Indie Side — Making A Genre-Twisting Visual Novel
Visual novels are a pretty interesting game medium. For something so simplistic, you can honestly do a lot with them. There are classic examples like Doki Doki Literature Club that puts you into a unique dating sim world, or you have works like Phoenix Wright that really drive up interactivity.
Com__et carries on the torch of unique visual novels by putting a bit of a spin on what you might expect. It twists some of the core elements of the game, like the very act of making a choice or how the dialogue is presented. It boasts seven different endings, with one of them being the ‘true’ ending, and each rewarding you to keep playing as you get closer and closer to the satisfying end. This is all in a nice, gay package that really makes it all the more rewarding.
The game is pretty short, with only an hour or two of playtime depending on how quick you read and how many endings you wanna shoot for. But yet the story, the great art (done by @esshemasha on Twitter), and the slick music make it worth every second of your time. I can’t say too much more without spoiling the experience — the game’s only four bucks, so check it out!
I had the pleasure of talking with the developer of the game, SuperBiasedGary, about the development of the game and what went into their creative process.
The dialogue is presented in a unique format, with it moving across the screen, only to reveal different sentences depending on what point in the story you’re at. What inspired this decision?
This is basically the whole crux of how I started making Com__et at all. I literally made it as a very basic [game], scripted first to put it directly into Ren’Py, as like a Game Jam. There wasn’t any graphics or music at that point, it was just getting the basics at that point.
It kind of came as a funny way in my head to represent stuff being repressed — in this case, repressed by a heteronormative impulse. There’s thoughts under the surface, but they’re not expressed or you’re not even allowed to have them. They need to be exiled, basically. And the idea of those being gone, but kind of noticeably gone so that it’s not just the lines being shorter due to stuff being taken out. It’s like, no, there’s something here that isn’t. It’s sort of like even if it all isn’t removed, there’s something there that shouldn’t be there.
What were the queer inspirations for making a game about pushing back against compulsive heterosexuality?
In making Com__et it was more about my own experiences. I’m not a lesbian nor do I identify as a woman, but different experiences about recognizing even small ways of masking or repressing as the way I think of this. Even in smaller ways, of just ‘Eh, I don’t need to have that thought.’ Just realizing that I was not allowing myself a certain amount of being myself or expressing things or even thinking things, just unpacking that myself is a lot of my inspiration for wanting to make this game this way.
I can definitely see how it’s a very personal game. It goes through these issues, and it’s very commendable to make something that highlights, even if it’s not one-to-one, of what you’ve gone through.
Thank you!
The game touches on experiences of homophobia and bigotry while presenting a powerful narrative about fate. How did you aim for this balance to affect the audience?
I think one thing I wanted to hit quite specifically was that it’s absolutely got homophobia and queerphobia broadly, but not in the kind of cartoonish way that sometimes comes across a person who is explicitly, loudly, or even violently opposed. Compared to the quieter or softer, for lack of a better word, for people who are just nudging in ways, or limiting your ability to make choices, insinuating that you couldn’t do certain things.
A lot of the family stuff talking about the main character and the childhood friend, just to be like well obviously this is what’s going to happen. At no point were they making it ‘is this what you want,’ ‘is this in the realm of what you want.’ It’s all very on-its-face themes, out of context or even in a snippet. You can kind of take it as ‘oh this isn’t that bad,’ but I wanted it to be like ‘no, this is bad,’ especially with a queer person. I think with the way I used the music and other queues to reinforce that no you shouldn’t be okay with this, even in this amount. This is still pushing people and limiting people in a way that is still bad, that is still this kind of queerphobia that doesn’t get shown as much. There’s other stories where they get into harsher, and more like directly threatening as opposed to the undercurrent that exists.
I really enjoyed the combination of time loops with multiple endings. Can you walk me through the creative process that led you to go this route?
So some of it is just the logistics of, where I’m making a visual novel. I want a false end and true end. I want more than literally just those two. It’s also kind of like a visual novel trope to have a time loop be the metanarrative of why you loop again and again, especially in the case of where you’re learning or exploring different alternatives. With the false end being the end you get the first time, you’re trying to find a different path forward. You’re kind of thinking about what would be a fun way for that to work. That led to basically thinking through the thematic version of this, what is stopping you from doing this stuff. On some level, there isn’t even much of the family’s queerphobia reinforcing this, with the antagonist as yourself or like a fictional future version of yourself. It’s thematically like you’re repressing these thoughts.
Other people aren’t strictly speaking forcing you to exile them, you’re doing that yourself — so in the same way, it’s like a time loop, it’s you from the future coming off and refusing to allow these different paths to happen. You’re just trying to navigate them. I didn’t kind of go deep into the logistics of how this works, but I thought the sci-fi stuff would add a bit of levity and comedy in the middle, while also breaking some of the thematic stuff by being able to have the main character facing themself.
I really enjoyed the way that the Not Me character suddenly being revealed as the future version of the character, and the kind of contrast with the sci-fi with the normality of the rest of the game. It’s really interesting to see as well
The artist, who is @esshemasha on Twitter, did a great job too. I was just like, ‘I’ve got basic concepts of characters with different personalities,’ while I was still feeling it out while talking to them. I had a draft of the story but I was still feeling it out while talking to them. ‘Maybe the other you from the future, she should be kind of sci-fi, kind of assassin-y?’ and like literally bouncing ideas off of them helped get the weird contrast. The almost invasion of more genre stuff to an almost modern-day normal setting.
The art is very well done. What led you to choose Masha as the artist for the game?
I had found them just doing fanart and small commissions, in particular a lot of Gundam fanart. I had commissioned them a couple times for a goofy idea for a character from Gundam. I did that a couple of times and got to talking to them, and they happened to live in Ireland. We have not managed to meet to have a post-launch pint yet, but we will eventually!
We had chatted a bit, and at one point I was like ‘hey, okay, if I commissioned you to make character sprites — it would genuinely be about three drawings of some variation, it would be on such limited scope that I could ask for a commission. They were very excited with people liking the game and commenting and doing videos and so forth.
It’s always we really cool to see how excited people get with how something they worked on gets received, it’s one of the best parts of making things
Yes, absolutely!
Do you have any other projects you’re working on that you’d like to highlight?
I’m working on a much longer — longer for me, anyway — supernatural murder mystery set in a castle. The basic premise is you’re the person who is a caretaker of the castle, and you invited people to prove ghosts exist in this castle, you wanna prove that your ghost sightings have been real. You invite this eclectic cast of characters, and very early your character gets murdered and is a ghost for the entirety of the game and has to solve the murder of what happened.
That’s really cool!
I’m hoping to get a Steam page up of it and a demo of the very start of the game over the next few months, and to see how far away the rest of it is once I’ve got that much done!
