To Be A Box

I made a visual novel! It's called To Be A Box and I made it in 6 weeks in ren'py. It was my first time doing this, so I figured I'd write down some of my thoughts on what I did.

How I got into this Project

I happened across the "Robotic Romance" game jam by chance. I had played a game called HalOPE fairly recently that I liked, and it turned out that the author of that was one of the people running the game jam. I'd also been thinking about robots in general for a while, there's definitely some personal feelings tied up in that, and multiple social circles have independently called me a robot in general before so I have some kinship in a weird way.

Writing

I think I've been wanting to tell a story for a while, but I hadn't really done any creative writing since like high school, and even then that would have only been for like English classes. Almost all of the writing I've done since has been like a flavor of technical or analysis (science papers, media analysis, essays, technical design/documentation, journaling). The structure of a game jam was sort of good at getting me to sit down and just write, just time pressure to make sure I sit down and do something. Definitely felt the lack of experience while writing and I'm pretty sure it shows. A lot of DV's rambling thoughts was intentionally kinda stilted, but it's also sort of indicative of how I think things through sometimes, and I don't think I really got a sense of how to write them until the end, but definitely couldn't really go back and rewrite everything.

I was able to write about 500 words a day though when I was able to convince myself to sit down and write. And for the days I didn't want to write I would end up working on music or art instead so it was nice to jump to different things if I had a mental blocker with one of them. Not gonna count the day that I decided to reinstall my OS or fiddle around with the layout of my desktop, as that was just run-of-the-mill procrastination. A lot of the writing I did on a 13 year old laptop that struggles to do anything outside of a terminal window and cannot be unplugged. Turns out when your computer is bad at doing the things that you'd do to distract yourself, you don't distract yourself!

Speaking of starting the project, I had actually written a whole outline of things I wanted to cover up front, but definitely ended up cutting stuff or changing things as I went as I realized I wouldn't really have time for them. May comes off kind of aloof because of this (I find the story from their perspective to be very funny), and part of this is also because I wanted to stick in DV's head and despite them thinking through a lot I don't think they're actually as perceptive as they think they are. However, it does make May come across as kinda flat since they don't really get as much space in the story it feels like. Like you learn a bit about their history and can see the sorts of reasons they're inventing to basically keep going, but they don't really get to do much other that be support.

I think part of my problem is that for romance, I haven't really read a lot of it, and of what I have read, I realized at one point during this project, it's almost entirely just slowburn stuff so that's the framework I was sort of working within. I never really got to build up their chemistry at all, they were just two characters thrown into the same place for the most part. I assume the general solution is to skip ahead in the relationship and start from there, with maybe some sort of obstacle happening, and it's a lesson I'll have to take forward. I haven't played any of the other games from the jam yet, they're almost definitely worth checking out for this purpose though.

Art

I realized pretty early on that I wanted to do a mostly grayscale style. Partially for speed, and partially because I was rereading Girl's Last Tour a little bit before the project started and the super pretty and scratchy art in there was in my head. Also I sort of got to connect the usage of color that I did make to essentially things that can bring joy or at least fight against the sterile environment (namely May's hair and the plants).

I think the setting being all gray and very sterile was thematically important, but it also made things very boring to look at. I'm sure there's probably a fun way to go about mixing those two ideas, but I didn't really have time to explore what I wanted to do.

It's been forever since I've drawn any backgrounds and having to think about perspective, so that bit was decently challenging in a good way. I sort of also limited my writing because having new scenes happening in other places would be more backgrounds to draw.

I did start adding a few little pop-ups at the end just to make things a bit more interesting, and also had fun drawing the end credits pictures.

I would probably go back and redo DV's design if I could, although them looking very plain is definitely part of the point. I thought May's design was fun though (their hands are granular jammers, which was a fun excuse to not draw more hands).

Sound / Music

Music

Music is fun to make, I'm glad I sat down and made a few songs for this. Got to start having fun with bitwig studio.

The first song I wrote I wanted to be kind of time pressury/dangerous. Originally this was just going to be going into the mine, which was going to be a bit longer of a segment than it was with an accident occurring, but that didn't happen. Was able to reuse it at the very start with the crash though where it sort of fit in.

This second one is what I made to be the sort of default background music, just sort of nice. A sort of repetitive structure and some noodling. In general I think it ended up becoming May's theme song, as a lot of the times when they leave the scene it stops.

The third is something of a short atmospheric one written for the scene at the end. I don't think I fully like how it came out, might have been better served with bells and pianos than synths, but it filled it's role.

Sound Effects

I also had lots of fun making the two sound effects. The crash was some silverware dropped into a bowl sent through a bunch of filters.

And the explosion was mostly me making noises/blowing into the mic. The tick at the very beginning was actually me accidentally hitting my desk when I started recording, but I thought it was kinda fun to leave it in there. I'm actually really happy with this one.

Closing Thoughts

It's nice to finish a project even if it didn't really turn out completely the way that you wanted it to! I like that it was short such that I could finish instead of burning myself out on the project halfway through and never finishing it (if it wasn't part of a game jam, I would have probably called it quits maybe a week before I finished it being unhappy with the direction it went).