The Mariverse
The Mariverse
The Mariverse
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Jay Miles
Narrative Designer - Game Developer
My Development
After the development of Igor Meme I had so much fun and managed to make a story with a team that I decided to try out the jam again the following year and commit to a yearly attendance of the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam. Mainly to think of good horror stories and expand the worldbuilding of my superhero dystopian setting of See Only Evil.
With the experience I gained last year, I tried to make up for the errors and mistakes I made and try again. My main goal was to get my visual novel onto the shortlist of the 2026 Visual Novel Jam.
Weekly Voting
A month and a half prior to the jam, I decided to try something different, inspired by the Grimoire voting from Dead By Daylight, I wanted to make my Visual Novel Story based on ideas I thought of that were highly voted by the community that hosted the jam. In the first week, I shared an elevator pitch for what the story would involve. I thought of 4 ideas and put out a poll using Google Forms and put it out on my socials for a week-long voting session.
In the end, the most popular pitch idea was:
"Zootopia Meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
(Poll Results for Elevator Pitch ideas with 9 voters.)
After figuring out the pitch, the rest of the weekly voting was about thinking of elements and ingredients and seeing what people wanted. This ranged from the setting, the protagonist, the cannibal monsters and their personality and appearance.
Along the way, I also had ideas such as having to choose a protagonist or if people want permadeath. Oddly enough, on the protagonist side, the results for gender, age and relationships. Resulted in two young adult females in a lesbian romantic relationship. Creating a new challenge for myself to write romance.
During the voting process, I started hiring members for the team and got some of the artists to pitch in ideas for the visual appearances of the characters. Only 2 designs of my own were voted in; the rest were made thanks to my team members.
(Visual concept character designs for the voting for The Daughter's Visuals, 1 and 2 were designed by me. 4 ended up being the most voted and used as final design.)
Installing Pausing First
Like last time, I made the visual novel using the Unity Engine and coded the programs using C# scripting. The first thing I worked on when the jam started wasn't the dialogue, but rather the pausing and saving system. Previously, there was feedback saying my visual novel lacked accessibility and I wanted to implement the most accessible system possible, with a saving system using a JSON file to save moments using checkpoints, and allowing the player to control the voice and music volume, even downright mute the voice entirely.
(early development of the pausing system with volume settings for voices and music.)
Narrative Graph
For my visual novel, I decided to make it into a linear experience, and treat choices and interactions as separate mini-games. I also planned a 3-act structure with different outcomes and endings, Act 1 is introduction of characters that ends with the protential first death, Act 2 is the middle that ends with Evelen (The Daughter) turning into the monster, and Act 3 is the climax.
Halfway through the time we had, I realised that there was too much to implement and had to trim the story so that there was a beginning, middle and end. Fortunately, there were 2 routes for Act 2 that both led to Act 3, and all I had to do is focus on one of them.
the result is a story that follows a semi-linear path that only diverge during 'Evelyn's Playtime' and with the outcome of 5 different endings and 2 characters who could potentially die in the story.
(First checkpoint graph draft of Act 1,
full graph in link below.)
(NOTE: Zoom in for clear text)
Writing a Romantic Relationship
I am going to be honest, when it comes to writing, I tend to avoid romance as much as I can. This is due to two reasons. The first is my lack of romantic experience. I am Asexual and have no interest in getting into a relationship with a partner; because of this, I personally believed that I couldn't be capable of writing such subjects. The second is my disinterest in writing romance, a genre I don't want to get into and I would focus on other genres.
But everything changed when I wrote Immolate.
I had to write dialogue not only to introduce the characters of Molly and Max but to show that they are in a supportive, romantic relationship, especially since I had to write a romantic relationship between two females. As I wrote, I just thought of what their conversation are like based on their character, how one would treat the other, what their role are, what issues they have that they have to resolve and, in the horror part, how they would keep each other together or how one mourns the loss of the other.
After writing and proofreading the dialogue, I found new confidence in writing relationships and having it be a same-sex relationship opens up to how I can write more relationships in the future regardless of gender.
(NOTE: Dialogue script includes scenes and interactions that didn't make it to the game due to limited time.)
What worked & what Didn't
Let's start with what didn't work.
Halfway through development, I realised I had to scope down the project into a more trimmed-down version of the entire story, but there was another reason.
Unfortunately, the story had a lot of CG art, and our team only had 1 CG artist. by the time the dialogue was written, there was supposed to be 40 planned CG images, with the trim, I cut it down to 24, but it was still overwhelming to my team. I tried to find another CG artist, but with limited time there wasn't one to find. It came to the point where other artists, such as the UI artist, and even I had to step in and do CG art.
At the deadline, the CG artist only managed to make 1 CG art. Including the CG images made by other artists, 19 of the 24 images was made, 10 were coloured in while the rest were sketched. the rest had to have a notification that CG art is missing and
What I learn from this error, is how much CG art I tend to use. For next year and any future Visual Novels for the Spooktober Jam, I hire at least 2 CG artist for the team.
(Missing CG Image pages I had to make to fill in the images while I made the build on Unity.)
Fortunately, that was the only major issue. aside from the trim, the development of the game went very well. We made the visual novel, took feedback, and even added a 'Skip' button to improve accessibility, a feature we hadn't planned but added after getting feedback.
Overall, Immolate ended up becoming a very interesting project, and I learned some skills as a writer and a team leader for a group project. The skills I gained are writing romance and quickly responding to feedback and updating the build with a new function to improve quality.
Immolate
Immolate is a horror Visual Novel for the Spooktober 8th annual Visual Novel Jam made by Devtalk. The story is also part of the world of See Only Evil.
the story focus on Molly and Max, a couple with sheep mutations, who gets kidnapped by a serial killer and his cannibalistic daughter. The aim is to escape and flee from your captors, together or alone.
You can play as either Molly or Max through the story; if one dies, you play as the other, and there are 5 unique endings based on choices and consequences.
