The Last Train Home - Development Process


After a couple days of drawing, writing and trying to understand how Ren'Py works, I think I've finally gotten this game to a state I can publish.
This is a bit of a log to show how I ended up with this game.
I've never used Ren'Py before (I bought RPG Maker MZ a few weeks prior--before that I'd use Roblox Studio on and off) so this was a bit of a struggle to make. Especially the main menu and moving the buttons; that part was possibly my biggest headache while polishing the game lol. In general, I struggle a lot with focusing on doing tasks (it's like I make a little bit of progress and reward myself by scrolling on YouTube for 20 minutes without watching a full video XD) but for the past few days, I've paused all of my usual projects to finish this once and for all.
When I first saw this jam, I started sketching ideas for what I wanted the story to be.
At first I wanted to be something like a horror game. I'm a big fan of the Magnus Archives, so I wanted it to be a game about confronting someone who claimed to be your boyfriend. Spoiler for the podcast, but there's a monster in it (the NotThem) that replaces people and erases all evidence and traces that the old one existed, save for a single person's memory (and tape recordings/polaroid photos).
Initially, I was planning for it to be that since you never see what your original boyfriend looked like (because the NotThem's sprite is the only one in the game), there would be two different endings: one where he successfully gaslights you into thinking you're crazy and that he's truly been your boyfriend all this time, and another where you'd resist and retain your memories.
This ending up being too difficult for me to do though, so I had to go for something simpler.
After a couple for failed ideas (they didn't really get anywhere aside from just a simple idea and maybe a sketch), I eventually drew a character that I liked. I also recently played Saihate Station (a very good RPG Maker game. You find it one Steam for free!) and that's what gave me the idea to place this character into a game with a train station as the setting.
(Pretty terrible first attempt.)
As you can see, as someone who is really bad at drawing perspective, the upper image is how I first tried drawing the background. Then, I found the train station image above online and used it as a reference for drawing the background in Ibis Paint X. The character themself was also coming along at that point, too.
I took inspiration from three of my favorite games of all time: OMORI, Deltarune, and Yume Nikki, and took pieces from each of their protagonists' design to make mine. Their name became Lake, because my friend recommended it.
(Originally, Lake was meant to have to have a blue sweater and no outline, but their hair was hard to see against the background without it, and to be honest, I just think that green just looks better.)
After all the assets were made, I downloaded Ren'Py, spent an admittedly embarrassingly long amount of time trying to just finish the quickstart tutorial, and so, wrote the dialogue and added the gui. I've written a lot in my life (As of right now, when I'm typing this, I have around 200k words worth of stories, fanfics and other things stored in my laptop and published on ao3) so this was arguably the easiest part, aside from having to cut some stuff out to fit the word limit (...I have a bit of a problem when it comes to maximum word count XD)
I wanted to make Lake an optimistic, happy person, while the player character was more of a grouch and a loner. They break your shell and ultimately, the two of you become closer. At first I was worried I was making the dialogue a bit too cliche, or just writing it poorly, but overall, after hearing some feedback from my friend, I think I'm happy with how I've written the dialogue as it is.
And so, that is how I made this game.
I hope that, in the future, I'll be able to make more and also post them here on itch.io again! There are so many stories I want to tell through games instead of just pure words, so hopefully this'll be a way for me to get those ideas out.
See you (hopefully!) next time,
mirrormagic
Files
Get The Last Train Home
The Last Train Home
You miss the train. You make a friend.
Status | Released |
Author | mirrormagic |
Genre | Visual Novel |
Tags | Casual, Cozy, Kinetic Novel, One-shot, Short, story, Trains |
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.