Match'N'Slash is a visual novel I've been developing by myself.
It is a fangame using characters from the game Dead by Daylight, setting up characters interacting with each other in various scenes.
I thought it was a great way to introduce myself to actually making a game, without worrying too much about complicated coding -> using the renpy game engine, it's easy to write the narrative and focus on creating comprehensive CGs.
Here is a customized menu I managed to make through replacing text buttons with image buttons and adding a hover function.
I had to relocate the exact coordinates from my drawing (in pixels) into the code, which was quite confusing at first but ended up looking great.
There are a lot of CGs, which are some of the best examples here. I aimed for a much more CG heavy visual novel, rather than one focused on dialogues with sprites and backgrounds.
I felt this approach could help better with with immersion. And I much prefer drawing CGs to practice & show off a larger variety of my skills in narrative illustration.
The logo is also the game icon.
When finding an artistic direction for the game, I had to find something that I could stay consistent with and fit the general idea I was going for.
To fit the characters and universe, I wanted to go for a comic, grungy art style that was still pleasant to the eyes. A big concern was also to give characters varying features that could differ one from another.
One of my biggest inspirations is Dillon Snook's Legion Comics.
During development, I wanted to experiment with renpy's features a little. I went ahead and added a blink effect in tune with the narrative, as well as a shake effect to express dizziness.
The blink effect was pretty easy to do, a simple PNG overlay trick. The shake was surprisingly not as hard as I'd imagined. It's all about creating a function that'll loop the image moving in different coordinates. When I want the shake to happen, I call the function onto the CG showing on screen.
I've gotten help from a friend for two CGs in-game so I could get the demo out faster. Although it's still ongoing, I am working on the rest of the CGs as the narrative and code for the demo are completely done.
The demo should be out soon.
Thank you for reading!
Thank you for reading!