Dev Log 2: History of the End of the World - Part 1

A little while ago, I was having a conversation with fellow VN dev and good friend Konvel about when Achlys had begun, and whether I was technically his senpai because I had been working on this for so long, even if it was just sitting on my hard drive. Ultimately he told me not to fuss over stuff like that, because ideas, not even the tangible and discernible elements, probably stew in our heads for a long time before they even hit paper.

After all,

“Who is to say when Achlys was really born?”

Incredibly insightful.

That line may make it into a sequel some day.

Unfortunately for Konvel, he should know that we are too similar for a simple warning not to fuss over things to stop me from trying to answer that question.

So when was Achlys born? 

One answer, the answer most relevant for players, would be the day that the game was published or released, meaning January 1, 2024, the start of a new year. And yes, this would mean that Achlys was literally born yesterday. (This line was written on 1/2/24, and will be kept here to keep the joke) By this point you can imagine that I couldn’t let the symbolism of being born on the New Year slip, and was itching to release it. 

In the case of movies, songs, books, games, and other media, the date when something is released into the world is a logical starting point to indicate when something was born. After all, this is the “Hello World” moment for the game, when a nascent idea comes into contact with the other and is able to establish itself in relation to the world. (AKA when I release it, will people play it and like or, or will it fall into some ironically foggy and dark abyss) If I may make the joke, does life begin at birth or at conception? Ignoring that these concepts are blurry for a digital medium, when was Achlys first conceived?

The first documents corresponding to the development and creation of the vn were created in late May 2021. Those documents were the first game design documents made for the vn, including brainstorming for ideas, which would then streamline into documents on structure, plot, characters, and themes, becoming closer and closer to what you see today. The most interesting parts of these early documents, other than the insanely lengthy footnotes for plot points I may have forgotten or have overwritten, is the fact that this early brainstorming document was actually a collaborative document for a project with an entirely different spirit than it has today.

I’ll go into the full details of the development history later, but in short, the game was a collaborative project envisioned as a “Persona H VN.” Putting it that way, the structure of the game makes a lot of sense, and if you were one of the earlier testers, some of the typos too. However it’s clear that this game in spirit is quite different from that, and it can be traced from one line in the development documents and conversations at the time where I had asked if I could use the setting for a DnD campaign I ran for the VN.

Now we have to jump a year back, to late March, early April of 2020 where a lot of things happened. I remember spending my days idly relaxing in that warm spring sun. Once at this yuppie Japanese place, I had this shot of sake with my ramen for lunch, and while I wasn’t drunk, my face was so red that I had worn sunglasses indoors at a charity event I had a few hours later. I literally spent an hour in shades on a bench listening to Oasis and hoping my face got less red. (Funny that I’ve been listening to Oasis again since releasing the game.) I had just bought Granblue Fantasy Versus and would spend afternoons practicing it by the windows. (Funny that Granblue Versus Rising just came out. This time around I’m making an effort to play the characters I liked but were unconfident in playing last time around.)

Then if you can imagine, based on the date that I had mentioned, that COVID would soon enter the world. The world darkened quickly. Outside of my apartment there were people protesting for BLM, and that night I heard what I hoped were just rubber bullets. I had convinced myself that I would have to just stay inside for two weeks, then it dragged and dragged. 

Then if you can imagine what I did in my boredom, I decided to put these feelings into a DnD campaign, with my own pre-recorded memo’s, and documents for lore. I had made a DnD campaign with the core theme to be, how it would feel if the world ended but people were still around, anime style. Hence the name of this article. Essentially, a mysterious fog had entered the world and the sudden disappearance of my self-insert character triggered the start of the campaign. Now you’re starting to see how it all fits.

Unfortunately as a DnD campaign this idea was too inflexible and too difficult. I had felt that players struggled to grasp the vibe I had been going for as well as the lore. (I had entire documents made from real gnostic texts.) I couldn’t keep up with my own prep on a weekly schedule despite frankly not having anything else to do. I was swallowed up in the enormity of it. A friend told me that I had a beautiful idea, but it struggled in the medium of a dnd campaign, suggesting that instead I had written a book. I kept this in mind.

Truth be told, while I had put those ideas together into a DnD campaign that day, I had only taken parts from past stories that had been floating in my head for a long time. I somehow kept the earliest of these stories out of the proto-Achlys, but among those ideas was the story of an Oracle, a white haired boy who could travel into dreams to remove problems, first jumping into the mind of a black haired girl about to kill herself. I had envisioned it looking a bit closer to Monogatari or Madoka. Many elements of the game, honestly, the weirder parts of the game, are directly ripped from real dreams that I have had and made sure to transcribe. I keep track of those things. (For instance, around that time, I had a dream where I went to a smoothie shop, with my friends, telling them that I had a dream about going to a smoothie shop. I made sure to actually do that, and the layers of irony impress me to this day.)

Like any author, and any author of stories where a character has some form of mental breakdown or extreme emotional outburst, I had also taken them from memories of my own life. (Sometimes I want to do a wellness check on some devs when I see something way too personal and painful.) I still have a few I have yet to use, or represent in its original context.

Finally, and this is something I may have argued as Jessie, that it began to feel as if I were reaching for these ideas from some spiritual place beyond me. I had toyed with the idea that perhaps elements or threads of the game were something that had always existed in some platonic form in some world out there. And if reading this log isn’t clear, you can also view the game and its writing as an extension of myself.

So when was Achlys born? Inconclusive.

As for the actual development of the game, here I can give you more concrete answers... (In the Next Post)