Two days left for December 17th. When that day comes, it'll be the four-months anniversary of our visual novel, Don't Give Up On Me!

This game was developed for an entire year, as me and my dear friend and artist Ryuzi_nea constantly took breaks to focus on our individual lives before coming back to the game itself. It was our highest priority for this whole time period - yet it couldn't be our main, continuous focus. Had we not took breaks, the game wouldn't be done with the same love and passion it could've been done.  That applies to everything: the art, music, programming, and even the writing itself. And trust me: there are so many things to talk about when it comes to our writing process for Don't Give Up On Me.

The reason I write this series of devlogs is to reflect and share a bit of how the entire writing process went down. It was defined by various sources of inspirations, mixing so many ideas, embracing the whole chaotic vibe, and finding ground to properly develop our lovable character cast. By sharing all of that with you, dear reader, I sincerely hope some of the things here serve as tips for your own writing - be it for a visual novel, be it for something else.

In the part one of this series, I talked about how the project came to be, our main sources of inspirations, and how ideas need some kind of previous ground to come along. As this is part two, I will now talk about our story's core. In short: we thought about what we considered most important in any writing - the emotions we wanted to convey in our game.

Evoking Emotions

From my point of view, you really can't have a proper story if you don't know what do you wanna convey from it.

Let's do a little exercise: think of your favorite movie, book, series, game, anything goes. Why is it your favorite one? Is it because of the spectacular story it has? Is it because of its amazing characters? Either way, if it's your favorite movie/book/series/game, it means it marked you somehow. And if it marked you, it's not only because of how good it is. It's because it evoked some kind of emotion in you. 

Every story, be it of any quality, wants to make you feel something. That's why we love stories so much. It's not only because of the curiosity, it's because of the whole ride you have with it. It'll lead somewhere, and that somewhere will pay off, be it with extreme hype, or huge laughs, or tender tears. If you're not feeling anything with it, you'll get bored. And I'm sure no one wants to write something boring.

With Don't Give Up On Me!, Ryuzi_nea and I aimed for something simple from the start. It's a romcom! Where do we head with that? The answer was simple: comedy that pays off with lovey-doey scenarios. Great! How do we do that?

I'm no expert in writing comedy, and I don't have any huge tips for it, to be honest. Most of the humor in Don't Give Up On Me! just flew in naturally, no hard thoughts, it just happened and we let it get weirder and weirder. One tip I can give to comedy, however, is to not restrict yourself. I remember one moment that crucially changed the direction of Don't Give Up On Me. I showed to Ryuzi_nea some jokes that I've had written, and she thought that they all seemed too basic, we should just knock it out of the gate and write crazy stuff. I was against that, as I was afraid it'd be too extreme for players. However, we ended up agreeing on something even better: we could start the comedy in a pretty simple way, and scale it with each chapter, making it even more and more insane. This was the best decision we had for the whole writing process.

As for romance, however, we just had to give proper space for our characters to build up on their chemistry. Have them talk about things naturally! Show how well they fit with each other! Show how they communicate with each other, even with differences from both sides! Of course, that isn't a rule or anything. Love comes from the most unexpected places, and it can build up from the most surprising things (think of Enemies to Lovers, for example). It just happens. And in the case for Don't Give Up On Me!, this is how it happened.

Our objective was to pretty much make players get into constant laughs and enjoyment. We wanted people to always get caught off by the weird humor and the illogical scenarios. Of course, however, nonstop humor can get dangerous, there's always the chance the novelty wears off, or the player just gets tired of it. That's why we also had the goal of making them also feel how the characters truly felt, in and out of the romance. How is our protagonist, Akihiko, feeling when is he burnt out of everything going wrong? How does his crush, Aoi, feels when Akihiko somehow disappoints him on a date? We wanted to transition into that wild humor to more personal moments without making things feel so abrupt. The key here was the balance, both the "romance" and the "comedy" had to be well deserved and spaced out.

However, spacing out is something more appropriate for the next devlog.

Next Part?

The final part of this series of devlogs is expected to come out in the following days, so follow me on Itch.Io and stay tuned for more news!

Thanks for reading this whole devlog, and I sincerely hope it helped you somehow! And while you're here, consider checking out Don't Give Up On Me! It's a free game, it'll surely be a great time for you.