Hey everyone!  I know I’m a little late on this blog, but things have been a lot more hectic than expected.  I’m still trying to figure out the best way to produce these blogs.  Anyway, I wanted to talk about my experience with one of the game projects I’ve been working on in my search for a job.  That being the parody dating sim: Love N. U. Tonight.

During my time in college, I participated in a sketch comedy club called CNU Tonight.  It's pretty much a club where a bunch of college students would write comedic sketches and perform them for friends and family of the club.  From live performances to digital videos, or anything in between CNU Tonight provided tons of content with the goal of making you laugh.  While not a perfect club by any means, it was one of those communities that provided the best parts of my college career.  I was very active in the club during my time at CNU, from voice acting in our digital videos during the 2020 pandemic, to performing and even writing sketches for our shows, to even becoming the club’s historian who was in charge of editing all of the club’s videos and uploading them to their dedicated YouTube channel (this may explain my hiatus).  Despite me graduating last year, I still keep in touch with some of the members of CNU Tonight to this very day. 

If you could tell by now, I love that little club.  So much so that I decided to make a parody game for them and had them play it on April Fools Day.  This idea originated from one of the members of the club asking if they were planning on doing something for April Fools.  Since no one had anything planned, I began to brainstorm some funny ideas to celebrate.  And at the end, I decided to make a dating sim with the goal of meeting the past 5 CNU Tonight presidents and “finding your lover”.  The only problem with this plan is that I had less than 3 weeks to make this game, so I had to come up with a concrete plan to get the game done as quickly as possible.  Thankfully, I’ve done a few game jams in the past, so I was confident that I could get this done. 

The first thing was settling on a game engine.  I ultimately chose to use the Godot Game Engine because it’s an engine I’ve used for 4 years and is the one I’m the most comfortable in.  If I were to do this again I would have used something that was made with visual novels in mind, like Ren’py.  However, at the time I believe that using a tool I’m familiar with would save me more time. 

There were some things I still need to work on for it to simulate the “dating sim feel” however.  Firstly, the Dialogue Manager didn’t support character portraits out the box.  My solution was to create a “scenery” node that would show character portraits and move them around whenever they were called in the Dialogue Manager.  Due to the limited time, there were a lot of things I could’ve improved on.  This is one of them.  Something I learned after this project was that I could have added character portraits and animations in the dialogue manager directly if I had modified the source code.  This was something I didn’t really think about at the time and ultimately did more work than I could have.  But that’s just the consequence of being under a deadline.  Despite my efforts to streamline the development of this project, you just don’t know what will be the most efficient until you take a step back.  I am still proud of the approach I did with Love N. U. Tonight, however, since I wouldn’t have discovered this simpler solution without having to get my hands dirty.

One technical issue I could’ve figured out before the April 1st deadline was implementing a save feature.  This would mean that the player’s progress would not only be lost once you boot out of the game, but also the player’s settings would reset to the default.  This isn’t the worst issue for this particular project due to how short the story is.  But it was still something I later implemented post-launch to make it a more polished project. 

Speaking of the story, this was something I knew was gonna take the most of my time due to the nature of the genre.  Visual Novels are known for their big, expansive branching paths.  However, something of that scale would take months to complete.  But I still wanted to add some engagement to keep the player invested.  My original plan was to give the player 5 unique routes, where the player would talk to 2 different CNU Tonight presidents.  While I still believe this would’ve provided a lot of replayability, having so many routes would have been a massive undertaking.  So I decided to condense the number of routes down to 3.  The number of endings would, ironically, be the same as my first design due to the number of joke endings I included, but it was still a lot less work than what I originally planned. 

Writing the story itself wasn’t that challenging for me.  I haven’t spoken about it a lot on Acro Projects, but I have experience in writing skits during my time with CNU Tonight.  So being able to write up comedic scenarios for the players and CNU Tonight presidents to get into was a smooth and fun time.  My approach was to go for a stereotypical high school romance theme, making sure to have a handful of cliques to sell the cheesiness.  Since this was made exclusively for CNU Tonight, I decided to add a bunch of references to the club and many iconic memories we have of each other.  I personally think I could’ve done one more rewrite to not alienate people who aren’t familiar with CNU Tonight, but I’ve had a couple of not CNU Tonight people test out the game and they still enjoyed the final product.  So the problem may not be as big as I think it is. 

Going back to the technical parts, in order for me to allow the story to lead to branching paths I would need to find a way to story game progression.  To achieve this, I used a simple autoload script that stored what route the player was on and what choices they’d chosen up to that point.  If the story ever called for heavy choices, I would set those flags according to what the player selected.  It was surprisingly not that difficult to implement thanks to the Dialogue Manager’s support for autoload scripts.

I broke the story/game into multiple “scenes”.  Once a scene was finished, it would load into a new scene depending on your choices.  I did create different scene types to make my life a little easier.  For example, if I wanted a nearly identical scene to play out but with a different character I would load a scene node that stored two dialogue objects and would play the appropriate dialogue from the player’s choices in the past scene.  There were 3 different scene types that I could use to help expand the player’s choices and help me create the story I wanted to tell.

For the art style, this was the one aspect that took a hit from the 1-month deadline.  I had a couple of friends assist me with making the character portraits, which I am very grateful for.  However, the people who were assisting with the art were also active members of CNU Tonight.  And because I wanted to keep the dating sim a secret, there wasn't as much communication as there probably should've been because I didn't want the surprise to be spoiled.  The result was radically different art styles between the two artists.  Both of the art styles look good but it was still inconsistent.  I love both art styles, but it does clash with the quality of the final product.

Regarding the background, I chose to take a bunch of pictures of the CNU campus and put an oil paint filter to give it a more anime look.  The result didn't turn out as good as I liked, but this was the best I could do with redrawing every image.  By the time I was working on the graphics, I only had a week before the April 1st deadline.  So it was a matter of making the final product look good enough. 

By the time I felt comfortable with the state of Love N U Tonight, I had 3 days left to get a trailer edited and ready to be shown to CNU Tonight.  Thankfully, with my experience editing YouTube videos, I was able to whip up a very cliche but absolutely entertaining trailer that showed exactly what the game was about.  Once that was all finished I just waited for April 1st to show CNU Tonight what I’ve been working on for the entire month.

Ultimately the reception was overwhelmingly positive by members of CNU Tonight.  Despite some missing features at launch, like a save feature, the people who played enjoyed all the effort that was put into the game.  Players of Love N. U. Tonight enjoyed the short, but entertaining story and liked all the little interactions/easter eggs I put into the game.

Now, for my overall thoughts on working on this project, I enjoyed it.  I’m proud that I was able to create a functional visual novel with multiple routes and endings in a month.  However, there were some caveats that came from making the game from scratch.  For one, there were features that are considered “standards” for visual novels that I didn’t think about implementing or didn’t have time for.  The save feature is one of those that I considered until after the game's release, which I did end up implementing.  However, something that I didn’t even think about until working in other visual novel engines is a rewind feature for those who wanted to pick a different option.  Little things like that would have to be made from scratch by me, which is one of the limitations of using an engine like Godot.  If I made this project in Renp’y, all these features would have already been implemented and I would only have to worry about the story and minor features to code.  However, this is all in hindsight and taking a step back from the project.  Realistically, there wasn’t a way to know about these concerns until I was deep into the project, so I can’t be too upset.

In the end, I am happy with the end product and glad I worked on it to help me get experience for not only the game’s sequel: “Love N. U. Tonight: Director’s Cut” but for future projects.