Melancholy Marionette’s yandere games love to mess with your head
The Queer Games Bundle is a collection of nearly 600 items by LGBTQ+ creators and teams, nearly 400 of which are independent video games, all sold for just $60. I’m talking with creators from the bundle about their games and their making habits. Visit the bundle and consider buying it.
Melancholy has a number of games in the Queer Games Bundle, of which I’ve played Impostor and Love in Lockdown. Both — and all of her work! — have a character type called yandere, a Japanese genre term for an obsessive, often violently devoted love interest. It’s amazing how quickly the action can turn from sweet to scary.
How long have you been making games?
I’m not 100% sure when I started, but it’s been a few years now, haha. At the time, I was caring for my grandma, and started putting together my first game during her afternoon naps. Sadly, she passed away before I could complete the project, but she was always really encouraging :3
The main reason I even wanted to make a VN in the first place was because I was such a huge fan of them myself, but wished there were more games out there with English voiced yandere dudes in them! Because it seemed as though there were way more female yandere characters than male ones for starters, and even fewer had English voice acting. I pretty much just wanted to make the sort of stuff I wanted to play.
What tools do you like to use?
Right now I use Naninovel for Unity. It’s a bit expensive, but I absolutely love it, and I managed to get it at 75% off during an asset store sale, so it was a bargain. I’m not a proper coder at all. I have no interest in coding. It drives me nuts, haha. When I first decided to try and make a VN, I looked to Ren’py and tried to learn Python. I was coping, but I hated it. Knowing that’s what I’d have to go through almost put me off even bothering. I didn’t want to have to code. I just wanted to make a story >.<
That was when I realised I had Tyranobuilder in a Humble Bundle! It promised to allow anyone to make a VN using a drag and drop system, no knowledge of coding required, and it delivered on that promise, allowing me to create my first game, Solipsism Reigns. I also used it to make Impostor, but began to tire of how slow it was to create using the drag and drop system once I’d become more experienced with making VNs in general.
That’s when I came across Naninovel. It has the same concept of not needing to know code, but instead of a drag and drop interface, it enables a user to write using simplified scripting, which is much faster (provided you can type quickly)! I can’t really see me using anything else now! I adore Naninovel, and even started learning how to mess with things like particles in Unity to implement my own particle effects in future projects :3
Aside from that, I use GIMP a lot! Since I’m not an artist, I often have to use sprite assets in my games, but I don’t like to use them as they come if I can help it, so GIMP comes in handy often for editing to make assets look more unique.
What themes or genres do you like to explore?
Since I wanted to add more yandere characters to the world, I kinda made it my mission to always have at least one yandere character in each of my games, often more, or if not full yandere, to at least have yandere traits, whatever genre the project is. Even in the game I made as part of a team for Spooktober VN jam last year, Limbo Line, despite not featuring romance, there’s still a platonic yandere in there :D Psychological horror is my favourite genre though, so I tend to lean towards that! I just love those sorts of stories that mess with your head a bit.
“I’m always surprised to see positive comments on the project, but it serves as a really good reminder that sometimes it’s all too easy to judge yourself extremely (and often unnecessarily) harshly.”
What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of making games?
Hmm, favourite aspects have got to be either making or choosing the perfect [background music] to accompany each scene, along with editing voice actor audio! I had a ridiculous amount of fun making the glitchy voice effects for Castor/ia in my Darling Duality project, creating creepy voice effects for the Architect, and all the voice effects for Limbo Line’s various characters.
Pretty much everything audio-related brings me a lot of joy, haha. Even if it’s finding or creating the perfect SFX for a scene. My projects always have quite a lot of SFX because I’m obsessed with those sorts of small details. Seeing everything come together is also a fantastic feeling. And as tedious as it might be, I adore having an insane number of sprite facial expression changes to accompany the voice acting and make the characters appear more alive.
Least favourite aspects are probably the coding/scripting side of things. I wish I could just write the story and have it turn into a game without having to do all that boring building. And then running into and attempting to fix bugs is a nightmare >.< Testing builds before launch and trying to fix bugs stresses me out a lot, haha.
Is there a game that has affected you recently?
Honestly, despite always being an avid gamer since I was a kid, ever since I got into making VNs, the amount of games I actually played dropped drastically because all the time I used to spend playing stuff became time spent working on my VN projects making stuff. It became a bit of an unhealthy obsession of a hobby I guess!
My backlog of games I want to play is now ridiculously huge. I finally managed to give myself enough of a break to play some Pokemon Legends Arceus, which I’ve been really enjoying, and I’m looking forward to playing Supermassive’s The Quarry whenever I can afford it (which won’t be any time soon because the price of new games these days is just waaaay outta reach for me) because I love their heavily story-based horror.
I think the last game I played that really had a big impact on me though was Far Cry 5, which was surprising because I’d never even played a Far Cry game prior to 5! It was just the ending I got that hit me. I was overjoyed at how bleak and deliciously despairing it was xD When I looked online to see if anyone else enjoyed it, I noticed a lot of players despised the ending. I can totally see why, but I loved it! I thought it was a fairly brave choice to go with an ending like that which would no doubt be hated by many people.
It kind of reminded me that you should write the sort of stories that you want to and not worry too much about what others will think because whatever you do, there are bound to be some who love it and some who hate it, so you might as well stay true to your own interests.
IMPOSTOR is very frightening, about a partner who suddenly suspects that you aren’t really yourself. How did you decide to tell that story?
With Impostor, because it was made in just under a week for Scream Jam one year, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to come up with an idea and make it into a playable game by the jam’s deadline. I had recently listened to a Darkfield Radio episode where the theme was Capgras syndrome/delusion though, so it was very much inspired by that! All of Darkfield’s productions are incredible and inspiring, but I’ve always been intrigued by psychological stuff, and thought it seemed like something that would be interesting to try and explore, especially when playing with breaking the 4th wall.
I liked how the pacing is very staggered as you’re questioned. How did you decide to build in so many waits and starts?
I’m a huge fan of trying to make things as immersive as possible, so I always try really hard to implement effects that emulate certain things in my projects to make the scenarios feel more immersive and realistic as I can. I really wanted to emphasise the passing of time and the strain of the situation the player finds themself in, so I attempted to make things feel more sluggish and dragging/harrowing with unskippable pauses in between questioning, but I also realise stuff like that can be quite irritating in repeat playthroughs >.<
A few people mentioned the fact that the shower scene lasts too long, and assumed that perhaps the game was frozen or broken in some way since you can’t leave the shower until the showering SFX finishes playing. That hadn’t even occurred to me at the time, haha. I was just trying to make it seem more like the person is actually showering because that’s my personal immersive preference. I hadn’t imagined it would cause people to think the game was stuck because they couldn’t skip through or speed up the scene x3
I always get really lost in tiny details, which is also why I do stuff like having it seem as though a character is whispering in the players’ ear for certain lines by forcing the audio to only come out of one ear/headphone :3
“Since I wanted to add more yandere characters to the world, I kinda made it my mission to always have at least one yandere character in each of my games.”
The timed challenges are daunting, and unusual in a visual novel type of game. What made you include those? (They are very effective!!)
When I started joining game jams, I gave myself the personal challenge of always trying to learn at least one new skill or trick during the jam that I could potentially use in future projects. With Impostor, I really wanted to learn how to get timed choices to work, along with creating a basic sort of puzzle and messing around with font effects in the text box. It was tough trying to learn it all in such a short space of time, and I think it probably came out a little buggy, but for the most part, I feel like I managed to pull it off.
I was also aware of the fact that a lot of the other devs participating in the jam who might potentially play my contribution were folks who either had never played a VN before or were generally uninterested in VNs, so I wanted to try and make something they might find more exciting/appealing to show that VNs can be more than just clicking through text.
As time went on and I got more experience, I tried to learn to implement more and more complicated things to give my VNs additional elements. For example, in Limbo Line, the player can access a phone at their desk which they can dial to speak to various characters, with some numbers being hidden throughout the game on interactive objects like posters. There is also an interactive PC where the player can explore different files and folders (some of which are password locked), and a side story which involves an ARG. As someone who doesn’t really know how to code, I was stoked to be able to pull all that off, haha.
Love In Lockdown uses an affection meter to pass stat checks. Do you have a favorite mechanic like that?
I’m a big fan of personality systems/mechanics in games where the way you behave and your choices impact things much further down the line and the options available to you. That sort of butterfly effect stuff has always fascinated me, and I think VNs are perfect for utilising mechanics like that! I’m trying to implement a sort of personality system in my current main project, Darling Duality, which will be based on a few different things.
The timeline in Detroit Become Human blew me away. It’s so huge and beautiful to look at, haha. I can only hope to have something that complex in my projects at some point. Affection counters can be fun, but I can never decide if I’d prefer the points racking up to be invisible or for there to be a physical display of how things are going! I think I prefer the mystery of not knowing for certain where I stand in terms of affection with a character. I’m not a fan of stat raising, so I think seeing bars and stuff in UI always puts me off as a player.
Aside from that though, I really love the small things in games as both a player and a dev. I’m the sort of person who can happily sit in a library in an Elder Scrolls game and read all the books!
You were open about being less happy with Love In Lockdown than other projects. What is it like releasing that work anyway? People still seem to like it!
I actually felt kind of ashamed releasing Love in Lockdown because I was so unhappy with it >.< I felt like it wasn’t representative of the vision I had for the project and the stuff I hope to make in general, so it hurt a lot to end up struggling so much with that one. Because I started it, I was determined to finish and release it even if it was immensely frustrating and wasn’t coming out the way I wanted it to. I don’t like the idea of leaving things unfinished forever. It makes me uneasy. In the end, I figured that despite my personal feelings about the project, I shouldn’t discard it completely because I did put a lot of time and effort into it. I felt it was important to state my own dissatisfaction with it though.
I’m always surprised to see positive comments on the project, but it serves as a really good reminder that sometimes it’s all too easy to judge yourself extremely (and often unnecessarily) harshly. It’s totally true that we’re our own worst critics, so it’s difficult to see past that. At the same time, I feel like it’s important to remember that just because you view something one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else will have the same view or opinions. There will always be somebody out there who loves something you share, people that it resonates with, and on the flip side, there are people who will hate it, haha. Nothing can ever be everyone’s cup of tea!
At the end of the day, the very fact that you’ve managed to create something to share with others in the first place is a pretty nifty achievement, and it’s easy to accidentally shrug that off or put yourself down when really we should all be trying to be a bit kinder to ourselves. That’s easier said than done, I know, haha. I beat myself up a lot about everything I do >.< but the main thing is to do what you enjoy, do it for yourself first, and try not to dwell too much on what other people might think.
I’m extremely lucky to have had so many positive comments on my projects and such amazing supporters in general :3 As someone who has pretty awful mental health and next to no self-confidence, hearing such kind words from people is a huge help when it comes to fighting that inner voice that says I’m not good enough.
