Melissa ❤️ and a Full Year of Visual Novels - From Spooktober to Spooktober

Thank you very much, everyone, I am blown away by the reception “Melissa ❤️” has been getting.  I am deeply flattered by everyone's feedback for my game.  I still consider myself quite a newbie in game development, and this reaction has been really overwhelming, but invigorating at the same time.

September was a particularly busy month for me, so I was under the impression that I would not be able to participate in the Spooktober Visual Novel game jam.  

Melissa ❤️ was largely a last-minute weekend project, with the idea INVADING MY BRAIN on a Thursday Night, 9 days before Spooktober’s deadline.  The rest was a blur of outlining, drafting, and asset creation to upload on Friday.

(The first quick sketch of "Melissa", yes that's right... she originally had a beauty mark).

The reason I fought to finish this project was largely based on a personal sense of significance Spooktober had for me.

It was this same game jam last year that first got me back into working on Visual Novels.

For a while before then, I had been trying to find a good “production groove” in order to write short graphical stories.  I am much more experienced working in comics & animation, but have found those mediums quite difficult when writing a story past a certain length.  

Once there was any level of complexity past initial concept phases, I got bogged down into a pre-production cycle of sketching and blocking things out that was quite difficult for me.

Namely, that it took so much time for me to finish something enough to stand back from it, and “observe” it.  

(The original computer design was much more vertical, I cut down on the detail and additional unnecessary gadgets in the final game).

Visual Novels feels much more like a puppet play than anything else.  You can arrange your actors and your environments, and just “test” them.  Being able to see the rough of my story unravel in such a small period of time felt like the kind of quick internal feedback I needed for writing my stories.  

Outside of figuring out the Unity Environment (which I am still in a constant battle with), this lifted a ton of stress from me, and allowed me to experiment in so many things in a short period of time.

I also want to say that... the Visual Novel community is incredibly positive and loving.  (Or at least the circles I had stumbled upon).  People seem very supportive to even the dumbest newbies LIKE ME, and tend to give practical advice that have helped me figure out what I wanted out of developing VNs.

Over the course of the year, I’ve made six visual novels.  Most of them aren’t part of the horror genre, but I hope you will enjoy them as much as I enjoyed making them.

Thank you again everyone!  I’ve grown to LOVE this type of storytelling, so I hope you stick with me on new projects I work on in the future. 

(As stated in the credits, the name "Melissa" pays homage to the infamous Melissa computer virus of the same name.)

My most recent big game: