The Bittersweet High School Romance
One day at school you meet two very different but extroverted girls, and over the next few days you develop a close relationship with both of them. Laugh, cry and maybe even love as you learn profound and personal information about these wonderful people. Maybe you'll get lucky and form a romantic relationship with them.
The Bittersweet High School Romance is a short visual novel I had to create over the course of 4 months. The uniqueness of this game is that not all girls are innately attracted to the player romantically, or attracted at all, which can lead to a heartbreaking revelation at the end of the game.
Click the image on the left to view the Itch.io page for the game!
The gameplay in this visual novel follows the typical conventions of the genre, with a high degree of player agency in the dialogue. The player can interact with the characters in the game as they choose, even if their choices may not be the "correct" ones. This leads to multiple outcomes depending on the choices made and different endings. The unique aspect of this game is how the girls interact with the player. They don't instantly fall in love with the player, but instead, the player has to get to know the characters and form a bond with them as in a real-life relationship. However, not every romance is mutual, some are bittersweet
Contributions
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Designed character profiles
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Scripted the player-character interactions
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Programmed the game in Python
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Learned to use the Ren'py engine
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Created all music tracks for the game
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Combined all elements of the game together
Character profiles
For the characters in the game, I created profiles detailing who they are with a brief description, 3 main traits that their characters are based around, a biography of their life, an appearance description with a few inspiration pics and a speech tab to describe their mannerisms. I utilized these character profiles while writing the script to remind me of each character's distinctive personality and mannerisms. This allowed me to stay true to their character, which in turn, would allow for the suspension of disbelief, creating immersion.
Game script
The Bittersweet High School Romance (script)
This is the script for the Bittersweet High School Romance. It details different aspects of the game in a script. (click the image or here to view it)
Programming
For this project, I used the Ren'py game engine. I used this engine because it was very welcoming to beginners to coding. It is also known as one of the best game engines to use for visual novels. The coding language used in the Ren'py engine is Python, which is newcomer-friendly and a suitable programming language for 2D games. For this project, I had to construct every aspect of the game using code, from the backgrounds and characters, to music and sound effects. I had to learn how to create flags, one-line statements and default statements. Whilst being simple, it's a whole new skill I had to learn within a 4-month timeframe.
Music
These are the music tracks that I produced for this game, they are visible in the music section, however, for consistency they are here to see as well
Rationale
For my module, I had free range on what I wanted to create. It could have stemmed from something small, like a few character profiles, to something greater like a whole game. I wanted to decorate my portfolio with another big project so I decided to create a game. It had to be something smaller so it wouldn't interfere with other modules, nor take longer than our 4-month deadline, but big enough to test my skills and learn some new ones. I had ideas to make some 2D platformers or a very brief 3D game demo, but I wanted to make a full game.
After careful consideration, and using my background as a writer, I decided to make a visual novel game, as it would test my skills in every regard. I however didn't want to make art as I am not an artist, so I used other methods of obtaining art, with it being mainly AI.
What I learned?
I learnt a lot from this project, mainly about the more technical side of game development. I learnt how to do basic programming in Python and how to put together a game using code. I learnt about the differences using a 3D game engine and a 2D one, and how that affects the production pipeline. This project was my first attempt at music for games, and what different practices you need to use, such as making most tracks loop. I learnt the massive amounts of writing that goes into games, even small ones like this had 30 pages of just the script. Overall I learnt how much work truly goes into making games, as this tiny small 4 month project took a lot of work and learning to create, and without dedicated and passionate developers, games wouldn't be able to exist.