Artist Manifesto

Artist Manifesto:

A visual novel is constrained mainly to it’s narrative. While there are interactive elements, story is what prevails. I decided that staying in the theme of October I would make a spooky visual novel. Now this was more as a challenge than a simple whim. I wanted to prove it was possible to make a scary game without bad jump scares. But since I am no artist it becomes harder because of using royalty free art. The same goes with music and sounds. So, my goal was to make the game as scary as possible with the bare minimum in both categories using mainly narrative to drive a tense atmosphere. The way I decided to do that was by pacing out the suspense. Considering I wanted story to be the main proponent in creating terror. It made sense to prolong the suspense. No immediate spooky stuff, but when there is it is very descriptive. I wanted each encounter to feel tense and unique, so the writing for each scenario is new or altered in some way. But because this is an interactive visual novel, I had to add decisions. But decisions can also be tense, especially when there is a time limit. Certain decisions will have a timer in which you must pick something, or a bad outcome will occur. This gives the player a rapid response moment where they have to follow their gut and hope their choice is the right one. Also, spacing these timed events well between each other has the player getting ready for the next timed decision; adding to the atmosphere I desired. Finally, to keep in tradition with the visual novel genre I have created multiple endings with a couple of dead ends hidden. This allowed for replayability as it allowed people to go back and try and get a better ending. Or alternatively find the bad ending. I combined all these elements and tried to come up with as scary of a game as I could by myself with the time constraints. Whether it is actually scary I can’t say, but I can only hope that my writing could suffice for a decent Halloween game.