Hello, fellow game enthusiasts! After years of thinking about it, I am making my first game.
It is funny to think that just a month ago, I had no idea how to even make a game. I chose the visual novel format because it seemed easier to make than anything 3D, and I have always loved writing. Thankfully, I came across Ren’Py, which has been much simpler to learn than the time I tried learning Unity!
I had an idea, or more like I got a feeling that I wanted to share through a simple story. I thought it would be fun to share with people who might be interested and, of course, fulfil my dream of making a game.
It's kinda a stereotype that all gamers want to make their own game, so here we are!
What is Mono no Aware?
It’s a short and bittersweet visual novel about a guy named Kenji. Six years of living a mundane life of home, work, home, rinse and repeat means unsurprisingly, he stopped noticing little things around him. He is not unhappy; he is just used to routine.
The story starts when his new upstairs neighbour (Sora) unexpectedly knocks on his door with a random question.
The game will take place across seven scenes (or that is how many I plan to make). It's about the city you stop seeing when you live in it too long. It's about what it feels like when someone changes the angle you look at things from. It's about the pathos of things, or in Japanese, mono no aware.
It is not quite a love story. But it's close.
Where I am right now
The script is mostly ready; I just need to have a fresh pair of eyes to edit it. The emotional arc is exactly what I wanted it to be. Even though I've read it so many times now that I can't tell if it's good any more, which apparently is expected.
On the technical side, the game is running. Sora has a sprite, a temporary one, which I am redrawing as I am emotionally attached to her already. I have sourced backgrounds and UI art as well, and all seven scenes have been coded. At this point, I feel Sora has come to life!
[Sora in the hallway, opening dialogue]
I wanted to implement a phone message system. Nothing fancy, just a phone appearing on the screen. This probably was the hardest thing to make so far, but I managed to get it working. The messages appear one by one on a phone UI, which I'm genuinely proud of. The first time I made it work, I was so excited.
Funny enough, a week later I found an amazing pack that included a much better looking phone messaging GUI... So now I am going to reimplement the system. Thankfully, now I know how it works, setting it up a second time shouldn't be that hard, right?
[phone message screen, three texts from "Sora Upstairs"]
What's left to do: remaining sprite expressions, music, and drawing a shrine scene that carries most of the emotional weight of the whole game. No pressure.
The part I didn't expect
I knew I was going to enjoy writing, but I definitely expected to struggle with coding, as I have little to no experience. The HTML coding lessons we had when I was in school do not really count. In the end, as English is not my first language, writing in it was a bit of a challenge. But with the help of a few friends, that was sorted.
Coding was much easier than I expected, thank you to the people who created Ren’py! It is still challenging sometimes; it took me a bit to figure out how to position everything on those damn x and y axis. But overall, after asking a few questions online, from Claude and on the official Ren’Py website, I managed to get everything working as expected.
What's next
Over the next few weeks, I am going to clean up the sprites, get the last background scenes sorted and add music. I still do not have any idea how to find music that will work and will be legal to use. I'm looking for something sparse and piano-heavy. If you have recommendations, I'm genuinely open to them.
I'll post another devlog when I am mostly done, I hope…
I am trying to create a story that feels melancholic and realistic, yet leaves your mind wandering. If this sounds like something you'd want to play, please follow the page to be notified when it's released. It'll be free.
Thanks for reading this far. I wasn't sure I'd finish the game when I started, something that has happened to me before, way too many times than I would like to admit. But this is the first time I feel like I will see it through to the end!
Hopeful dev,
A from “Good job, you did it!”