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Drawings and preparations – April Update

28 characters

During April, we’ve completed the line art for every character in the game. If someone would have told me that this game would include 28 characters, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. Knife Sisters has 12. It says something about the scope of Truer than You, which is large by design – since the game is about going to new places and meeting new people – even though we’ve tried to make it smaller than we initially intended. Game projects are somewhat hard to predict, since so much happens iteratively, but you can always be sure that the scope is too big.

Knife Sisters turned 5

On the 24th of April, Knife Sisters turned five years old! We celebrated by giving it away for free for 24 hours, and reminiscing about everything that has happened since the release of that game.

Preparing for ChinaJoy

We are preparing for our visit to ChinaJoy in Shanghai In July, as part of the Game Connection Indie section. Looking forward to it a lot!

Gameshifters started

A new project of ours, called Gameshifters, started in April. It will run throughout May and June, and contains a concept development process that we will do together with young people from Fryshuset in Malmö. We will work on world building, game design and concept art for a game set in the future.

We have also updated the texts on the Steam store page.

❤ Have a look, give us feedback, and, if you haven’t already, please add Truer than You to to your wishlist, it means a lot to us!

#game design #visual novel #indie games #gamedev #vndev #lgbtqia #relation games #storytelling #indie dev

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Celebrating five years!

On this magical date – 2024.04.24 – Knife Sisters turns five years old. To celebrate, the game is free for 24 hours. Get it on itch-io!

It both feels much longer and much shorter since it was released.

We started conceptualizing it in late 2015, originally it was intented as either a novel or a web tv series (!), but it didn’t take long until it turned into a game – something we’re very pleased about.

Making and releasing it was a ride, though – afterwards I’ve understood that it actually was kind of a quick process. Knife Sisters was in development for two years and four months. It felt long, at that point, but really, it wasn’t.

Standing onstage at the Game Developers Meetup on the release date itself is a very fond memory! (Not being able to find any pictures from the event I suppose goes to show how busy those times were!)

#indie games #indie dev #knifesisters #visual novel #vndev #lgbtqia #queer

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Words and Choices - March Devlog

March is ending and we’re finally seeing some sun here in Sweden. (Maybe you know that Swedes love to talk about the weather? That’s because at least half of our year is spent in darkness. When the sun comes out we all get a little crazy!)

Script editing in process

I (Bobbi) am working on editing the game script, and finished editing the first chapter. I found some ways to improve the script in the process. The game now has over 1100 choices! And that’s not including the option to progress the dialogue without making a choice, which should also be considered a decision.

Looking into localization

Pixie har started looking into how the game can be localized based on the set-up we’re using (Unity with Ink). We haven’t yet decided on implementing any other languages than English, but we at least want to check how we can prepare the game to be localized.

Games as a cultural expression

We also did a presentation of games as a cultural expression and art form at SpilBar #59 in Copenhagen. In Sweden, games doesn’t have a lot of national support, even though (or because?) the games industry is doing very well. In the talk, I went through how four indie games from Sweden were funded in the absence of financial support, including Knife Sisters.

It turned out that three of the four examples had been supported in some form by the Swedish student loans, CSN. We’re working towards structures that would allow a more targeted funding. That’s why we are active in the non-profit Dataspelscentrum, aiming to affect cultural policies for better games support.

Now, we'll have a few days off for Easter celebration! Have a lovely easter if you do that kind of thing, and otherwise, a wonderful end-of-March weekend!

#game design #visual novel #indie games #indie dev

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Cultural convention and content creation - February update

February is a short month, but it has felt rather long. This is indeed the last day of it - and it’s good that it included a bonus day so that we could make the update in time!

So what have we been up to since last time?

Showcasing at Folk & Kultur

We showed Truer than You and took part in a panel about games as an artistic expression at the cultural politics convention Folk & Kultur (People & Culture) in Eskilstuna. Yes there exists such a festival in Sweden, which is pretty cool! Our goal wasn’t so much to present the game as to discuss the conditions for being an indie game creator in Sweden. We have no national public support for game development as it stands right now, and that is something we wish to change. A bonus of us having the game at the festival was that it was shown in the background during this interview with the Swedish Games Industry association that was broadcast on national TV.

To discuss using games as a means for expression in a panel was also a great experience and something we really haven’t done before. There were many people listening and it led to interesting discussions afterwards. Lately, I think there has been a much larger interest for games as a cultural form - and that makes me really happy!

Assignments system re-design

Pixie is working on the systems for assignments that Rin can get in Truer than You. We decided to make some changes to it, to make it easier to put the whole game together. It turned out that the way we had previously solved it led to tedious manual work that also created a risk for getting bugs added in the process.

Back to the drawing board

In the last week of February, I finally got back to drawing. There has been so much other stuff going on, so I really haven’t had the time to focus on making any art. I see this as a shift back into production after a long period with funding in focus. Which is absolutely necessary, but making the game is, too. I have added some new character sprites for chapter three. There are two more characters to draw for this chapter, and then a number of backgrounds and other illustrations. Looking forward to drawing more, since that work is very relaxing compared to getting funding (!!), and having a calmer period is something I really need right now. Hoping to make more or less every graphic for chapter three during March!

The first pitch for our next game

We also did a first pitch for our next project at Sweden Game Arena’s winter pitch, and got feedback from publishers and investors. It feels like a big milestone to have presented this project to external people, even though it’s in a super early stage. Keep your fingers crossed for this project - we are super hyped about it.

Photo from Sweden Game Arena

See you next time!

Join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/Nk4JYuz6WT

#indie games #visual novel #gamedev #indie dev

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Full game drafted – January update

2024 is here! That’s great, isn’t it? So what have we been up to since the last update?

The full game is drafted

I (Bobbi) have drafted every scene of the game. That is a huge milestone! The game has 89 scenes, spanning from a few lines of text to over 1300 lines for the longest scenes. The next step is to put it all together and start testing how everything comes together. We expect a lot of changes to be made based on the testing, but having an outline for the full game feels really great.

Choices moved and redesigned

When playtesting the game, we’ve noticed that a few players actually missed making choices in the game. This is because you don’t have to make choices, instead you can keep going and see what happens. And in comparison to Knife Sisters (which also have this functionality), the choices in Truer than You were placed much higher up on the screen, something that resulted in some players not noticing them, since they had their attention focused on the dialogue text. We’ve now redesigned this part, moving the choice buttons much closer to the dialogue box. We’ve also changed the look of the choice buttons.

Systems behind the scenes

Pixie has been working hard to make a good foundation for the saving system and other upcoming tech things that need preparation. Those things aren’t very visible on the outside, but really need to be done.

Creative Europe application submitted

Another thing that has happened is that we’ve submitted an application to the EU funding program Creative Europe, for our next game. Yeah, it’s not enough to have one game to finish, we need to start funding the next project too! Being an indie developer means always being busy! But we’ve come to the conclusion that we must enjoy this, since we are still making games.

Until next time!

If you'd like to support us, please add Truer than You to your wishlist!

Join our Discord server

#game design #indie games #indie dev #visual novel

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Writing in Winter - December Update

We’ve decided to start making monthly updates about the development of Truer than You and other news about the studio, to let you in on what’s happening!

Truer than You is progressing steadily. I (Bobbi) am currently writing the last scenes of the game, getting closer to drafting the full game. The goal is to have a first version of every scene by the end of December. It feels great to see that we’re starting to tie up all the loose ends, especially since the content of this game has been a really hard beast to tame!

Simultaneously, Pixie is working on the underlying systems to support saving and porting to consoles.

Apart from writing, there’s a lot of other content that needs to be produced, to take the game to an alpha stage. There are many characters, backgrounds and illustrations to draw, so my tablet will definitely go warm – and that’s good, since it’s currently pretty cold here! (When writing for the game, it’s actually rather hard to remember that it takes place during the summer. It’s very easy to get affected by the current time of the year and adding in winter sweaters and cups of hot tea…)

Other news is that our studio has been accepted into the formation phase of the Sweden Game Arena startup program, with our next project (!!), that you’ll get to know more about further on. The program aims to support projects in early stages, and we’re looking forward a lot to taking part in it, and getting to know the other studios.

That’s it for December, hope you’ll have a cozy Christmas, if that’s something you engage in, and if not, we hope you’ll have a nice time anyway! :)

If you’d like to support us, please add Truer than You to your wishlist.

We’d also be super happy to welcome you in our Discord server!

#game design #visual novel #gamedev #indie games #indie dev #storytelling

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Making sports into drama (and games?)

An anime analysis from a game design perspective

I admit: I am a great sports anime nerd (and I’ve previously written about the volleyball anime Haikyuu and its fandom) – something that also affects my thinking around game design. What makes sports anime so good – better than watching the sports themselves – is that they usually combine the thrill and achievements of those sports with portrayal of the characters performing them. For me, that adds an invaluable component, since I’m also a character and fictional relationships nerd.

Ookiku Furikabutte - manga by Higuchi Asa

I’ve categorized the series based on how much of the dramatic content focuses on the game or sport itself and how much it relies on other factors, such as relationships between characters outside of sports. I’ll put my main focus on the series that primarily revolve around the sport. Many are based on manga, but not all. (Whether the series originates as manga or not might actually also affect the content, but it’s not something that I’ll go into in this post.)

Categorizing the shows

Series where the drama is primarily built around the content of the sport:

Ookiku Furikabutte/Big Windup (baseball)

Diamond no Ace/Ace of the Diamond (baseball)

Haikyuu!! (volleyball)

Kuroko no Basket/Kuroko’s Basketball (basketball)

Series where the drama is built around a combination of the sport’s content and other factors:

Kaze ga Tsuyoku Fuiteru/Run with the Wind (running)

Tsurune: Kazemai Koukou Kyuudoubu (archery)

Yuri!!! on Ice (figure skating)

2.43: Seiin Koukou Danshi Volley-bu/2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team (volleyball)

Days (soccer)

Re-main (water polo)

Ping Pong the Animation (ping pong)

Series where the drama is primarily built around content outside of the sport:

Free! (swimming)

Hoshiai no Sora/When Stars Align (soft tennis)

Keppeki Danshi! Aoyama-kun/Clean Freak Aoyama-kun (soccer)

Cheer Danshi!!/Cheer Boys!! (cheerleading)

Bakuten!!/Backflip!! (rhythmic gymnastics)

Taisou Zamurai / The Gymnastics Samurai (gymnastics)

It’s interesting to see that the focus on sports content could in part be related to which target group the series is aimed towards. It seems like shounen anime (“for boys”) has a larger focus on sports content, whereas shoujo (“for girls”) and seinen (“for grown-ups”) revolve more around relationships.

Could set-based sports with clear positions be easier to dramatize?

Haikyuu!! - manga by Haruichi Furudate

Both volleyball and baseball translate well into anime format. Volleyball’s set-based play makes it easy to create exciting match portrayals. The game involves turn-taking and players’ positions on the court, including who serves and rotates, creating clear recurring moments of suspense. Since the objective is to win the most sets out of a predetermined number, the outcome of a match isn’t known until the decisive set is played.

The psychological play and complexity

Ookiku Furikabutte - manga by Higuchi Asa

The complexity of baseball could be seen as a disadvantage due to its difficulty to comprehend, but it’s a double-edged sword, since the complexity also adds excitement. Baseball matches as a whole can become slow, especially if the teams are adept at defense and don’t allow scoring hits. However, in anime, unlike in reality, there’s the possibility to cut or quickly summarize dull parts of the match.

Baseball and volleyball gameplay loops

A Gameplay Loop is a game design term that is used to describe the repetitive activities that a player will take while playing a game. It, essentially, defines what the player DOES while playing. – Engaged Family Gaming

Diamond no Ace - manga by Terajima Yuuji

In volleyball, a loop begins with one team serving, the ball is then moved between teams by players with various roles (such as setter, wing spiker, blocker, libero) until it hits the floor on one side of the net, determining which team scores a point. This loop is integrated into the larger system by having the first team to reach a certain number of points win the set, while the overall match aims to win the most sets out of (usually) five.

Do shorter loops and turned-based sports make for better drama?

The smallest loops in baseball and volleyball are clear and quite short, allowing for detailed focus on the characters executing decisive actions. The moments before a serve/pitch provide space for inner monologues and character communication. Side changes and innings/sets frame the matches, making it easier for viewers to follow, compared to more fluid sports like basketball or soccer. In turn-based sports, breaks are incorporated into the game’s design. Therefore, I believe that turn-based sports, where players also have very specific roles, are more favorable to portray, than sports where players have more similar roles and the game is more fluid. (Perhaps this is why Kuroko no Basket assigned supernatural abilities to the players, adding an extra dimension to the game that makes it a little more video game-like? Well, it could also be because the creator wanted to make a series about basketball players with supernatural abilities. Personally, I find that supernatural abilities detract from the intrigue of sports, but that’s a matter of taste.) 

Haikyuu!! - manga by Haruichi Furudate

Teams are great for drama

I believe team sports are better suited for storytelling than individual sports. This might be because team sports allow for more complexity in the narrative, as players within a team can be rivals, while also depending on each other to develop and win. Opposing teams are obvious antagonists, but the most interesting events often happen within the teams, between the characters that viewers have come to know, and whose development they are following. Team sports also have recurring tournaments where teams can face the same opponents multiple times, enabling long series that maintain suspense. This exists in individual sports too, but individual competition feels more one-dimensional than team-based competition. So, aside from game (sports) design itself, the setup around teams, tournaments, and matches also influences the narrative. Series centered on individual sports tend to focus more on character relationships outside of competitions, possibly because the sport itself doesn’t provide enough material to build drama solely around it.

Translating sports into drama - and games!

When translating sports into drama, there are factors that can both facilitate and complicate the dramatic buildup. If the focus is on the game itself, it’s advantageous if the game has a high level of complexity, clear/short loops, and specific roles, preferably with inherent conflicts. Among the sports I’ve seen depicted, I would say that baseball has the greatest potential to create compelling drama. However, with that said, the storyteller’s skill will likely have a bigger impact on the story than the design of the sport itself.

I’ve based this analysis on anime series, and they have their aesthetics, structures and way of portraying things. I’m very curious as to whether the components of a great sports anime – sports/game content together with character development and relationships – could also be made into great games. The content of digital games and anime series are very different, but I think there are still learnings to be made from analysing and also comparing those media forms.

Please let me know through our social channels which games you have played that include sports mechanics and relationships. I have played Pyre, which I think combine those things well. I also have Roller Drama on my to play-list, but I would like to know of more games that focus on sports and relationships (sports relation games!).

A last side note: When there was finally an anime about Water Polo – Re-main – the creators missed the opportunity of telling the amazing story on how this sport might have come into fruition – as a water based version of horse polo, called Polo Aquatic, where players rode on barrels hitting a ball with sticks… I mean, that’s something you can’t exclude!

#game design #anime #sports anime

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Is the goal to make players feel good?

In a series of posts about relation games I’ve been discussing game and narrative design from a relational perspective. I’ve been meaning to explore the role of player agency in games centered around relationships.

I also posed some specific questions:

Should players get a wide variety of romanceable characters to choose from, and be able to shift the relationships according to their preferences, or could it be meaningful to exhort players into having relationships they wouldn’t choose for themselves to convey a specific story?

I believe both these questions could be responded to with a yes… depending on what type of game you want to make. Catering to players’ wants and needs is one way of addressing relationships in games, and it’s probably the most common route to take – but it’s not the only one. In the end it comes down to what the purpose of the game is – is it to make players feel good and offer them the fictional relationships they want to have? Then covering a range of options that is as suited to the target group as possible would be the best thing. Players try to satisfy their needs while playing – and being able to shift the relationships according to their preferences will make this easier. But making players feel good isn’t always the goal. Sometimes you want to explore a certain issue that might make some players uncomfortable. For us, that’s fine – but that comes with an extended need for communication. Being clear about what to expect is important, as well as accepting that players might – or will – react.

Working with content warnings and information is one way to prepare players for experiences that they might not fully enjoy. Especially when you are working within a genre where many games are based on fulfilling the wishes and needs of players by letting them romance characters. Then, if you include routes where the relationships aren’t completely healthy or don’t go well, you might break the expectations of the genre, and players might need to have some preparation for that. As a creator of that kind of game, you would also need to be prepared that some design or narrative choices might have a – sometimes – unexpected impact on players. I’d say it’s impossible to completely analyze a game during the development process. Doing a lot of user testing might bring issues to the table before release, but it’s definitely not failproof.

Bringing what we've learned into Truer than You

When developing our new game Truer than You, we’re aiming to implement some of the things we’ve learned from making Knife Sisters. In this game, you play an androgyne character called Rin, who’s recently moved to an unfamiliar city to start a new life and a new position at the secretive company Truer than You, specializing in renting out actors for real life situations. There are rules you have to follow – for instance, you can’t have relationships with people you meet through your work – but that���s something that could happen anyway… and that’s how you get to know Ariel, Indira and Sylvester, the characters you can form closer relationships with.

This time we’ve chosen to have branching storylines following those characters, instead of having them complement a main storyline connected to another character (Dagger), as we did in Knife Sisters. That’s not only because some players objected to being forced into the relationship with her, but also because this game has a whole other set of themes than Knife Sisters, that we see could be better explored by connecting them to the characters. We think that this design will increase the desire to replay the game, and make the player feel more in charge of the story. Hopefully, people will also perceive it as less linear. In Knife Sisters, you do have a lot of agency when it comes to how each scene plays out, but not as much when it comes to affecting the main storyline’s course of events. This is perceived very differently by different players, but we’re eager to see what players think and feel when the story changes a little more.

What do strong emotional reactions to your game mean?

In the end, it’s impossible to cater to all your players’ wishes. So you’ll need to accept that people will get disappointed at times – but, like the player who wrote an angry message, they might come to enjoy the game anyway! Strong emotions connected to your game show that people have engaged with it. Emotions aren’t always easily interpreted, and the systems for leaving feedback don’t necessarily cater to that complexity. You might engage heavily with a game, but still decide to give it a “not recommended” review on Steam – because it left you with negative or complex emotions. But negative emotions also teach us things.

For me, I don’t think making players feel good is a goal, but rather to make players feel, period. To evoke many types of emotions, ranging from good, to sad or even angry. If we make a game that has the player coming back to it in their mind, over and over, then we have succeeded.

What do you think?

#game design #relation games #visual novel #indie games #storytelling

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Relationships and gameplay

If fictional relationships feel real, as I proposed in a previous post, then we need to be mindful of how we utilize characters and relationships in games. Why are the potential relationships there, and what do we want players to feel?

Most often, we are not entirely free when we design a game – there are constraints. Being indie developers with limited budgets, there might only be so many characters that we could offer our players to form closer connections with. So how do we choose those characters and relationships? Here I’ll present some different approaches to consider when designing a relation game.

Characters representing functions or symbols

I think it’s pretty common to have characters display very different traits, which by extension might mean that the characters have different functions (gameplay- or story-wise) in the game. They might also be connected to some kind of already established symbol, system or archetype. Connecting characters, game components or content to existing symbols/systems is a very common way to go about designing in the first place, since it helps us conceptualize things and put them into context. It could for instance be using the Tarot deck to base game content upon, like Simogo did in Sayonara Wildhearts. Using something that is already established might also help players to more easily understand the game. This way of thinking can be applied also to deciding upon characters/relationships and their roles in the game, and I’ll take some examples below.

Three types of practices

In Knife Sisters, I wanted the dateable characters to represent different types of BDSM practices: namely being a top/domme, bottom/sub or switch. It’s sometimes hard to backtrack how design decisions are made, but this idea came very early on, and preceded the choice of characters – which means that the characters are designed to give the player the opportunity to explore different sexual practices.

I wrote more about the design of Knife Sisters in this post, and about BDSM in games here.

Three types of love

Another game that might be applying this is Hades, the relationship heavy roguelite where you battle your way out of hell – also one of my all time favorite games. In this CBR article, Noelle Corbett states that the three characters that Zagreus can romance could be seen as representing different philosophical conceptions of love: philia, eros and agape.

Philia is the one sometimes called platonic love, or siblingly love, represented by the relationship with Dusa.

Eros is the type of love driven by desire and sexual passion, in the game represented by the relationship with Meagara.

Agape is a kind of transcendent, persistent and unconditional love, in the game represented by the relationship with Thanatos.

The game uses characters with different functions to have the players explore different types of love and kinds of relationships. This diversity might motivate the player to keep playing, to experience all of its variations. It’s also perfectly connected to the theme of the game – that our relationships form who we are, and affect our fate.

(Connected to this: when I played Hades and Zagreus tried to romance Dusa, she told him that she did have feelings for him, but she wasn’t attracted to him sexually – something that Zagreus responded to in his usual happy-go-lucky way, taking it very well and saying that he respected her feelings. Me, who is very emotion focused, missed seeing a more emotionally affected response from Zagreus. For me, the game would have grown even more if Zagreus, all while respecting Dusa, could have displayed some disappointment or sadness that Dusa didn’t reciprocate his feelings – but maybe that’s just me.)

Connecting relationships to other game mechanics

I’ve been discussing connecting characters and relationships to the game design in a very high-level, conceptual way. Characters and relationships in games could also be tied to other game mechanics, meaning that the relationships will affect the outcome of other gameplay features (such as battles). This is also done in Hades, in the way that nurturing the relationships will unlock better companions, which could then be used in the battles. This has both ups and downs – the downside would be that you’re not given the chance to explore those relationships freely, instead you might feel obliged to do so, to gain more powerful companions. On the other hand, by encouraging the player to form relationships with all three characters (and then giving the player the option to make the final decision on how far to take it), they make sure we get to have one of the first openly pansexual and polyamorous main characters in a (more) mainstream game, which is amazing. 

That’s also one of the answers to a question I posed in a previous post of this series: Could it be meaningful to exhort players into having relationships they wouldn’t choose for themselves to convey a specific story? I think it’s definitely meaningful in Hades, even though I also objected a little to having it tied to other gameplay mechanics. It has to be done with an understanding that this will affect the player’s decisions and experience of the story.

Gender variety

Another pretty common way to make up a cast of characters – at least in queer games – is to work with gender variety. An example is Boyfriend Dungeon by Kitfox Games, where you can date your weapons in human form, consisting of men, women and non-binary characters (and they also have a character called Dagger… or, who is a dagger, rather). Gender variety could also be said to be used in Hades, where you can date a woman, a man and a Gorgon head (!). Of course, their gender is not the only important aspect of the characters – dateable characters also have differing personalities and traits – and when all the dateable characters are of the same gender, the variety of personalities might become the main factor that separates them – like in Amnesia.

Relationship variety

A complimentary way to think about characters and relationships could be to base it on the notion that it’s the relationships rather than the characters that should offer variation. When in an in-game relationship, things might work out differently depending on the player’s choices, and the designers’ values and norms play quite a large role here. If we have routes with endings that are supposed to be bad, good and in-between – how do we decide what’s a good ending and not? The Very Common Way™ of doing it is to have the romance be the good ending – they lived happily ever after – and the breakup as the bad ending (well, and sometimes death, too) – but should it always be that way? It definitely says something about how we value relationships, with a hierarchy where monogamous, evenly reciprocated, long-lasting love is the crown jewel, and other types of relationships aren’t as valuable. (An example of this is the somewhat derogatory term situationship that categorizes relationships that fall outside of this norm.)

When we did a user test for our game in development, Truer than You, we got this feedback from a tester:

I have some triggers around Rin’s thoughts about  Sylvester, when they think ‘well I guess I can think of him as a friend if he already has a girlfriend’ – but I don’t know how you plan to work with that, if that relationship will circle further around the infidelity thing, or, for example, end up in some kind of relational non-binary (where love and friendship would be the binaries). I would prefer the latter, but I’m biased because I’m a bit starved for such stories.

This response reminded me that all players do not want romance or friendship, but might actually want to explore the in-betweens.

It’s very easy to use our own values and views as a baseline, forgetting that other people might not function or feel the same way as we do. For example, if you’re a romantic, it’s very easy to make the ‘true love’ ending into the best ending – but does it have to be that way?

What are your thoughts around character and relationship design and variety in games?

#game design #visual novel #indie games #relation games

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Impressions from Devcom & Gamescom

Last week was a really intense one for us, as we attended both Devcom and Gamescom. At Devcom, we did the first IRL showcase of Truer than You, during the two conference days, as well as at Developer Night at Courage Cologne. Then we moved over to Gamescom for meetings, where we were part of the Creative Europe Media stand.

Showing the game

Layna | Cozy Games playing Truer than You at Devcom

Showing a game publicly for the first time is always nerve-wracking. We have done a user test of the game before, but it’s very different to observe people when they are playing. We learned a lot! Some of the findings we did were things we had already suspected, some were things we didn’t already know, which is great, because now we’ll have the chance to make things better.

The players

We tried to keep track of the players, and found that 63 % seemed to be female/non-male. We had already estimated that 60 % of our players would be non-male, and this guess seems to be fairly accurate. Then you’d have to consider that (judging from what we could see) the visitors to Devcom are not evenly distributed between genders – we believe there are less female visitors than male. Some of the players commented that they were drawn to the game since they interpreted it to be LGBTQ+, which made us really happy, because it’s true!

The art style

The most common comments revolved around the art style. “Visually striking”, “unique” and “one of a kind” were some terms used, and I, who created the art, could not be happier. The art for this game has actually been a challenge from the start, and I’ve changed the style, especially of the backgrounds, many times. Getting encouraging comments was exactly what we needed.

Rin's gender

Before showcasing, we had some questions around how the main character Rin would be interpreted by players. Some commented that they appreciated that Rin was explicitly stated as non-binary. (I myself got goosebumps when a player called out “yay” at the point when Rin said their pronouns were they/them.)

There were also some players who used the pronoun “she” for Rin, which we see as a good thing, since we were afraid they would be interpreted as male. Seeing that different players used different pronouns for Rin was something that delighted us. (Two players were also called Rin themselves, but that’s a completely different story).

The things that didn’t work

We also found some things that we need to improve, and two things stood out. One was that some players didn’t grasp how the choices worked, and they could miss making any choices at all (since the game doesn’t force you to make choices, you can always continue without choosing).

Another was that some players got a little “lost” when clicking around in the in-game phone, not knowing when and how to close it. Both these things can be addressed with better feedback through sounds and animation, and (in the phone) adding a button, but also by making the tutorial more thorough.

Developer Night & Courage Cologne

After the last day of Devcom it was time to showcase at Developer Night / Courage Cologne. It was our first time at that event, which brings thousands of people to a showcasing night at a club. There are many, many cool indie games to play, an outdoor area to hang out in, and a dance floor (that attracted my attention a lot, since I was in the mood for dancing). We thoroughly enjoyed this event. It reminded us of showing Knife Sisters at A Night of Erotica in Malmö in 2017, which was a great experience, and the first time we showcased Knife Sisters. 

Our station at Courage Cologne before the event, next to our nighbours from Greece and their amazing game

Showing a game on a club night is very different from showcasing at daytime, and our game might not be 100 % suited for a loud and crowded environment, but actually, a lot of people played. The happiest things were to reunite with the founders of Gamera Games, who we’d met for the first time at Gamescom last year, and to meet with someone who helped us test Truer than You and who we hadn’t met in person before.

Hanging out with other devs at Courage Cologne

Gamescom highlights

After showcasing for two days and one night, moving over to Gamescom to “only” have meetings actually felt kind of easy. We were part of the Creative Europe Media stand, and met with many new and old friends and strengthened our business relations. I guess!

Meeting up with a female/non-male network from Discord was one of the highlights, another was talking to the Korean dev behind the cheeky platformer Pigromance, and a third was hanging out with friends on the stairs to the Dome in the middle of the night. 

We also took the time to explore the exhibition halls, see our friends do a chiptune show, play some games, and get mystery bags.

All in all, our experiences from Devcom and Gamescom were wonderful – and we’re already looking forward to coming back next year!

Plushie loot from the mystery bags!

#indie games #gamescom #devcom #gamedev #indiedev

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Fictional relationships feel real

I’ve been writing a few posts now about the relationships in Knife Sisters and what we learned from making that game, as well as from the comments we received (here and here). This post is about one of the most important findings we’ve done when it comes to relation games.

Players invest themselves when playing

Knife Sisters was the first game I made about relationships. I've written novels, but as you might know, there are big differences between games and novels… one of the most prominent being that people who play games and retell what happened, talk about themselves in first person. That’s something I’ve never experienced when it comes to novels. It seems like the player identifies more closely with the player character than what readers do with the main character in a novel. That isn’t to say that readers don’t engage deeply with the characters in novels, they definitely do - I just think they do it in another way.

Players who played Knife Sisters tend to say things like “I dated Vicki”, or “I went to the forest to find a skull”… and by that, in a way, they’re stating that they are in fact the main character Leo – because they’re the ones making that character’s decisions. The one that brought this phenomenon to my attention was Christine Love in her fantastic talk Narrative Techniques in Ladykiller in a Bind at VNConf in 2017. And after hearing about it, I’ve paid attention to this habit in myself, and yes, I do it too!

From that viewpoint it also gets pretty easy to see something that I’m not sure I was fully aware of when I started working on Knife Sisters, and that I will elaborate on below.

Fictional relationships feel real and should be treated as such

Players invest themselves when playing, and the decisions they make, as well as what happens in the in-game relationships, needs to align somewhat with the player’s wishes for that outcome – otherwise it might feel very out of tune for them. The relationships in a game need to be handled with care, just like ‘real’ relationships.

The break-ups

From my own experiences of playing games, I have two examples, both from the same game, an otome game called Amnesia (the English release is called Amnesia:Memories) by Idea Factory & Otomate. (Note that there will be spoilers ahead so if you’re not up for that, you can stop reading here.)

In Amnesia you play a girl with memory loss. There are four parallel worlds which you as a player can enter and explore, to try to find out what has really happened. In each world, one out of four guys is the protagonist’s boyfriend… or are they really? She can’t be entirely sure that the guy presenting as her boyfriend was actually that in her previous life, before she lost her memories.

One of the boyfriends is Ikki, a very popular person who even has his own fan club. As the game progresses, the heroine feels quite unsure of her feelings and what she is to him. But me and Ikki (now I’m doing it) went on nice dates – and when I got to the first ending in that route, it was one where Ikki broke up with me. Even though I shared the heroine’s feelings of doubt about the sincerity of this person, I actually felt heartbroken. I still wanted the relationship to succeed – and I especially didn’t want him to break up with me!

Another relationship I had in Amnesia was with Toma. ​​Toma is a very jealous and “protective” person, and his route takes quite a strange turn, when he locks the heroine up in a cage to keep track of her. I detested Toma, and when I reached the so-called good ending – where the heroine chooses to stay with him and forgive his actions, I couldn’t feel accomplished at all. I really wanted a way to tell him that what he had done wasn’t okay in any way – and for sure I wanted the chance to break up with him (and more too).

I think those two examples from the same game are very different, even though both are about things that happened in the game that made me feel bad. I could accept that I had gotten a (mildly) bad ending with Ikki, and that I could replay his route and try to get the romance ending, where he wouldn’t break up with me. But I found it hard to stomach that I had to accept Toma’s actions toward myself, which I thought were repulsive, without getting the chance to object to it. In the first case, I think the game is fine in leaving me with my feelings of regret for being dumped, but in the second case, I absolutely think the devs should have added the possibility to say “thanks, but no thanks”. I think it would have been better to give the player the opportunity to set boundaries in this situation.

(I’ve written another lengthy post full of spoilers about this game and its anime adaptation, if anyone’s interested!)

If fictional relationships feel real, how does that affect game design?

Accepting that fictional relationships feel real, and that players might object to going against their own will, can definitely affect the way we design games. We need to be mindful of how we utilize characters and relationships in games and what options we give to players. But as game developers, and especially indie devs, we also have constraints. Every new character and every route with different options adds to the game’s size – and therefore to the budget and development time. So there needs to be a balance between the options given and the scope of the game. This can lead to tricky design challenges when deciding which characters are in the game and how the player can affect the relationships with them. I’ll continue the discussion about relationships and gameplay in my next post. 

Have you played any games in which you objected to relationship outcomes?

#relation games #game design #visual novel #indie games #storytelling #amnesia

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Since Truer than You is part of the Steam Visual Novel Fest as an upcoming game, we did a broadcast to our Steam store page for the first time yesterday - which was nerve-wracking, since we definitely are not streamers! 😆 We will re-broadcast the stream later this afternoon.

This whole event/ordeal had me thinking about the amount of stuff you need to learn as an indie dev these days. Last year, I had to start learnng Premiere Pro for video editing, to be able to make social media posts. I had to learn using TikTok and try to understand how their algorithm works (still figuring that out 🙃), and now, using OBS for streaming and understanding the broadcasting system on Steam (everything that has to do with the Steam backend will lead to a certain case of headache). Then, there’s a need to make printed materials for the upcoming game shows. And all of those things lie outside of the game development itself, which also has to get done, somehow.

Oh well, rant over. Now we know how to stream to the store page, and it’s great to learn new things! 😉

#indie games #indie dev #gamedev

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Welcoming an eventful autumn

We’ve had a pretty productive summer over here in Sweden. It started with us doing a game jam for an upcoming title, which we hope to start pre-producing next year.

We have also been working quite a lot on the story for Truer than You, and are now feeling pretty confident about it. This story has been a challenge from the start, since it has so many layers, but after taking the time to focus on it lately, it feels like it’s under control, and we’re eager to tie it all together.

We’re also planning lots of fun things from August and onwards!

Steam Visual Novel fest

(Never mind that these colors hate each other!)

We’ll take part in the Steam event Visual Novel Fest on the 7-14th of August, with Truer than You as an upcoming title. We don’t yet have a demo for Steam, but we will be streaming a playthrough of the latest demo to our store page  – exact date and time TBA. We’d love for you to join us! <3

Devcom, Gamescom & Courage Cologne

We’ll go to Cologne in August to showcase Truer than You at Devcom on the 21-22 of August, and at Courage Cologne on Developer Night the 22nd of August. Then we’ll participate in the business area of Gamescom until the 25th, as part of the Creative Europe umbrella stand, having meetings about the game and future endeavours.

Tokyo Game Show delegation

On September 21-24 we’ll join the Greater Copenhagen delegation to Tokyo Game Show, going with more than ten indie studios and game tech companies from Skåne and Copenhagen. We’ll have meetings and network, and have a small joint booth. Since we had such an amazing time last time we went to Tokyo, we’re looking forward to it a lot! (Especially that I’ll get to celebrate my birthday in Tokyo once more!)

And then will hurry back to production mode to finish the game. ^^

Are you going to any of the events mentioned? Let us know!

#indie games #indie dev #visual novel #relation games

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I’ll make it up to her!

Games that are about relationships and making tough choices in regards to other characters can evoke quite a lot of emotions. We have already talked a bit about how some players objected to being forced into a relationship with Dagger in Knife Sisters.

Another very emotional message we got from a player was about not being able to date a specific character, namely Ayana, Leo’s best friend. Leo and Ayana are very close, but depending on how you play, and how you communicate, there might be some strain on the relationship between them.

I’m going to show you excerpts from this conversation because I think it’s kind of interesting.

It all started with me getting a rather intimidating message, that read like this:

You know what, the Knife Sisters game should be reported, cause it’s the worst game I’ve ever played.

I thought there would be a possibility for Leo to have a romance with Ayana, (not the two ****** Vicki and Mo), so I’ll never play that game again.

At first I thought about just leaving it be, because it was clearly written in affect, but then I decided to respond anyway, so I wrote:

Hi! I understand your disappointment, but unfortunately, there isn’t an option to romance Ayana in the game, sorry!

Then the person wrote back:

Don’t think I didn’t like the game, (I wasn’t completely sincere before, I actually liked it).

I played the game once, got to the end and got shivers down my spine, and tears in my eyes, so I quit, then I regretted it, because I actually liked the game more than I thought, so thank you for one of the best games I played in a long time.

/…/ it’s just that after the first playthrough, when Leo got ‘together’ with Mo, I felt so bad because of how Ayana reacted, that’s when I hoped that Ayana was one of the people Leo could get together with.

So, the reason this player was upset was that they had such a guilty conscience for the actions they had taken, in the shape of Leo, that they wanted to make it up to Ayana by dating her.

To this I replied:

I understand how you feel, that it could’ve been nice to get to be with Ayana as well.

It’s hard to say why I chose it to be that way – but I think it’s got to do with that Leo and Ayana were very close, and Ayana was such an important person in Leo’s life, that Leo wouldn’t want to risk losing her by having a romance with her – if you understand what I mean?

And then I got this reply:

Yeah, you did an amazing job, (I hope there will be more games like this, but please give us more options). And yes, it’s so rare that such a good game comes out (and maybe that’s why I was a little……. well, I’m sorry for what I said).

All I want is that you keep making games like this. :)

Aww.

What do you make of this? As you might imagine, I’m very happy I got back to that player instead of just leaving it be, and having a bad feeling about it, which would probably have stuck with me for days. Sometimes it’s better to open up a conversation to try and see what lies behind an angry message. Sometimes, it definitely isn’t. So how to tell the difference? I don’t know. In this case, I thought back on working in IT support as one of my first jobs, and I remembered that sometimes when people wrote angry messages, they could turn around completely if they got a nice message back, and I sort of wanted to try it. In this case, it ended well.

But this conversation is also part of a bigger picture around how to handle relationships in games. I’ve learned some valuable things from the player feedback on Knife Sisters, that has got to do with characters and relationships, and this specific exchange has been part of that process. In my next post I will elaborate more on these findings.

What’s your experience from playing or making games that contain relationships? Have you ever felt bad for what you did to a character in a game? (I recently got told by someone about a game experience that was really bad, because of what they felt forced to do to a character in the game. I’m going to play that game and analyze it, and get back about my experience later on.) If you have thoughts about relation games, we’ll be happy to discuss in comments!

#relation games #indie games #lgbtqia #game design

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Would you like being forced into a relationship?

When working on relation games, there are many things to take into consideration. I’ve already elaborated a little upon the fact that the choice of characters in relation games is very important, and will affect the players a lot.

When working on those kinds of games I have asked myself questions, such as if players should get a wide variety of romanceable characters to choose from, and be able to shift the relationships according to their preferences, or if it sometimes makes sense to exhort players into having relationships they wouldn’t choose for themselves, to convey a specific story.

Through our experiences working on Knife Sisters, I’ve understood that, even though it’s absolutely doable to coerce players into things, it comes with a cost, and that’s what this post will be about (there will be some spoilers so read with caution).

The relationship between Leo and Dagger

We discovered that players can heavily object to being forced into relationships they haven’t chosen for themselves, if they do not enjoy these relationships. As I wrote in the last post, the storyline with Dagger is the main story in Knife Sisters. So what happens if you don’t like Dagger, and don’t like being subjected to her? It turns out that most of the ‘not recommended’ reviews on Steam mention not being able to opt out of the storyline and relationship with Dagger as something that negatively impacts the game.

When I come across a bad review I generally react emotionally, I often avoid it by for instance skim-reading, and sometimes dismissing the information as not relevant (that’s a coping mechanism – it is really hard to handle when someone truly hates something you’ve tried to be careful about and have put so much effort into). But in this case something got me interested in what the players who objected strongly were actually experiencing – so I decided to take a little more note than I might otherwise do.

So this is from a really lengthy review by someone who disliked Knife Sisters immensely  – both because of how the game was designed, and how the characters were written and/or portrayed.

First and foremost, all dating sims have one thing in common: making you feel like you have a choice. This generally makes or breaks a dating sim, and in this case, it breaks it. This game makes you feel like the relationships you pick, are the ones you decided on. This is not the case at all. I will tell you the obvious now: Dagger is your girlfriend. These other characters? We don’t know them.

The reviewer then discusses their emotions around having to always come back to Dagger, no matter how they feel about her:

Anyway, in all seriousness, I hate Dagger. I didn’t want to be with her at all, yet the story doesn’t progress until she is acknowledged. /…/ after a while, it just gets redundant. Suddenly, I’m not playing the game anymore, the game is playing me.

A game about power and dependency

This player seems to have been hoping for a queer dating sim where player choice regarding all the relationships’ outcome (including the relationship with Dagger) would be much greater than what it was. Since Knife Sisters is about dependency and power relations (something that is clearly stated in the description and also in the beginning of the game), there definitely is coercion – meaning that the player/Leo can’t fully get away from Dagger. Being caught in Dagger’s net is what the game’s theme is about – and if that’s not something you as a player would want to explore, and you can’t stand it, then the game will be experienced as almost abusive to you, which is what this player is expressing. They are also saying that there are some expectations on the genre dating sim, that Knife Sisters just doesn’t live up to.

The game and its player

To counter, some reviewers thought very differently about the game. In her Kotaku article, Kate Gray goes into the topic of the player’s relationship to the main character – and that their wants and needs actually could differ to some extent. In the beginning of the article, she poses this question:

Can a character be their own person? It’s intriguing, the idea that the player and player-character could be two separate identities, with two separate senses of agency and decision-making. Often, they are one and the same: The player tells the player-character to do something, or say something, and they will. But in many narrative games, sometimes the player-character has a personality already, and they know what they do and don’t like.

What Gray addresses here is something I’ve thought of a lot, and have made a deliberate choice about. I want the main character to be a person that has their own agenda. Within the framework of their agenda, the player can make choices. And the relationship with Dagger is, in a way, a reflection of that design decision. No matter if the player likes Dagger, Leo is intrigued by her, and has a hard time resisting her. In that respect, Knife Sisters probably does break dating sim norms.

Gray continues:

Leo decides how they feel about the world, but you, the player, decide how they interact with it. Yes, Leo is scared, that much is clear; but whether or not they do something despite their fear is up to you.

This way of playing actually demands of the player to accept the main character’s personality and circumstances – which might be too much to ask of every single player, since they will sometimes want more agency than what the game can offer.

What do you think?

#game design #knife sisters #relation games #consent in games

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In south Sweden where I live, we have Pride week right now, and the ending parade will pretty much coincide with the finale of the Queer Games Bundle..!

The bundle contains over 450 games and other items (Knife Sisters included!) and is a great way to explore games outside of the mainstream, while also supporting queer devs and artists!

🚨 There are only 48 hours left to buy the queer games bundle. 🚨

With social media collapsing, it is now more important than ever to support indie queer art.

Full Price: https://itch.io/b/1812/

Sliding Scale: https://itch.io/b/1813/

Pride may be over but we are still here.

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Systems for Emotions - Knife Sisters

In this blog post, I’ll take our game Knife Sisters (18+) as an example on how a game’s system is created to convey a story, and how the characters are chosen to play a part in that story. (Be aware, there will be spoilers!)

If you’d rather play Knife Sisters than read about it, one way to get it is through the Queer Games Bundle on Itch.io!

When we started working on Knife Sisters, I mainly only knew that the game would be about Leo, a 19-year old non-binary and pansexual person, sharing a flat with a few other people in a semi-large city. Leo was inspired by a real person who I spotted at the Pride Parade in Malmö. At a Pride Parade, many people are celebrating, but this person was standing alone, with broken angel wings, as the rain started to pour – and I got intrigued. Who were they? I couldn’t know, so I started making up stories in my mind. Eventually the fictionalized version of this person became the main character in Knife Sisters.

In the beginning of the game, Leo is portrayed to be indifferent and probably also a bit depressed. Then, the artist Dagger moves into the same apartment as them, and she claims to be part of the secret society Knife Sisters. She starts asking things of Leo, things that are sometimes really hard to obtain, such as getting blood from an innocent person. As the story progresses, the demands on Leo get higher and higher. But can Leo really do whatever Dagger asks of them, regardless of the cost?

The game’s set-up

The game is structured into six chapters, each of them spanning one week. The game starts with one of the last scenes, where Leo wakes up in their room, remembering nothing from the night before, just knowing something bad must have happened. The player then has to go back six weeks in time to find out what actually happened.

Each week/chapter in the game is also structured somewhat similarly, where on weekdays, the player uses Leo’s Diary to decide which people to hang out with, most often their friends and – later – lovers.

In the specific scenes, the player can make choices (mainly dialogue choices) that affect the outcome of the scene, which will also affect the overall outcome of the game, since some choices affect stats in the game. Each week, the player will play a couple of everyday scenes where they meet with different characters and try to meet Dagger’s demands.

At the end of the week, there is usually a bigger event happening, such as a party or a gathering of some kind, to have many characters in the game meeting at the same place, for instance a rave party or an occult fair that is a part of the story.

As you can gather from this, the set-up of the game is rather fixed. There is a limited set of locations and characters, and of choices you can make in regards to the characters. The temporality of the game is also somewhat fixed: Since you start with playing one of the last scenes in the story, we know this outcome will be there no matter what else changes in the story. But although there are set premises, within those, the player has the freedom to decide what will happen.

The choice of characters

As I previously stated, characters have functions within the game’s system. On each weekend in Knife Sisters, Leo can date one out of three characters: Naomi, Mo, and Vicki. They’ll have playdates, which I’ve tried to design to give the player lots of freedom when it comes to how these scenes will play out.

And then, each Sunday, Dagger invites Leo to her room for a ritual, during which she will introduce Leo to a new assignment, as well as evaluate the last one.

Meeting with Dagger is not something you can back out from. The storyline with her has to be considered the main story, and the dates with the characters are side-stories, even though they will affect the outcome of the main story.

Having the relationship with Dagger being the main story was a choice I made because I wanted this story to be about dependence, and the idea was to have Dagger wanting you to go into a rather dysfunctional relationship with her – and then have the other characters function as counterweights to that. Depending on how you play, you’ll move on a scale related to dependence and empathy, which will also constantly shift Leo’s mood. The dependence value is mostly connected to Dagger, whereas the empathy value is connected to how you interact with other characters – your lover/s and friends.

The choice of relationships

What I wanted in Knife Sisters was that Leo’s relationships would serve as a counterweight to the rather dysfunctional relationship they would have with Dagger. The characters would also represent different sexual practices that the player might want to explore, such as being a top, switch or bottom. Apart from that, the characters had some different traits, for instance one is a cis woman, one is an androgyne non-binary, and one is a femme trans woman. I didn’t give the player any opportunity to date cis men, which means that the game caters mainly to players that are interested in women and trans people. (There haven’t been many players objecting to this - maybe because the game is pretty clear about what to expect.)

Maybe it sounds cold to say that characters represent functions? I don’t think it is. That games are systems is just a fact, and characters in games will always be utilities in that system, but of course, that’s not everything they are! The main goal of relation games is to evoke emotions, and if characters were only utilities, that goal would be impossible to reach. So the game’s characters are both functional and portrayed as close to real humans as we can possibly make them.Knife Sisters is just one example of how relation games can be made. There are definitely flaws in the game’s design, and design choices we made sometimes had a bigger impact on the story than I would have wanted them to, but that’s what it’s like to make games. You can’t fully know what you’re making until it’s done and players start playing. That’s also the fun part! Let me know if you have experiences from playing or creating relation games. What did you learn from your experience?

#knifesisters gamedesign queergames indiegames