The Kandria team did a game jam as a little break/reward for getting to the vertical slice milestone. Nick had the idea to make a visual novel, using some of the dialogue tech from Kandria, and make it about adopting animals from a shelter. Amazing right?! We talked about Hatoful Boyfriend as a strong influence, which I was familiar with but hadn’t played—so it was fun to do some research into that game too.

We made the game in two weeks, working normal hours, and it’s been some of the most fun I’ve had in game writing. We all pitched animal characters (the rats and dog were mine), and I came up with the game name and wider story, and wrote the dialogue. Nick handled the engine, and he and Fred shared art duties. Nick also did the sound effects and sourced the royalty-free music. Obviously as a game jam we had a lot of constraints, but this actually ensured a large amount of creativity and focused content—there’s about 20k words in the game. I’m really pleased with how it turned out, mixing comedy with serious themes.

So Nick could gain experience with the Steam release pipeline, we’ve made it available on there for $1 / £0.79. Please check it out on Steam and give us a review if it sounds like your thing! It’s also available on itch.io. Nick even made a trailer with voice acting!

I’ve tweeted and blogged about it in a couple of other places too if you want more info—here’s a tweet, and I also wrote some dev insight for the Kandria monthly newsletter.

The game’s presskit is here for full credits and more info.

Tim