Main Character Development is a visual novel following Kouda. They were born to be a main character and yet has tried their hardest to avoid such a lifestyle. Alas they're forced to enter this it in order to find out what happened to his one and only friend.
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Available on itch.io!
Main Character Development (Itch.io)

Genre: Adventure, Visual Novel
Team Size: 4
Platform: PC (Windows, Mac)
Development Time: January - April 2023
Tools Used: Final Draft (Script), FL Studio (Music), Audacity (Sound Effects)
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Main Character Development was a academic project for Simon Fraser University completed within four months, I worked alongside Trisha, Ben and Jerick.

My responsibilities included as writing the script alongside Trisha in Final Draft, creating the final flowchart alongside Jerick in Figma, as well as composing the music for the game in FL Studio.

In my Narrative and New Media course, I was grouped with others based on the types of stories we were drawn to and discussed ideas we thought of create an interactive piece. We began by writing a script in the context of a film, and later transitioned the medium to a visual novel game.

Our project had two phases: first, we brainstormed, ideated, and wrote the script. Next, we took that script and adapted it to a different medium. During the second phase, we decided to adapt the script to fit a visual novel.

Initially when Trisha and I wrote the script, our scope was too high. As we originally planned to include three antagonists, but we were advised that it would be difficult to pull off within the context of a 30 minute film. To resolve this, we removed one antagonist and turned another into a disguise for the main antagonist.

During this phase Trisha and I were then paired with Ben and Jerick. To adapt our script that's helpful for planning out a visual novel we opted to create a flowchart in Figma. The flowchart would have details regarding dialogue, choices players can make, when sprites or backgrounds appear and when sounds or music plays.

We each assigned tasks to each other and made sure to communicate to one another whether or not we thought our workload was fair and played to our strengths. We settled on Trisha creating the artworks for the character sprites, Jerick would work on the flowchart, gather sounds and also handle the backgrounds, Ben would handle the coding for the game and I would create the music and assist Jerick with working on the flowchart as well as gathering sound effects.

Our main issue was the amount of time we had compared to the amount of work we had considering we all had additional classes to do on top of this project. For the music, we all read over the first act of the story to figure out what kind of tracks I'll need to compose for the game and we figured that we needed a Happy track, a suspenseful track and a sad track. I also tried composing character tracks, but unfortuantely didn't pace myself well enough to make one for all of the characters. For these tracks I grabbed reference tracks to get an idea of what kind of track he should create. For example, for a delinquent character's theme, the main inspiration for the track was Juncreated by Takuro Yoshida, using it as a reference I created the theme for the delinquent character, Onizuka.

The resemblance to the reference track should be apparent but, I hope it manages to achieve a similar feeling while also being its own track. A similar process was done for the other tracks as well.

Main Character Development was well received by our professor, and was even featured on the SFU Showcase for Spring 2023. My contributions to the project with the music and story to the game helped it achieve the feeling we wanted during certain scenes as well as creating believable characters with a sympathetic goal and development (hehe).

From my experience working on the project I learned the importance of pacing myself as there were more tracks I wanted to create for the game. Being strict with myself through creating a schedule to follow will be a step in the right direction.