In my previous devlog, I elaborated on the background of this project. This time, let’s talk about design. The Butterfly Dreams was originally a short story. Anyone who had done visual novel development before might have realized the challenge we had to undertake in this project. Simply put, resource is rich in text. I have always been a fan of text-based games, commonly known as interactive fiction. Location can change every two sentences, adding characters and items as easy as entering the lines. In visual medium, there is a certain amount of expectation put on to depict at least some parts of the script.

Since The Butterfly Dreams wasn’t written for a game, it was far from optimized. Many scenes only appeared once. Characters came in and dropped out of the story. After stripping out the text tags, the script went from 13k words to barely above 8k. The reveal also didn’t work well enough when the script was retranslated, so what began as a simple port got complicated fast. Scenes were added and reworked. No matter what, the script still demanded quite an amount of resource for the runtime.

And for something so resource intensive, we were…quite strapped. Frankly speaking, I was just laid off, but the others were still juggling full-time jobs and multiple projects. In order to get this done and prevent it getting swept under the sands of time, we had to work with stock and loyalty-free assets. There are really nice works out there on the internet, and I hope I have properly attributed them all on the main page. Stock assets get a bad rep and a lot of people seem to discount the usage the way takeaways are derided in favor of homemade meals at all cost. Those who have used these tend to avoid disclosing the fact if they could get away with it (100% homemade game is actually pretty rare). Stock assets can certainly be abused and rife for copyright infringement if one does not read the license correctly (I read everything thrice just in case, but should I miss any…do tell me), but I don’t think it signifies creative bankruptcy.

asteRiesling did all the original character artworks in record time, which I could never be thankful enough of. However, we still did not have quite enough and I wanted to push this as much as I could. Enter ATL and shader. To make limited assets look more lively, I tried to give different movements to every character and have them react to the dialogues. I got a bit overexcited halfway through, and started adding things…just because I could. It became really tricky to balance “not overdone” and distracting with “this is actually too subtle, I cannot see the movement”.

Allow me to drop all the businesslike pretense. See, had we aimed for commercial viability, I might not have the courage to make it this tacky. But Avenue Q encouraged me to put all my heart into this and “we could always take it out later if it’s too much”. That was how The Butterfly Dreams got filled with things that had no business being there in the first place, like callbacks and effects most people might never see. I do like that almost everything you do gets a feedback, especially the crunchy SFX on hover and click. Click on something, and a fleeting butterfly flits for a second.

I hope someone else can enjoy this as much as I did making it.

🦋Requiem🦋