The Big "Pizza Game" Post - Art, Backgrounds, CGs, and More!

An in-depth look at all the art I did for my sister's visual novel, Pizza Game, as well as the process of working on it. Wow!

Here's all the backgrounds and custom graphics I drew for my sister's comedy visual novel Pizza Game, available on Steam! For those who don't know, we are currently doing a fully-voiced playthrough of the game on our Let's Play channel.

This post was originally created back in 2019 to show off the background and CG artwork, but since I'm revisiting Pizza Game four and a half years later I thought it would be appropriate to show off all of the process artwork. Please be aware this art WILL contain spoilers for Pizza Game, for people who care about that sort of thing. I'll put individual process pieces in the big image album above, and general "here's how the game was made" overview in the post below.

While some character portraits will shown off here, I won't be going through all of them! If you're interested in downloading every single portrait in the game, check out THIS POST instead.

Okay let's start at the beginning: What the heck is Pizza Game?

Pizza Game is a shitpost visual novel inspired less by bad otome games and more by purposefully bad fanfics, such as Quarter Life: Halfway to Destruction and Half Life: Full Life Consequences. My sister, Plasterbrain, started writing a visual novel route based on our friends Chula (Kiane) and Arim (Mr. Arimnaes) as a joke. Plaster's favorite character archetype in most visual novels tends to be the Obviously Evil Murder Man Route, like the doctor in Hatoful Boyfriend, so Mr. Arimnaes was designed to be one of those.

This started as a dumb gag. Something she would write and that we would read out loud together in small bursts. We did another thing like this based on reader-insert fanfiction with a 50+ chapter Smash Bros. ficfanfictio where the main character tries to date each Smash fighter (and fails). We self-imposed a page limit with only one page allowed for each chapter, then we would switch. It was like playing hot potato, but the hot potato was a pile of flaming garbage. The fanfiction is called "Sweaty Angle", a corruption of "Sweety Angel", a hypothetical terrible pet name.

Plaster also wrote basically all the good parts of Welcome to FanFiction.Net. As you can tell, she's a big fan of high-effort shitpost writing.

At the insistence of our Skype friend group who were very amused by this thing she had made, Plaster was urged to keep writing. At some point it grew into a "Maybe I'll actually make this?" sort of project. I think this was in part because I kept drawing actual character art for it. She took a lot of long breaks and at times seemed to actively hate working on Pizza Game, like it was a big expectation hanging over her, Sword of Damocles-style.

Keep in mind that I did not make Pizza Game. My sister did. This is very much Plaster's game. I'm just the guy on the sidelines who drew art for it and came into the room every few days to offer an idea that meant way more work for her. Several characters only exist in the game because I was like "I thought of a design!!!" and she'd go "Ughhhhh . . ."

She did all of the coding, design, music, and even some of the visuals herself, so outside of artwork and hazy memories of seven or eight years ago, I don't really know what was going through her mind when she made this.

Anyways, let's talk about the process:

The game was originally going to have five dateable characters, each based (incredibly loosely) on one of the people in our Skype friend circle at the time.

Yeah, this was back when people still used Skype. Like 7-9 years ago. Yikes.

In the order of left to right, the following datables were decided on:

• Mr. Arimnaes - The wealthy CEO of "The Big Microsoffit" and part-time serial killer. Real-life Arim worked as a coder at real-life Microsoft at the time and was known to enjoy a pizza. To my recollection, this is literally the only reason this is called Pizza Game. At one point years later Plaster suggested changing the title to Pizza Money, which, while less vague, had even less to do with the game's content than the original title did and it was even harder to google on search engines. Mr. Arimnaes is a deconstruction of the asshole serial killer route in visual novels. The expectation of a visual novel is that, eventually, though hard work and rigorous ignoring of various red flags, the player is expected to be rewarded at the end when the asshole randomly decides to fall in love with you (or at the very least put you in a cage in a fucked up sexy way). Arim has several scenes where he pretends to make excuses for being hard on you, but really the joke is that he will never love or appreciate Kiane no matter what she does.

• Chris - Based on our friend Christopher Gilstrap, best known by JelloApocalypse watchers as the guy who voices Hamtaro in our Hamtaro Abridged videos. Chris is a parody of the myriad of secret demon boyfriend games out there. You know the type. The sort of game that starts with an innocuous player character working at a cafe, only to find that their hunky new co-worker is secretly a vampire or a mummy or an alien or something.

• Sensei - This one is technically supposed to be based on me, at least insomuch as he is blond. Sensei is just thoroughly inexplicable. He is supposed to be a nod towards the Hot-For-Teacher route where you can date your teacher. This route is practically always bad, so I think Plaster and I just silently decided Sensei was going to be the most patently un-sexual character in anything ever. I believe he's technically a mutant plant or wheelchair or something? The Sensei family lore is hard to follow, but to my understanding all of them are mutated inanimate objects, and that's why he has wheels. To my recollection, Sensei was the second character I drew for the game. He wears oven mitts because I did not want to draw hands and an apron because I did not want to draw a body. I remember Plaster being baffled by him. Fair enough.

• Keen - Based on our friend Keenarnor, who has worked for Little Ceasar's pizza for the last decade now. Keen is the token "normal" character. I believe he's supposed to be the Boy Next Door archetype. Keen was the last of the original routes to be conceptualized, and his route basically turned into a repository for every character I had drawn for Plaster that she didn't know what to do with. That's why Keen, Boo, Roobit, Brain, Sav, and Siv all appear in the Keen route. Whoops!

• Lamp - Based on WarpedLamp of SurpriseRoundRPG fame. Lamp is a mash-up of the various tsundere routes in games where you can date a bully or the mean "cool guy" character. I think I drew Lamp third, after Sensei. Lamp came out as a trans woman during the production of the game, so Plaster simply removed all pronouns referring to her until in-game Lamp finally mentions she uses she/her near the end of the game. It's pretty hilarious trans/agender rep, actually. I believe real life Lamp currently uses any pronouns. Real life WarpedLamp was probably Pizza Game's biggest fan during development and loved to do test read-throughs of whatever Plaster had recently written, so the Lamp route got a lot of early production love. I remember Plaster feeling like Lamp and Arim's routes were better than everyone else's. I believe to this day the Lamp route is sort of the fan favorite, but I think that might be because Lamp really is the only viable dating option for Kiane. Everyone else is too insane or actively hates her. Except Keen, who is just straight-up too good for her.

• Roobit - Based on Roob who originated the character of Giovanni Potage. Roobit spawned into existence as a joke while I was drawing other Pizza Game artwork over a call. We joked that if Roob was in pizza game, Roob would inexplicably be "The Only Good Character". "Roobit" would be an Animal Crossing rabbit from space with no relation to anything else, and after every time she succeeded she would say "Dear Diary: Killin' it." I think she does say this exactly once in-game. The final version of Roobit snuck into the game pretty much by accident, essentially in tact from our joke session. She acts as a breath of fresh air from the rest of the cast, who are pretty objectively terrible people.

This was par-for-the-course for Pizza Game development. Plaster would write some stuff, a random group of whoever-was-around would read it together on Skype, laugh, and then we would speculate on what might happen and who might get added to the game in the future and how they would interact with other routes. Explicit "story beats" were not planned from the start. It was more like an improv game of telephone.

Many characters suddenly "spawned" in the game because suggestions would get too funny and form a life of their own. Some characters were created because each route needed an antagonist of some sort. Oz's character, "Siv" spawned into the game as antagonist for the Keen route. Another character, Sav, was created to be Chris's antagonist. Note that Sav is based on neither "Siv" (now Oz) nor our current friend Savvy, but a third unrelated guy from a separate friend group that only Plaster and I knew who's full handle was Savato. It's kind of a wild coincidence we have another friend now who goes by Sav that also has black hair and is also often depicted wearing floral shirts.

I remember Brain's inception in particular really well. I saw a similar character design in a dream and was imagining her having a gimmick like a very specific weird Pokemon NPC. There was a guy in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald who would ask you to input "the cool new thing", and you could create a phrase out of any word. He'd be like "Yeah! DANCE PARTY GYARADOS HAT is amazing! All my friends are talking about DANCE PARTY GYARADOS HAT!"

For some reason I thought this was extremely funny, so Brain was conceptualized as a bonkers philosopher who waxed philosophical about trends that didn't exist and spread wisdom that wasn't wisdom. Plaster was very annoyed when I pitched this and did not want to put another character into the game. She did though! I'm glad because I think Brain is really funny.

I believe Boo was pitched in a similar way, though originally my concept was that he would be the Mayor or Flordaddle or a journalist or something.

Johnny, uniquely, was the only major character not based on someone in our friend group. He was one of Chula's various roommates at the time. Chula had a long slew of absolutely awful luck and terrible jobs/living situations when Pizza Game was first being made. Johnny is a bit of a nod to that.

I never met the guy myself, even digitally, but I do remember asking everyone for a "theme tune" I could listen to while drawing their in-game persona. I asked for something they thought encapsulated them as a person. Most people picked fun, goofy random video game tunes. I remember this guy unironically assigned himself Libera Me From Hell from TTGL, which is the most self-aggrandizing thing I can imagine, lmao.

Anyways, each character was given a unique Character Color, because that's the sort of thing I like to do. It started easy with Kiane as pinky purple and each of the routes as a different color of the rainbow. You can tell Roobit was added late, as she ended up being "Reddish purple" in addition to Lamp's "just plain purple". Johnny was grey, Boo was teal, etc etc.

There were a few other strange little art hiccups. At one point in the game's development items and inventory were going to be more of a thing. I think the idea was there was going to be a box above Kiane that was occupied by both Inner Kiane and various item pickups, which is why the item dimensions are the same size as Inner Kiane's sprites.

There were a few characters who got touch-ups to their original sprites. Arim, Sensei, Keen, Chris, Lamp, and Kiane were all old enough that they got upgrades. Plaster did not ask for these, I just thought the originals were so goddamned ugly and bad-looking that something had to be done about them. I think I started tweaking Inner Kiane's portraits too, but she asked me not to bother because she had edited Inner Kiane into the game already in unique color-coded thought bubbles and didn't want to do it again. This is why Inner Kiane's hair looks so terrible in the finished game. I cry.

The game entered it's "final stages" some time in 2017. If you dig around, you can find my first post about the game on this very Patreon from around this time, because by then I had finished all my artwork. It was up to Plaster to wrap things up on her end.

So then there was an on-and-off two year hiatus. Woo! Confetti.

Plaster came back to work on the game almost out of nowhere when Epithet Erased's animated season entered its crazy production mid-2019. She wanted to premiere the game at convention in San Antonio we had been invited to. This meant that on top of early Epithet work and finishing StiB Sonic the Hedgehog, which was also premiering at that convention, I had to do a trailer for Pizza Game. Plaster got me codecs that didn't work in Vegas (my usual software) so I had to use Premiere instead, the single worst piece of video editing software on planet earth. It took me a week and I am still kind of angry that the release ended up square in the busiest part of my ENTIRE LIFE after the game had been dormant for a year and a half. OuO

Plaster also didn't really want to do any promotion for the game. I don't even think she wanted to HAVE a trailer, which was insane, so I just made one for her. I even hired Jad Saxton to play Roobit. That was a weird session to explain. We even did that one in person! Man, I miss pre-2020.

And then Pizza Game came out!

This is just speculation, but I think Pizza Game was kind of an anchor around Plaster's neck, creatively speaking. She stopped focusing on it so quickly after the incredibly grating launch process and first few patches were finished, I can't help but think she just wanted to get the thing over and done with so she could stop thinking about it and start work on real games. I believe she has three she wants to make? If you are a fan of pizza and/or games and would like to support her future work, she has her own Patreon here.

Anyways, that's Pizza Game. Feel free to ask questions below, I might know some of the answers!

Don't ask about Inner Kiane or Johnny DLC routes tho, those are for sure never happening, lmao.

And again, if you're interested in checking out all of the Portraits from the game in full, please look here!