Cuttlebone has been out for roughly a month now and there’s a few things about its development that I’d like to talk about. Initially scheduled to last one month as per the Nanoreno 2015 time frame, it ended up taking 2.5 times as long, and that allowed me to learn many more things and bring it closer to the level of polish I was aiming for. When you finish the game there’s an extras menu that shows you a bunch work-in-progress snapshots from the development of the various visual assets, to give you an idea of how those elements came about and evolved throughout that time. However, many things about the development of those assets could not be contained simply in snapshots, as well as roles whose progress can’t be properly conveyed visually at all, such as writing. These posts will serve to further expand on that.

In this initial post I will cover the things I needed to do to get the project started, and I’ll go more in-depth about the writing process.

Preface

I’ve been drawing for quite a few long years now, and of the various entertainment mediums I enjoy consuming, visual novels are one that have had a particularly big influence on me. Many things about it drew my interest:
Unlike anime/animation, where your workload is distributed through hundreds or thousands of frames, in visual novels your work is reduced to a small number of still illustrations, meaning with the same time budget you get to make every one drawing extremely polished and looking great, all the time. This key characteristic makes it so visual novels are able to achieve higher visual fidelity and look incredibly sleek, as well as being feasible for smaller teams to make.
For writing there’s similar benefits. You’re not restricted to fitting your script to an episodic format, or to achieve a 300 page quota. In addition to this, there’s the unique ability of being able to tell different versions of the same base story.
Many people see visual novels as a medium best fit for role-playing, but I see it as a medium that, due to the aforementioned and other miscellaneous characteristics, has tremendous potential for traditional storytelling.

Because of this, I’ve spent the past few years daydreaming of being part of a team, working on creating cool projects like the ones that inspired me. However, although I’ve made several attempts at joining with other artists/developers/groups and making something together, none of them ever went past the initial talk sessions. Sometimes because of differing ideas and investment in themes, or scope, or experience, or time zones, and so on. But this time I was resolute on making a visual novel, whether it be in a group or by myself, and Nanoreno 2015 gave me the perfect excuse to dive in. As it turned out, I ended up going solo, and in retrospect I’m glad I did.

Getting started

Right off the bat, there were a few things I knew I wanted to have in the project:
- I wanted the story to happen during the Summer on a coastal setting. For reasons that are slightly too involved to go into depth here, and as people who have followed my work will be familiar with, I am absolutely obsessed with Summer. The warm weather, the beaches, the light clothing, the absence of school, the cicadas. It’s a dream setting for me, and one that I wish to keep exploring in my work indefinitely.
- The story was to be grounded in an apartment complex. Once again drawing from things that inspire me, sprawling complexes like Gunkanjima and the Walled City of Kowloon, as well as environment illustrations from artists like Takayasu Ikumi, have also been deep fascinations of mine.
- There had to be at least one scene on a beach.

As well as a couple very glaring problems to face:
- Writing. I’ve never written a proper story before. I do plenty of analysis and critique of other storytelling media, and write a good bit by virtue of spending a lot of time on the internet, but I’d never attempted to write a story with defined characters, a start, a middle, and an end. This was what scared me the most going in.
- I had next to no experience doing full finished background illustrations. I started studying perspective last year specifically for this purpose but didn’t get around to doing much practice before this.

Writing

I quickly concluded that, before anything else, I needed to get the basic plot of the story worked out, as all the portrait art, backgrounds and script hinged on it. Painlessly enough, I settled on the idea of doing a childhood friendship story, with a particular focus on physical intimacy, all in the lens of slice-of-life. We would follow these two friends on a trip to the beach, and that would be that. The scope seemed reasonable enough, and hey, if I’m doing this whole thing myself, I may as well play up to some tropes I like.

Now, here’s where the recurring theme of nothing-is-ever-as-easy-as-you-think-it-will-be starts. Here I am, basic vague plot set out, and now what? Other writers will probably be having a chuckle of acknowledgment at this point, as I assume this is a very common brick wall for beginner writers.
Try as I might, I wasn’t having any luck kicking this thing into shape; I couldn’t figure out what the key plot point would be, how the story would start, or how it would end. But it gets worse. I couldn’t even figure out who my characters were supposed to be. By that I mean what does Inami like? What does she dislike? What’s her favorite food? What classes is she good and bad at? What are her hobbies? There are a couple things you can derive from the basic idea of the childhood friend archetype, but that could be developed any number of ways, and I had trouble settling on one.

^{I spent a ludicrous amount of time looking at this blank character sheet, not knowing what to write.}

Faced with this impasse, I decided to change the approach and try writing scenes first instead. Sketch out what scenarios I’d like to see happen, and possibly move on from there. And for a little while, that worked. Right up until the point where it didn’t, and things got even worse. See, one of the big things I learned is it’s really hard to write a character into a scene if you don’t know him/her. I kept second-guessing myself as to their behavior. Would she say this? Would he do that? It was a bunch of me staring at empty pages with lonely titles.
This tragic state lasted roughly a month.

I’d love to be able to tell you that I had a eureka! moment at that point and figured out a clear-cut solution. Unfortunately, I didn’t. Well, sort of. I managed to progress through an amalgam of methods.

The first one was by making scenes in which I wanted the characters to do a certain thing/act a certain way, and through that deduce their personality, and vice versa, complementing both the plot progression and their personalities simultaneously as I went along.

The second method I came up with was by using easter eggs. Much like I did for the general themes of the setting and plot, I thought about some of my favorite works and in some cases pretty much copypasted things from them.
“The Great Majority” TV show that Shu and Inami talk about? That’s the plot of Hellsinker, my favorite SHMUP. And “The Great Majority” is the name of the first EX stage.
During the recalling of the accident with Inami’s mom, Shu is a playing a game called Takedown 3. That’s a reference to Burnout 3: Takedown, my favorite racing game.
The part where Shu mentions that they’re laughing like a pack of crazy hyenas? Reference to a scene in Persona 4 between Chie and Yukiko at Junes.
Inami doing tennis? That’s a reference to Nakai Yukari, my favorite gravure idol, who also did tennis.
The beach they go to? Modeled after a beach near where I lived in the south, which had cuttlebone as well.

Lastly, the final way I found of pushing this cart along was to pull things from myself. Lots of facets of Shu and Inami are drawn from my own personality and experiences. If you’re looking into starting work on writing your first visual novel and have no previous experience writing, I highly recommend this and the previous method, when finding yourself at a loss on how to proceed.

And that’s mostly it! I could probably ramble on about a few other things, but I think they’re a bit too specific or unrelated to the writing process itself, and I’ve already made this post lengthy enough, so I’ll leave it at that.
In the end, writing Cuttlebone ended up being a very fun and rewarding experience. The ability to have full control over the story of the project was extremely satisfying. Not having to compromise on anything and being able to do every little idea I wanted, it felt great. Now that I’ve had a taste of it I’m even more excited about continuing to learn how to write and in exploring more of my own stories.
Unfortunately, while I’m in the midst of trying to write my second visual novel, I find that the process hasn’t gotten any easier. It’s also worrying that in Cuttlebone I developed a snapshot type of story, where you’re getting a look at this relationship at this very specific point in time, and there’s no real plot progression. If I’m to increase the scope of the next story then it’s something I’ll have to figure out, and as of now I still don’t know how I’ll crack that problem. Quite a predicament!

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Hopefully this was an interesting read, and perhaps even helpful if you’re looking to tackle the same problems yourself. If any writer with experience knows of any hot tips and tricks for writing a story that I don’t know of yet, I would appreciate it immensely if you could share them!

Look out for the next installment of this retrospect series of posts, where I will be focusing on the topic of pipelines! I think it’s a very cool topic, and if you do character illustration and/or coding work, this will be especially interesting to you. :p

Cheers!

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Cuttlebone Retrospective #02 - Pipelines
Cuttlebone Retrospective #03 - Advice & The Future

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You can download Cuttlebone for free here!