Mint S. Decot

Info: Hello Girl, a new visual novel

Added 2023-07-20 04:55:28 +0000 UTC

Long time no see! I feel like I've just landed back on Earth again.

I've been so 'away' lately because of a very important project that I had been working on. It's a visual novel that I and a team of 4 other put together named Hello Girl.

Created for 2023's VN Cup, Hello Girl is a visual novel about a girl named Ana who works as a switchboard operator in a world engulfed in turmoil.

It is available now on itch.io for free on PC, Mac and Linux.

Download it here!

I recommend reading through it before reading about its creation below. It is around 2-3 hours in length, though that may vary depending on your reading speed.

VN Cup this year was a 12-week long contest that tasks anyone to create an original visual novel with a specific central theme. It is then judged by a panel of 6 artists including CPU (aka /f), Sofa, Mara Barl, Henrietta, Kyou, and Emamouse.

I wanted to submit a visual novel for last year's VN Cup but unfortunately the contest overlapped with a family vacation, and so I wasn't able to put anything together.

Originally I had planned to enter this year's alone, and after the first day of the contest starting, I already had a little bit of a premise hatched out, but Merilynn approached me and asked if I'd want to develop something with her. The answer of course was yes, Meri is such a talented programmer and artist, and we were also joined by 3 other musicians in June Harmony, Naja D'egoutter, and Kalibration.

Meri developed a VN for last year's contest, Good Morning is a Social Construct. It's a very sweet story about two girls in school who fall in love. I recommend reading it. It was created in only two weeks from start to finish!

June and Naja are two musicians I was not previously familiar with, but Meri is close to June, and Naja D'egoutter worked on some soundtrack parts for Good Morning.

Kalibration is long-time friend of mine and actually did the music for Beloved Parasite, and so I knew that his contributions would be great no matter what.

The concept that Meri and I started to put together was inspired by Keifuku-san, an animated short by the Kemono Friends series creator about a girl who goes about her daily routine in a surreal world. We wanted to take the idea of a girl who goes about her day in a routine that maybe does not seem very familiar to the viewer while living in a world wracked with conflict and mystery. And so the initial idea was for a postal worker of some sort, in a world affected by a great war. I'm not sure when, but eventually we thought about someone who could monitor phone lines, gathering information on the world by listening into calls, mysteries stirring up all while doing so.

We spent a day watching videos about how telephones worked from the years 1920-1940s, switchboard operators, and training videos. The idea of a world war stuck with us, as well.

Little inklings of ideas for characters began to fall into place, a younger girl who took on the job of telephone operator from her sister. She falls in love with a maintenance worker. Stuff that stuck through until the end. There was the idea that she could be drafted into the army, and start working as a military phone operator.

During World War I, female switchboard operators were referred to as "Hello Girls". We thought this to be really cute, and laughed at the idea of naming the game that. We were also thinking of naming it something like "Operator: (main character name)", but eventually the name Hello Girl grew on us.

Other character concepts began to take shape, too. The maintenance worker girl would be leaning more toward androgynous, taller than the main character, and just being a down-to-earth hard worker. A stoner mail worker girl. Twin soldiers girls who take their jobs very seriously but aren't that great at it. A tragedy-stricken girl who gives you the real scoop on the war. And the horrible secret of the war, Rabbit Zero.

I started to work on some of the art, too. I was excited at the idea of doing landscapes again. I put two landscapes together before I realized how much of an undertaking it'd be to draw every single background for the VN, and so later we would use stock photos.

More challenging than the art was the writing, though. I wouldn't call myself a talented writer by any means, and it is very rarely that I ever do write full stories. But I tried to apply bits and pieces of my life to each character, and eventually after about a month or so we fell into a good groove.

The writing was handled by Meri, June and I. We all made pretty siginificant contributions to the story. Try to guess who wrote what^__^

After we solidified the character concepts down, I started on some of the sprites. Sprites felt important, because they operate as the puppets of a puppet show, in some way. Once you see them moving around in-game, you'll get a really good feel as for what works in the writing and what doesn't.

At this point I was getting very giddy seeing these characters rendered out in such detail. Ideas about their backstories and what they'll do in the story began to flow between us nonstop. Everyday we'd throw new ideas at each other excitedly. We also just made them all rabbits because why not.

The main character was named Ana because of the word 'Analogue' (lol). And also because in the last VN I made 11 years ago, the main character was named Anna (Decot). Here is a comparison of Ana's sprite from Hello Girl, and Anna's sprite from that old VN.

Earlier in June, Meri had the idea of flying me out to her place so that I could work on the game with her in person. I jumped at the chance, and on June 30th I flew out of state for 10 days of non-stop VN work. This is where most of our important work had been done. I even managed to bring my pen display and a clone of my home PC's hard drive so that I could seamlessly have my home art setup. It all worked smoothly and we were able to work hard on it everyday.

We had enough ideas for this VN that we considered making an extended version of it later down the line, but the after exhaustiveness of this development, it's probably for the best that it sits where it's at right now.

Some of the ideas left out were some of the best ones, I think, but I'm happy with what we ended up with. What we submitted for the judges to read in VN Cup is just about what the final product is. It does feel like a story that could be expanded on, but that could probably wait for another time.

This project was by far the most satisfying creative experience of my life. The challenge of the deadline pushed us to reach far into our heads to create something great. The experience of working with a team of so many talented artists was wonderful. I found myself wishing that this would never have to end. And now that the rush of its development is over, I find it hard to think about what will come next in my life.

To Meri, June, Soap, Kali, I love you guys. Thank you for helping to create some of the best months of my life.

I'll share some more concept arts below for you to look at.

Thank you for reading!

Soldiers concept