THE ROAD TO BAD SUMMER: HOW WE GOT HERE PART 1

I was minding my own business, scrolling on my computer, when my sister burst into the room with the look—the one that meant she either had a brilliant idea or had just committed a minor crime and needed an alibi.

“Let’s make a game,” she said, eyes gleaming with excitement.

It was a Tuesday afternoon—one of those gray, uneventful days where even the internet seemed bored. Nothing good on TV, nothing new on YouTube, not even a mildly interesting drama unfolding in the comment sections.

I shrugged. Why not? I didn’t have anything better to do. And just like that, history was made. Okay, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind a bit, shall we?

We were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. We were confident. We were excited. We had just decided we were going to make a game. All was right with the world again—at least in our minds.

We had gone from an endless stretch of uneventful days to actually having something to look forward to. We had purpose. We had ambition. We had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

Deciding to make a game? Easy. Trying to figure out what kind of game we wanted to make. Slightly harder.

We landed on visual novels.

1. We love storytelling.
2. We love writing.
3. It was the most cost-effective option.

That last part? Kind of a big deal. Being a fresh out of college in the middle of a pandemic meant job hunting was about as promising as trying to get a cell signal in a horror movie. So, a visual novel made the most sense financially…at the time.

(Translation: we were broke and game dev is expensive.)

Note: It got really expensive pretty freaking fast. But that’s a story for another newsletter.

Now onto the hard part—or at least the part that made us really stop and contemplate whether making a visual novel was something we actually wanted to do.

See, we’re siblings. Which means we fight. We disagree. Sometimes over important things, sometimes over things as trivial as who finished the last bag of chips. So the real question was: Did we have a healthy enough relationship to survive making a game together?

And beyond that, we had to ask ourselves: Was this just a fun little project for us and our friends, or were we really going all in? Were we actually ready to put this thing out into the world and let total strangers judge it? Could we handle that type of exposure, criticism, and (hopefully) praise without immediately spiraling into self-doubt?

We sat with that question for a few days, turning it over and over in our mind before we made our decision: We wanted more.

We wanted to share it, put it out there, and see what people thought—the good, the bad, and or the brutally honest.

And that’s when the real work began.

PLAYING GAMES…FOR RESEARCH

We needed to study visual novels. And sure, that sounds easy—playing games all day? Dream job. But this time, we weren’t just playing for fun; we were analyzing, taking notes, researching why certain VNs worked and others didn’t. We wanted to understand the genre beyond just being fans of it.

And once we had a solid grasp of what made a great visual novel, that’s when a very important, top-secret, highly classified piece of equipment came into play—The Board.