Dev Notes:

Alright, let me get my background out of the way first: This is my first game, first jam, first whatever. I have some experience in writing and drawing but I'm no professional. There's a lot I didn't know, a lot I still don't know, but I definitely learned a lot.

About story:

It’s funny, I told myself that this game will be short. It will be 3000 words MAX and only have one drawn character. With only a month to do everything with no realistic idea of how long each component would take to develop, I knew I had to set limits.

7400+ words later: (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻! I mean, is this even a surprise? After seeing how long this note has become, it's pretty obvious that I can't stop myself from writing... Still, I very much never wanted to go over the pre-established limits, but I also have a habit of adding things when the current project isn't going in a direction I think is interesting. It's a curse, I swear.

First, let me backtrack to how the concepts for the story were developed. I've always had a guilty pleasure with yandere visual novels, so like why deny myself from making one lol. The original idea was for the player to go on a blind date, the protag and date’s interests don't click, hint at some red flags before the player does something dumb and the love interest kills them. Then, the story resets except the love interest is suddenly perfect and shares all the same interests as you and suddenly it's like love at first sight for the player. Bla bla bla, stuff happens, story gets too complicated for a first game jam so I dump the idea.

Then, I try to think of the most anime thing possible. That's when the summoning demon to be girlfriend idea hits me. It even has an Isekai element in it lol. Since the game jam was anime themed, I made sure to pick a super anime title, hence “Is it Wrong to Summon a Demon to be My Girlfriend?” I drew the character on the first-ish days and made some music and bam, I thought this game jam was going to be a breeze.

It wasn't. I started writing and the story just wasn't clicking for me. The more I wrote, the less yandere this demon became and the whole story was turning into a philosophical romance that only oozes ANIME™. Which is like… cool and all, but I wanted a yandere horror visual novel!

Less than two weeks pass of me banging my head trying to get this plot going, I get the idea to just introduce a new yandere-ish character. I'd been reluctant the whole time because time is limited, but eh. I drew her and bam, I got both my horror beats and my anime beats. Yay.

But then I bumped into limitations again and realistically knew I had to stop. That's why bonding with Lailah is rushed (I wanted a slow burn toxic relationship okay). It's also why, if you choose to work with Veda, the rest of the story is even more super rushed. Oh well, it is what it is. At least I got a finished game out of it. It was so much fun :D

About Art:

Nothing much to say about this. I just look online for relevant references and just draw. For Veda… I really don't remember. I drew it at work, vaguely remembering what a bunch of other anime demons look like. For Lailah, well… this isn't my first rodeo with an innocent-looking manipulative character. I also like the idea of cute-looking angels just being absolute monsters inside, so… yeah, that happened.

With backgrounds… it's not something I practice often. I figured I could spend the least time on it as long as it got the idea across and set the right atmosphere.

Though, while I have experience in art, drawing as much as I did in one month for this project was new to me. I'm usually very slow and inconsistent when it comes to art, so being capable of drawing all these different things in one month? I’m patting myself on the back for that :D 

About Music:

I only started learning about music production a couple days before the new year. I don't have a thought process for this because I still don't know what I'm doing lol. I just watched a tutorial, put a bunch of notes and instruments together, and hoped it sounded fitting. 

Oh, I hummed and recorded Lailah’s theme. Of course, it was off pitch and my voice cracked, but I was able to kind of fix it in FL Studio. And I say kind of because it created a melody that had parts with my voice humming three different notes at the same time. I didn't know how to fix it, but I figured Lailah would be weird enough to be capable of it, so I kept it.

Programming:

So, I was really embarrassed with sharing this project… which led to me communicating very vague details about what the game needed to my programmer… which led to only getting the functioning parts done at the very end of the game jam and forgoing things that could make the game more polished (like, I wanted a scene fade transition, music to play at certain times, music to continue playing even when scenes change, letting player input whatever name instead of it blatantly being protag, more options). But like, yeah, my shame definitely made the whole process more tedious/frustrating in the long run. I learned my lesson (°ー°〃). I will definitely be more clear about my ideas if I ever make another game. 

I did learn a lot from how Unity works tho, which is cool. My only experience is dabbling in RPG Maker, so going here and literally having everything made from scratch was an enlightening experience. Big thanks to MerpiB for doing the script and teaching me how to use Unity. 

Limitations and Struggles and Scrapped Ideas:

I know this may be obvious to everyone else, but I learned the hard way that writing a visual novel is very different from writing a normal novel. There were so many times I was writing a scene before I realized I could literally just show it with the visuals lol. But then, it felt so weird to just write dialogue after dialogue without something to write in between (I had been under the assumption that the script of a visual novel primarily focused on dialogue while descriptions are left to visuals). It definitely slowed down my writing process until I eventually found my groove. And then me being too lazy to look for sound effects and the limitations of the program also held back visuals/sound effects at certain moments of the script. There's some kind of balance to strike between script and visuals, but my main focus was to finish a game within a month, not master the art of making a visual novel lol, so I'm fine with the end result. 

There's also the fact that I didn't want to draw a character for the protagonist, which really limited how much could be drawn.

I also wanted to make different music and not the first thing I made with a tutorial, but I didn’t have time to attempt to produce more music.

This story does have a bit more to explore. Manipulation can go so wrong in so many ways. I wanted to explore more about the protag becoming so dependent on Lailah that they willingly throw away their beliefs, perceptions, morals, and life just to be with her (without any magic nonsense). I wanted to go more in depth with the “madness” the protag goes through in one of the endings to provide more insight into what caused Lailah to become what she is now. I also mentioned that Veda’s route unintentionally became more philosophical… which led to a discussion about the natures/limits of humans and demons, free will and destiny, defining love as something that enhances people or obliterates them. Clearly that was too much and thus it was scrapped. 

But whatever. Deadlines are deadlines. Maybe another time.

If you notice anything else that could be better or felt like it was missing, go ahead and criticize me. I’m always open to ideas that could make future projects better.