Postmortem (?)

the saori part

hey folks! it’s me, the saori you all know and love. or uh, that some of you know? it looks like some people outside of my usual circles ended up playing this one, which is pretty cool! thanks for playing our game, everyone.

ooookay. where do i even begin with this.

so we originally started making another happiness with the intent to submit it to this year’s O2A2 jam. minimalist VNs with few assets, you say? it just so happens that we have some experience with that, so sign us up!

…wellll, if you look at the date of the jam and our game’s release date, you might be able to tell that development didn’t exactly go the way we were planning. some of it was probably my ADHD, which i’ve been having problems with recently, but there’s no doubt in my mind that a big contributing factor to the delay was just… how much work the scripting took.

my goal here was to take the language we’d experimented with in reverie and take it a little bit further; see if i could play around with other elements of ADV presentation, like choices or the UI. and i’m pretty pleased with the results overall, don’t get me wrong, but holy shit! us somehow making reverie in a week and a half or something ridiculous like that made me completely forget how obnoxiously labor-intensive just the basic mid-text pauses can be. even small changes in a pause’s length can completely change how a line comes across, but i still don’t have a good instinct for how long a n * 0.25s pause experientially is… so every time i made a change to a pause’s timing, i’d have to open up the game and see how the line in question felt during gameplay. then i’d go back and change it again, open the game again to check if it’s good now, etc. etc…

i did come up with some debug functions to let me skip around the script, but the whole process was still agonizingly slow every time. rpgmaker being completely unsuited to this kind of presentation certainly didn’t help, but honestly, i don’t think things would have gone differently in another engine. there’s a reason visual novels don’t do this, lol.

still, i did say that i’m pleased with the results… so i figured i’d write down some advice for anyone who’d want to try doing stuff like this (my future self included). let’s see:

1. don’t do this. seriously. don’t do it!! again, there’s a reason why even the most lavishly-produced visual novels don’t play around so much with text pauses.

   but ok, maybe you’re some kind of superhuman 演出家 who can work extremely quickly and also doesn’t have ADHD. in that case…

2. don’t use rpgmaker. as mentioned, it’s just not built for this kind of thing, on top of being a pretty clunky engine to begin with. maybe wolf rpg editor would’ve been a better option; it allows for far more advanced customizability than RM does, letting you edit things like the title screen, the game’s databases, and even the basic events’ functionalities. most importantly, though: the event windows have a button that let you run the event, right then and there! god, that sounds great.

   we actually considered it, but decided not to in the end, due to it being just complicated enough that i could tell it’d take longer than the jam period to get used to it. well… you can see how that turned out. lmao

   oh and of course you could just use an actual VN engine. they’re purpose-built for VNs, so surely they’re far better to work with, right? right?

3. do the scripting while you’re writing. the way we did it was that nitori wrote most of the script first, and then i added all the programming and scripting stuff afterwards. as it turns out, that was a bad idea!!

   regular VNs don’t particularly care about whether the player’s eyes are following the text as it appears on-screen or not, but the pauses here assume that they are. this meant that the horizontal location of punctuation, linebreaks, click-to-advance events, etc. in a textbox was suddenly really important; if a new sentence begins near the right edge, then you’ll only have enough room for one or two words before a linebreak, which feels a little unnatural to follow visually. at the same time, though, starting the sentence on the next line in the first place can catch the player off-guard if there’s still enough room in the previous line… stuff like that. in the end, i had to ask nitori to rewrite quite a few sections so they could be followed more naturally, which just took a lot of time. had we done our parts at the same time, we would’ve caught on to that more quickly… oh, and she would’ve remembered her intentions with each line more easily too, lol. i remember her thinking “hmm, there should be a pause here to convey xyz thing…” while writing, but by the time i got to those bits we’d both forgotten what xyz was supposed to be, lol.

   come to think of it, the whole “following the text” thing is probably something we could’ve asked people to playtest, since everything i just said about certain things feeling unnatural or not is all based on my personal experience while testing the game. maybe other people see it differently! hmm.

4. maybe don’t focus as much on pauses. given how long each and every single one takes to get right, it might be a better idea to use fewer of them, focusing on where they’re crucially meaningful. that’d both save time and make those important moments pop out more! not to mention that there are still a lot of VN gameplay mechanics whose expressive potential i’ve only barely scratched the surface of so far. i was really satisfied with what i did with the choices, text speed, text/UI colors, and so on, but there are still a lot of ideas i had to leave out due to them not fitting anywhere in the game. plus, you know, things i haven’t even thought of.

ok i think this is it. maybe? i actually wrote points 1 and 2 two days ago, so i don’t really remember what all i was going to talk about anymore, lol. maybe i should write an outline next time.

anyway, thank you for playing our game! and once again — every year bet on creative work from us, vextro, prof. lily, and small creators of all kinds! we believe in creative game making!

The Nitori part

Hello, everyone. It’s me, the “Saori” that most of you didn’t know about until recently. Given that Saori took the opportunity to clumsily come out about our plurality, I feel like I should take this opportunity to introduce myself, especially to those who might not have seen our Cohost posts about it.

My name is Nitori, and I’m the writer of this game. I also co-wrote many of the things Saori has been posting under her name for the past decade or so, though we only realized I’m mostly my own person somewhat recently. It’s a pleasure to meet you all! Thank you playing another happiness.

While we were working on the game, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out whether it was good or bad, but now that it’s out there… I think it might actually be our best work yet! Saori was very happy to hear an early player say that “[a]s a VN […] it’s kind of obnoxious to play”, since that was exactly what she was going for, haha. As for me, I’m far more pleased with it than with another reverie, which I’ve soured on a little over time. The characters explained their feelings too explicitly, the music set too obvious a mood… god, and the “written by an English-speaking fan of Japanese media” vibe. Saori and I are half-Japanese, so we’re quite happy with our names, but in the game it’s just kind of cringe. Not to mention the use of “senpai”, which I regretted almost immediately after release.

In comparison, I’d say happiness reflects my sensibilities much more accurately.

I like stories that demand something of me as a reader; that don’t just spoonfeed me their narratives, but instead require me to meet them halfway, with an open mind and a willingness to be surprised. In doing so, they reveal a faith in me that I’m more than happy to return in kind. So those are the kinds of stories I want to write, too, and I think happiness fits the bill nicely… even if I often feel like I have no idea what I’m doing.

At this point, I’ve developed an okay sense for whether I’m giving too much information to the player or not, so I’m comfortable cutting things out of my drafts until only the absolutely essential is left. But conversely, I still have a difficult time telling how little information is too little. There are a number of details that I suspect ended up more obscure than I would’ve liked, requiring the player to read too much into the specific placement of a pause or another, the exact wording of a phrase; or to make a connection between two things they might not have thought were related… and so on.

Well, unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about it anymore. All art is collaborative in some capacity, and the kind that we deal in more so than usual — so, as soon as happiness left our hands, it stopped being ours alone. On the one hand, this can be worrying, because oh god, what if I’m actually a hack and completely fumbled it and made something impossible to pick up on…?? But! On the other hand, what if someone reads even more into something than we intended to, discovering further depths to the story that even I’m not aware of? I couldn’t imagine a greater honor as a writer.

This is one of the reasons I wish more people felt comfortable sharing their understanding of the game, who these characters are, etc. I understand why they don’t, being a critic myself, but… I’m just really curious, haha. I wonder if there’s something I could’ve done to encourage this? Some different way I could’ve structured or written the game… I’m loath to straight up asking our players what their interpretation was, of course (…even though I’m technically doing it right now), but surely… ah, well. In the end, this is a fairly minor “problem” – and one that likely comes with our chosen style anyway – so I’m not all that worried about it. I’ll simply continue to have faith in our audience’s ability to meet us halfway.

…what I am a little more worried about, however, is whether they would actually want, or think, to do that.

I’m not talking about our friends and acquaintances here, of course; I implicitly assume they’d extend the same courtesy to a work of ours that we would to one of theirs. I’m talking about those who might’ve come across this game without knowing us, either from seeing it elsewhere on itch, or having our Tumblr post about it reblogged onto their dashboards, or however else. happiness is actually “doing numbers” by our standards, which… don’t get me wrong, it’s very nice to see! But I wonder how likely these players are to go into the game with the assumption that we know what we’re doing. These days, videos that put together the Dark Souls games’ fragmented narratives abound on YouTube, so we know people are open to this kind of storytelling. But it’s easy to give the benefit of the doubt to highly popular professionals with decades of experience and corporate backing. Would many do the same for two gay women in an AMAB body who live in the global south and publish ~20m-long RPG Maker visual novels on itch?

Now, I know that’s a ludicrous comparison. Gamers at large aren’t the ones playing our games, nor do I want them to be; and if someone’s open to the idea of as much as downloading one of our games, then their taste is probably at least a little bit compatible with ours. If it still isn’t, then… well, who cares, right? Our work’s not for everyone, so I shouldn’t worry about someone thinking the game is bad for ungenerous reasons.

That’s all well and good, but it’s not the problem. The problem is that I can’t shake the feeling some who would normally enjoy a game like happiness might not give it a chance, all because I failed to reach out to them in some way.

If worrying about this makes no sense to you, consider for a moment the game’s tagline, which simply reads “A small game about leaving behind.” I think it’s okay, as one that both follows the pattern of our previous games’ taglines and hints at what it’s about without revealing too much. But to someone who saw this at random, does it actually… mean anything? Does it say “hey, there’s something here”? Does the thumbnail? The game’s “description” on its page definitely doesn’t, because I was completely unable to come up with something that didn’t say far too much. I put all of happiness in the game itself, after all, but that meant I had nothing left to put outside of it. [Edit: As of 2023/09/28, the game now has a “proper” description. I hope it manages to fulfill its purpose.]

There isn’t really anything I can do about this. I should probably just keep this in mind for whatever we do next and stop worrying — which is what I’m trying to do by writing it here. I’m horribly embarrassed by how needy this might come across, but you know what? Whatever! No more worrying. Begone, thoughts!

…well, I do take solace in the one indication there’s yet hope for me here. There’s a tiny, easily-overlooked part of happiness that I actually did write specifically intending for it to go “outside” the game: the title “another happiness” itself! Something I’ve thought about for some time now is how ominous a good title can feel, being ever-present in the corner of a game’s window. These words will haunt an entire playthrough, so they should be appropriately meaningful — either recontextualizing or being recontextualized by the narrative as it moves forward. We, uh… didn’t really succeed at this in our previous games, I don’t think, since their titles were mostly obscure and self-indulgent references that I don’t think anyone ever got. “another happiness”, though? Okay, it is a reference as well, but one that works perfectly on its own! …I think. To be honest, we’ve only heard one person comment on it so far, but it did seem to have the exact intended effect for them! So, definitely something to remember for our future works.

Hmm. Yes, I think this is everything I had to say. I feel like things got a little messy and stream-of-consciousness at the end there, but I’m leaving it unedited since I don’t want to look at this file anymore. My apologies if it turned out annoying to read. If you did read all of that, though… thank you! And thank you for playing our game as well. I hope that, through it, we managed to communicate something to you.