Hi all!

It’s been a little while since the launch of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, so as I start tinkering around with new projects, now would be a good time to look back on this project. This article is structured such that I’ll talk about the creative elements of my visual novel first and then get progressively more technical about the logistics of making and releasing REPEAT IT BACK TO ME. If you want to hear about my plans for future projects, feel free to skip to the end.

Narrative

REPEAT IT BACK TO ME centers around three characters. First, there is the unnamed narrator. Second, there is Elias, the narrator’s (former) love interest. Finally, there is Elias, again, but something's not quite right. Throughout the novel, the narrator recalls anecdotes about the Elias from their past while interacting with a character who has taken the physical form of Elias. This new Elias is not quite able to replicate the traits of the old Elias, both the narrator and the new Elias recognize as much. REPEAT IT BACK TO ME is fundamentally about exploring the tension that comes from changing circumstances over time, nostalgia, and love.

Sidenote: I once said to a friend, while writing the script, that I was working on “the weirdest love triangle story you’ve ever seen.” I still think this holds true!

REPEAT IT BACK TO ME is set in the countryside during summer, specifically in a place above or close to the arctic circle. I used this setting to convey a story where the characters are trapped in what I’d consider “not-quite-a-time-loop.” While I was inspired by a lot of science fiction pieces that revolve around time loops, I wanted to see if it was possible to tell a story where the technical details are completely sidelined by the interpretations and feelings of the characters to the point where I don’t think this story would register as a “time loop story.” The result was a story where past and present become indiscernible, where characters find themselves acting out the past even when they don’t intend to.

Over the course of the narrative, the narrator and the current Elias grow closer in a romantic sense, hence the “romance” tag I put on the game. However, I hoped readers would get a strong feeling that something isn’t quite right with all of this. The primary stakes of the narrative concern the relationship between the narrator and the Elias they are currently with. Alongside this tension exists concerns about the narrator and their sanity. I labeled this visual novel as a “psychological horror” piece to reflect how these questions come up with the narrator. 

REPEAT IT BACK TO ME is the first story I’ve written to have two endings, even if the final results of both are quite similar. I think the tone of the events preceding each ending can color how the reader views the revelation of the narrator. In one ending, this revelation reads like the narrator is letting go of a weight. In the other, this revelation is their final thought while they are in a bad place.

The first draft of the script was written over the course of 3 weeks in February and continuously revised and edited up until release. Overall, I’m still quite fond of the work I did narratively in this project, especially given how odd the concept was. I wanted to write a story that was close to a love story, but equally as close to a horror story. Some of the scenes suggest some greater forces in the world. Ultimately, however, the circumstances of the story are born from the narrator’s choices and desires. The birds throughout the story are omnipresent, but entirely opaque, even to the characters. All of this made for a story that was hard to write, but I hope that if I did my job well enough that at least some of these elements will stick in the heads of whoever reads REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, even if the fuzzy outlines of those details seem contradictory.

Visuals

All of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME’s illustrations were done by me over a period of a few months. In the final game, there are roughly ~40 illustrations (including all of the character sprites for Elias.) While I was first adapting the script, I wanted to do several more illustrations, but had to cut back since the script was long enough that illustrating everything the narrator described wouldn’t have been practical. I think this is the most effort I have put into illustrating one of my games (albeit, SALTWATER does come close.) 

The backgrounds for  REPEAT IT BACK TO ME were the most ambitious I’ve done for a visual novel. I will let the visuals speak for themselves on this front. As the story progresses, the narrator frequently has moments where reality seems to tear, especially when considering old memories. In these moments, I used an alternative version of the background sprite for that scene to indicate the change. These alternatives were usually made by overlaying different images onto the original illustrations and painting over them. Frequently, the images I overlaid were cropped and distorted versions of the original illustration. My favorite of these were the ones from Elias’ bedroom.

I should also note here how I hoped the UI would complement the project. I think that the parallaxing in the different scenes along with the use of particles made for something that felt dynamic to look at. I also made the somewhat odd choice to slant all of the narrator’s thoughts pretty aggressively. This was partly a practical choice: I wanted to be able to use up more screen space for illustrations, but I also think the final product turned out pretty stylish.

Music

I started work on the music for REPEAT IT BACK TO ME shortly after finishing the script, sometime in March. In my previous games, I had used some sound effects and longer recordings from freesound.org to give the projects a better sense of ambiance. This time, I wanted to be a little more ambitious and go for a full soundtrack. I spent some time trying to find music that would be free or inexpensive to use in my own projects. While there are a lot of options out there, I found myself getting annoyed and overwhelmed by the process. Eventually I settled on learning the basics of music production for myself so I could score my own games.

I do not come from a music background, so I started at square one by doing research into music theory fundamentals and how people go about composing and producing music (preferably without having to invest a lot of money.) In the end, REPEAT IT BACK TO ME’s original soundtrack was made entirely from free software. Everything I learned about music theory came from free resources as well. I will refrain from going in depth about the resources I used at this moment since I’m still deep in the learning process and I believe there are many better testimonials available online from people who have more experience than me who I think would be better to listen to. That being said, I would encourage anyone who may have been in a similar boat to me to do some research and give exploring music a try! I may publish a separate piece in the future going more in depth, but feel free to ask me any questions if you’re curious about a specific part of this process.

Artistically, I think a lot of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME’s soundtrack was shaped by me trying new things while learning about how music works. The title theme was one of the earlier pieces I wrote, and is thus shorter and more barebones than some of the others. Most of the tracks used some combination of a synthesized piano with other synths playing underneath. Other tracks, such as “Empty Roads” and “Tension,” focused on a guitar. I occasionally made use of some flute and violin instruments as well. The track “Obliteration” is a remixed version of the title track made to sound more scary/sad. My favorite track I wrote was “Sunset,” which I think comes across a lot more hopeful/playful.

The full soundtrack for REPEAT IT BACK TO ME is available to stream on Youtube and to download on Bandcamp.

Programming

REPEAT IT BACK TO ME was made using Angela He’s Yarn Pile template for Unity, which did most of the heavy lifting on the programming side and handled the UI for the game. Like any set of tools, I had to spend some time getting used to the systems as they were built in order to make the adjustments that I needed to make for this specific project. I had to spend a lot of time fighting with Unity specifically which got tiring near the end of the project. Overall, however, I’m happy with how everything came out.

As of right now, I don’t feel qualified enough to make any big sweeping judgements on the tools I used to make REPEAT IT BACK TO ME. I can speak honestly though and say that I will be trying out Ren’Py for my next project, although this choice has a lot more to do with me having different goals for my future projects than my experiences using the tools I did for this project.

Putting It All Together

Shortly after finishing the first draft of the script, I knew I wanted REPEAT IT BACK TO ME to release in the Summer, roughly around the summer solstice. This gave me about 5 months to get organized and make the game. 

For all of my projects thus far, I have worked as a hobbyist solo game developer. I’ve seen some discourse around these terms, so I’ll briefly define what they mean for me. I make games on my own, mostly for myself, using all of the tools I have at my disposal. I don’t make everything used in my projects from the ground up, but I work on my own in that I do not have a boss or externally enforced deadlines. This setup can be difficult to be productive under, as I have to make sure I am getting important parts of the project done, even if I don’t have anyone else telling me to do so. To keep myself organized, I kept track of my progress via a kanban board. I prioritized getting a mediocre baseline demo of the full game over getting to do everything I wanted to do in one segment before moving on to another. I found this approach helpful as it made me prioritize tasks that would have the most impact on the final game.

Some things didn't go as expected. By the end of may, I had to stop work on the project for a short while due to wrist issues from drawing and a general feeling of fatigue I had in getting the last parts of the project done. During this time, I made PLATINUM WHITE, a completely different game, in a little under a week for a game jam. On paper this sounds like a bad idea, like I was only giving myself more work to do before my summer solstice deadline. Somewhat unexpectedly, I found that taking a break from a larger project by creating something small was a good way to step back and get a sense of perspective. I don’t think this would work for everyone, but I would recommend it.

Marketing and Release

Really quickly, I feel the need to explain why I cared about marketing REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, along with the rest of my games. Where I’m at right now, I do not create games as a means to get a paycheck. At some point in the future, I would like to maybe recoup some expenses associated with making games so I can continue making more ambitious projects (potentially some that might involve working with other artists?!), but that wasn’t my goal with this project. Here I had a set of ideas, thoughts, and feelings that I wanted to convey in an artistic medium. While I believe in the benefits of creating art for yourself, I wanted to create art to communicate my thoughts to other artists and people who enjoy art. In order to communicate something, however, I had to find someone willing to listen. To do this, I spent some time ahead of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME’s release marketing the project across my social media accounts and on itch.io.

Broadly speaking, I view these efforts as having been unsuccessful for the associated time investment. As such, I thought it would be worthwhile to go into some depth about exactly what I did and the results that I got out of it for two reasons. First, I’d be interested to know if any other developers have advice for improvement. Second, I hope that I might be able to help other developers make better choices than I did. 

At the time of writing (one week following the release of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME) here are lifetime stats of the project, according to itch.io:

• Views: 299
• Downloads: 15
• Browser Plays: 78
• Ratings: 3
• Collections: 20

Most of the views on the page came from referrals from itch.io, specifically through the page where all of my games are displayed. A slightly smaller portion of these views came from itch.io users’ feeds, meaning that they had found the game from someone they follow reviewing it or adding it to a collection. A similar amount of players found the game through browsing itch.io via their tags system.

On social media, I posted about the game on Twitter and Tumblr for a few months up until release. These posts usually showcased illustrations, music previews, gifs, and sometimes a trailer from the game I produced a few weeks ahead of release. I do not believe that most of these posts brought in a significant number readers who had not previously followed me, but they still accounted for a pretty considerable number of players.

Below I’ve listed some things that I have personally found to be true during the marketing of REPEAT IT BACK TO ME, in no particular order. Please don’t take these as gospel, but I hope that they might be useful to someone out there.

• People who are not already interested in your project *probably* won’t like to view explicitly promotional material for it, even if it is for a free project.
• The overlap between “posts that people come to social media for and thus perform well” and “posts that you can make about your game” will likely vary in size depending on your project.
• Works in progress will frequently perform better than a finished work.
• Explicitly blocking out a period of time to make and schedule posts will help keep you sane. This method is much easier than trying to post everything in real time.
• You can apply 10 tags to a project on itch.io. By applying more tags, you make it easier for others to find your project.

I would like to note to players of small games (this also includes developers!) that interacting with games on itch.io directly can make a pretty big difference. When you leave a rating or add a project to a collection (even just a to-play collection), your followers on itch.io will see this pop up under the “Feed” tab on the site. I think that, given the volatility of social media more broadly, developers and players should be making the most of the features itch.io offers us to share and find interesting games.

Final Thoughts & What’s Next

Overall, I’m quite happy with the work I did on REPEAT IT BACK TO ME. Despite some of the hurdles of the project, I think I made something cool that will be able to stand on its own for a long while. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

REPEAT IT BACK TO ME was my second project that took several months to make working on my own. I think that I’ve been able to make cool things under these conditions, but the lack of feedback during the process that comes from working on a big thing in (partial) secret for several months can be somewhat draining. Upcoming projects will likely be a bit shorter. When I’m feeling up to it again, I may try experimenting with releasing big projects in pieces so I can collect more feedback during development. Finally, I’d like to make myself available for collaborations on games and visual novel projects. If you have a project and are looking for a collaborator (art, writing, music, etc.), please let me know!

Thanks for reading,

Sky