I have recently completed my first visual novel and video game "Milk Puzzle".
At first I did not feel the urge to write up a post-mortem, partly from a lack of confidence, partly from a feeling of everything that I wanted to say is contained in the work itself. Even still I feel that kind of pretentious desire to be more "mysterious" tugging at me. But it seems like a good way to organize my thoughts and this site could always use more actual writing, so I shall push through.
First off, I am astounded by the reaction...I was really, really sick about releasing the game!!! I thought it was messy, pointless, generic, offensive, childish, ect....I could go on all day. So I am genuinely filled with a feeling of something akin to...hope(?) that so many people reached out me. Whenever the feeling that it lacked too many elements that made it a "good" story became overwhelming, I just told myself it was a jam project and that I should keep pushing through. It didn't have to be perfect, far from it.
I think I may have hallucinated something. People have asked me where the names milk puzzle and PANTHALASSA have come from. And well, they're very fitting names, that fit the themes of the stories I'm writing perfectly. But if you asked me Hayao Miyazaki-style what day it had been or what the weather was like when I came up with these names, I would not be able to tell you. And this bothers me. So maybe I dreamed them.
That's not what I hallucinated about though. I feel I have hallucinated what a "milk puzzle" is. I swear to god I learned of the concept first from a Professor Layton game, but google is implying there is no way that is true. So it must have been the game "ib". Garry explains to Ib what the concept is after encountering a painting titled "Milk Puzzle". It is a jigsaw that is entirely white, as the title implies. I have built one in real life before I had begun larping Buddhism and it was a gruelling experience. But the brain of a child raised on RPG maker games genuinely believed this was common knowledge for some reason. I think this delusion was partially encouraged by Near from Death Note building a completely white puzzle with an "L" in the corner of it. Maybe if you asked the average Japanese citizen what a milk puzzle was they would be completely in the know.
The choice of the title came from my experience building one. Building the outside frame is easy enough, but from there on out it is all complete guess work. You place a piece randomly, hoping that it will fit. If you are some sort of savant I guess it could be considered a stimulating brain activity, but to me, after all was said and done, it felt...pointless. You don't even get to look at an awesome picture after finishing it. But the sensation I remember most strongly was putting a piece down, feeling that 'click', but knowing something was off. It would kind of resist, or slide around, or pop up a bit from the board. Or maybe fit perfectly, but have a corner sticking out. You couldn't tell if you were forcing the piece in eager to make progress, or perhaps overthinking some cheap factory-cut cardboard.
This experience to me feels exactly the same to trying to discern one's sexuality.
What is nurture versus nature? What is imposed to you by society or the social circles you spend time in? Are you forcing a feeling, or does it actually make you feel good?
Which feeling is "true"? It is surprisingly hard to tell. At least for me, and I assume many other young women completely immersed in a world of both compulsive heterosexuality, spectrums of asexuality, feature-erasing beauty standards and biphobia.
I can say I initially felt a lot of hesitation about releasing this game...
I lack self control. As in, I feel like I failed to hold back where I should have in writing this game. But that's where the paradox began to be created in my mind. Cutting certain things out of this game would have fed into the despair I felt about the lack of honesty and vulnerability in a lot of self expression these days. I wondered multiple times if sharing these feelings was crossing the border of writing a character and just treating the act of making a game into a therapy session... (Which is honestly what a lot of art is.) (We've all seen End of Evangelion.)
I also have a bit of an obsessive personality. Much to the chagrin of my parents, I was never good at school or sports or making friends, but I definitely inherited their workaholism.
The scope and timeline of this game was planned out perfectly for what I was capable of at the moment. I never felt the pressure of the deadline or had to cut anything I planned (I did change the entire prologue, I drew 3 CGs that never ended up seeing the light of day.) But while I was able to write everything I intended, an emotional dam got forcefully unblocked in the middle of the brainstorming session, and got water all over the floor. I do think the eerily timed passing of my father upon the firing of the gun announcing the jam impacted things quite a bit. It placed me in a strange headspace. I wanted to write, and write, and write, put as much of my despair and confusion as I could into this work, in an attempt to make someone understand. I knew I wasn't special. I knew the hopelessness I carried around wasn't something unique to me...so I must emphasize again, it made it all the more impactful to hear other people could connect with this work. It makes you feel a little less alone.
I have had a lot of experience writing fanfiction and comics, specifically BL. A lot of women are drawn to BL because of the allure of abstraction... Of course, two men means one doesn't have to think about their role as a woman in society. Two men means they view each other as equals. There is no social power dynamic. Yes age gap and teacher/student are all the rage these days, but the dynamic rarely feels as demeaning as something so uncontrollable as "being a woman." (Obviously this is not a catch all for fujoshi, I'm projecting my own feelings here).
I think this very specific feeling is why milk puzzle ended up turning out so brutal. I don't mean the skinned dead body, you can find that in any old story, but I don't think I would ever explore the despair Eleanor was feeling in a BL work. Obviously a lot of sadness bleeds into PANTHALASSA but the science fiction world and the past weighing everyone down takes priority over most of the navel gazing. When writing yuri I have to ask myself "what does it mean to be a woman?" and "what does it mean to love other women, as a woman?" especially in the context of my own immaturity? How could I ever indulge in such a fantasy with such specificity looming over me...? I sound 12 years old right now. But feeling like a 12 year old is what led me to writing this so. Listening to your inner child isn't so bad now and then.
It's like.....I know the problem lies in my inability to visualize myself in my mind
cause I've always struggled with yumejo/self-insert content as well. No matter what the
scenario is I have to think of "myself" which is a deeply painful experience.
With yuri I am there in the scenario no matter what...but BL I feel like a scientist
in a lab typing observations into a computer.
I'm not crazy and I engage with the
world in a completely benign manner (coping).
I didn't realize this either until talking about it with some friends, but it is kind of funny to me that both Claire and Erin aren't "real".
In my head all the coworkers and even the hospital goons have their own little lives, but I feel the "love interests" lack the most depth because of Eleanors refusal to see them as any more than that. Of course, if you asked me directly if those two had potentially deeper character arcs the answer would always be yes. The moment Claire decided she was "free" was when she murdered her abusive boyfriend, and Erin didn't have a girlfriend at all, he was too busy having sex with older men that reminded him of his dad (don't worry Eleanor, you never had a chance, phew!), but these possibilities would never once occur to Eleanor because all she cared about was what they could do for her. Whether it was distracting her from her depression, making her believe she could be loved, or opening up more of the world to her.
Here are some random tidbits I have about the actual making of the VN and not the taking-a-shower-for-too-long part of it.
The first drawings I ever did of Eleanor and Claire. Everyone else was made up on the spot. They didn't really change...I guess I wanted to make Eleanor more "unattractive" but that never works when I try to do it because of the nature of simplified anime drawings.
Claire was more like.....wet...? And scary looking...? Gaunt and strange...? This doesn't reflect here at all but I feel her final design came out a lot "warmer" lol.
Some of the prologue drawings I cut because 1) THEYRE UGLY!!!!!! 2) I remembered that wasn't official Inugami Korone art and thus would be rude to include in this work.
Despite loving ryona and guro and wanting nothing more in the world than to put a man in a $500,000 suit into a paper shredder, I can not handle gore. So I did not know how to approach the horror CG. So I used a pose maniacs model to paint over, but then I realized halfway through it was exactly the thing I was trying to draw...so I just used it.
Most of the photos I used were from free to use asset packs on itch.io but I took some photos on my San Jose trip to use in the game.
Here's some other CGs I decided to skip out on. I would make this formatting nicer but I'm a moron. Sorry.
It took me from day 1 to day 40 to draw the CG of dream Erin standing in the elevator.
I also redrew those naked CGs moments before uploading the game...I was in a call with my friend and said "I need to redraw these" and she said "Margo you don't have time" but little did she know...I'm not sure what adjective to write here that's subjective. Not lazy or insane...but I really did just freehand all the art for this game. Not worrying about sketchiness and focusing on intent. But I'm worried that comes off as gloating. Or maybe I should simply be proud of my ability to draw quickly. I've just drawn a lot of comics okay....? When drawing 50 pages in a month you have to decide what's important and what isn't really quickly. It's a useful skill to have as a solo-dev.
Making music for the game was educational. I just needed some ambient stuff since royalty free music can get a little elaborate at times...obviously I'm not satisfied with any of it but it got the job done.
I stopped production on this game for like 2 weeks cause I had to 100% Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum or I wouldn't be able to focus. Again I have a very obsessive personality. Sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad.
I had Hana-bi (Kitano, 1997) on loop like literally the entire time I was making this. I even listened to the commentary track. But halfway through the commentary track the music cuts out despite the Joe Hisaishi score being one of the most fantastic parts of that movie. So I had to have two instances of Hana-bi running on my computer carefully synced up so that I didn't get depressed. As a result I only listened to the commentary track once. Multiple people told me the story reminded them of a movie or a cheap yakuza film so I think I watched it too many times. My bad.
Ummmm. Yep. That's my insane person rambling about this game I made. Thank you to anyone that liked it or downloaded it or sent me a message about it or clicked through the text really fast cause you realized it wasn't the kind of thing you felt like reading but wanted to see the art even though you could just look at the files in the zip and sorry to anyone that suffered psychic damage because I put all of your evil caveman thoughts into a game or reminded you too much of a specific life event you'd rather not think about.
It will haunt me for the rest of my life. I need to hurry up and finish PANTHALASSA so that can haunt me for the rest of my life instead because at least that one has yaoi in it.
Thanks for reading.