Hello hello :D 

I didn’t realize for the longest time, that there was an option to make devlogs on itch.io. As I’m resuming to work intensely on Mirror Marker, I thought it was time to document my progress and give an insight to people who are interested!

How did I start on it?

Mirror Marker was born from one question I had for various love stories I have consumed in my life: Why should these two people be together? 

I am a fan of love stories in general, but relationships are often just portrayed as a fantasy. That doesn’t show what I see people around me go through: Growing apart or growing together and influencing each other to be better or worse people. 

So I centered my VN for the Otome Game Jam 2019 around this question. Which meant I decided on some things early on:

I want to write about how two people can influence each other, so the female protagonist needs to have a defined character. That’s how Galen took shape. 

It is important to me that people immediately see that she is not a self-insert otome protagonist. Especially to reach the players who might be interested in a more defined personality for a protagonist. I turned her into  a smart, introverted young woman, who fears failure and exposing her bad sides. Having her have a “good” image meant she thinks she might lose something by showing her weaker moments. 

I also decided that each of the love interest shares a flaw of her. That meant they could relate to each other, but also both potentially ignore their own issues. 

Now, what exactly those flaws are, are spoilers so I can’t go into it too much. So I will just talk about them in general. This is Rhett the helpful upperclassman.

Finn, the cute and upbeat guy, whose energetic sprites were fun to draw! 

And Hugo, who only gets about  5 seconds in the demo, but has intrigued people, from what they told me. 

Their design were influenced by my own preferences and art style, but creating their personalities with all these goals I had in mind, made them more layered. And such, it became even more clear to me, that this will take longer than the game jam, to fully present their story. 

I take game jams as a playground for ideas and concepts. They usually take place in a time frame, in which it is okay to fail, so you can try things that are out of your comfort zone. 

Meaning I focused on producing assets rather than making a fine-tuned outline first as I really wanted to submit at least a demo:

I wrote about 8’000 words, drew 13 BGs, one having two variations, 1 CG, 1 menu image, 6 sprites, ranging from having 1 to 10 expressions with sometimes pose changes, edited sounds and searched for CC music. 

While also drawing about four BGs for each other project I was on board on. I certainly fell into the trap of being my own artist, which meant, rather than cutting down scenes which use too many assets, such as mentioning many place changes, I just forced myself to draw a lot more. In the end, I had to turn what I had for Mirror Marker into a demo for the game jam to make it in time for the deadline.

It was an intensive time, after which I needed some distance from the project.

I still checked up regularly on the discord server, on other projects and took on the role as BG-artist in another team. Getting constant feedback from others fuels my motivation and helps me to keep improving. I learned from being exposed to the discussions and doing some playtesting for others, how exactly one could make and polish a VN. Each feedback on my art and then even feedback on my demo, showed me that at least some people are interested. 

So now I feel much more confident in the decisions I’m making for the further development of Mirror Marker!