.

Hopefully my oddball of a game is interesting enough that someone other than the friends I forced to play it will like it or at least want to try it out to tell me it's crap.

Sneak Peek: Writing

It's official guys; I have written the Prologue. Granted, a good portion was part of Chapter One, but it's changed a lot in terms of content, so it's not that bad. Here's a little teaser for what happens in the beginning:

1st Person POV Official

*Cries softly in xir hands* I just realized that the flashback arcs for Henry and Drayden are in 1st person but Enia's arcs are all in third person. Not only that, but Enia comes across as a really flat character with no real personality other than her reactions to things. And I hate that. Because Enia is much livelier when I don't write her in script format and she's so fleshed out, but without a first person narrative, it rarely shows, if ever. So now my word count has jumped up at least 150K. Fucking hell, how did I know this was going to happen?

Progress Check: Writing

I finally finished Chapter Two! ;w; Now I just need to hammer out Chapter Three, which is a lot longer than I initially planned out. Orz I honestly don't know how long this whole game is going to be. I'm sorta winging it as I go along. Just watch, I bet this whole thing is going to be much longer than my anticipated 100K word count.

Sneak Peek: Writing

People seem to prefer the sneak peeks of writing versus character designs/art, so here's another little snippet, this time from Chapter 2.

Visual Novel or Kinetic Novel? That is the question.

When I initially wrote out To Hell with Love! (which at the time was called Glutinous Succubus), the over all story was really short and was a surprisingly fluffy piece that ended up with Enia falling in love with a human girl and them opening up a ramen shop together. When I first transcribed the story to a visual novel format, it was short, flat, and too much like a dating sim. I hated it, so I scrapped it entirely and built it from scratch, building up from my original idea of a demon falling in love with a girl.

I fleshed out my characters, gave them reasons, hopes, and dreams, realistic reactions, and found out that my 5K story had jumped up to about 30K. Then I found a plot hole. And when I fixed that, my word count jumped up to an approximate 100K. It's terrifying how big this project came, and now I'm stuck on a little conundrum. Whether or not I want it to be a VN (where your choices affect the ending) or a KN(where your choices do NOT affect the ending). The problem with this is because the game will be separated into three arcs, there would be no way of knowing what the player chose in the previous arcs and have it affect the next. So maybe I'll have to change it so that the first to arcs are KN in style (with a few choices that don't affect much), and the last arc being the actual VN piece where you can get any of the crazy endings I have concocted.

Why oh why did my first piece have to be such a huge project? It's too late now, time to get to work.

That Awkward Moment When Your Game's Too Long

So I was going over the full outline with my friend Waz, and I realized something. It's too damn long. Like really fucking long. So I decided that we would have to split it in three parts or rather, three arcs. The first arc is about Enia being forced to live in the human world and coming to terms with herself. The second arc will revolve with some romance but mainly the history of the family and heavily involve mystery. The third arc is the action arc, in which Enia fights to get her throne back and has her "happy" ending.

The problem with this? Coding. It's going to be a true pain in the ass to code this long piece of work, especially seeing as I want to implement a sort of battle system later on. That would involve me moving all my work into Ren'Py and I don't know jack squat about Python coding. So unless I can get someone to work for free to help me code this baby, then I'm going to have to start learning. At least I'm graduating next week and will have all of summer vacation to work on learning Ren'Py. But on the other hand, I could just wait until all the UI's, script, and art is ready and see if I can save money to pay someone to code this game for me. Hmm... Decisions decisions. Maybe I'll just do a kick starter instead when I have most of the work done.

Sneak Peak: Character Design

A little snapshot of Henry's face. Makes me feel sorta bad about the shit I'm going to put him through.

He looks cute right now, but wait till you see him pissed off!

Sneak Peak: Writing

A small section of what's to come in Chapter 1:

Progress Check: Writing

Small update on the writing: Chapter 1 is completed and Chapter 2 is on the way to completion. I'm contemplating doing a prologue to help showcase the world a bit better and explain certain situations that normally wouldn't make sense, but I'm not 100% sure if I should do that...

Sneak Peek: Character Designs

A few sneak peaks on the character designs for Clara (the waitress/witch) and Cecilia (the angel).

The Beginning of a Blog

Welcome to the newly created dev blog of To Hell with Love! I'll be posting artwork, screenshots, and script snippets here whenever I get the chance. Hope you enjoy!