The Making of The Moon's Cherished Flower 01

On August 1st we released this game for the Shoot for the Stars Jam. We had 12 days to work on it, and in this Devlog, I, Sei, will be talking about how we made this!

The Concept

As the name suggests, the theme for the Jam was "space and sci-fi." At first, I had several ideas about aliens and advanced civilization and even space wars, but ultimately they all needed their own complex world-building, and I wasn't ready to tackle such a wide subject. Hence, I decided to choose a lighthearted, slightly supernatural theme, the Lady of the Moon.

Why did we choose to make an epistolary visual novel?

When the Jam was happening, we already had our hands full with our studio's main project, Serene Sonder, so we aimed to create something simple. The idea of making an epistolary visual novel came from Dear Devere. It's a wonderful epistolary, and one that showed me a whole new approach to making a visual novel. No sprites needed; just a series of letters, or in our case, diary entries.

The Diary

Dear Devere did a beautiful job telling a story with its beautiful envelope design. We wanted to do the same, to not bore people with the lack of sprites and faces to look at. I did some research about epistolary, and found out that diary entries are also a part of the genre. Well, perfect! So now we have the Lady of the Moon and diary entries. A few brainstorming sessions later, Selene was born and we got the first draft ready.

Now onto the writing! 

Selene was 6-12 years old in this story. In the first few entries, she had a lot of typos and grammatical errors. The entries were also made to be very short, showing her limited vocabulary. Selene had no access to public education, so this trend continued until she grew older.

We had her age decided on every single entry, making it easier to keep track of her growth. We made sure to show her improved vocabulary, better spelling, and longer entries. The topic she wrote about also varied greatly depending on what she was going through at that age.

Although there was 6 year's worth of stories to be told,  we kept it short and only showed the important ones, those that actually had an impact on the story. Her terrible family situation, her mental health, and the Lady's visitations were the three major things we wanted to highlight.

Lastly, we had to decide whether we wanted to make this completely kinetic or with multiple endings. The player wouldn't be able to change anything that has happened in the diary, so the only possibility was to have the player decide what would they do after learning about Selene's past. So we made three endings and a series of choices about what they think actually happened to her.

What's next?

So far, we have finished the base game. We've encountered a few small mistakes and are actively working to fix it. We're also trying to implement a Gallery and/or Achievement system so you could look at each individual diary entries without having to play the whole game again.

Selene's side of the story is complete, but we're planning to make a short epilogue where we tell the story from the parents' perspective, so you could have a better understanding of what actually happened to this family.

There's no release date yet for the next big update, so stay tuned! Follow us here or on Twitter.

Thank you for reading, have a wonderful day!