How does an interactive fairy tale get made?

(This is a long post, so buckle in!)

If you’ve been here a while you’ll know I’ve been redoing a lot of my work on The Last Winter Knight, a Gothic/fantasy visual novel where you play as a haunted suit of armour. This includes designing a brand new, shiny GUI. 

Designing stuff is fun. I like designing stuff. 

The problem was that I had no motivation to code it!

'So,' I thought. 'I’ll make a quick spin-off project for a game jam. It’ll be short and sweet and force me to code this UI and get me back into the swing of programming! SWAK VN Jam allows spin-off games, and Once Upon a Time jam is also running! Perfect.'

Hah. You can probably guess that this project was not nearly that simple to put together. But hey, I did get the UI done.

Part One: Finding Friends??

The first thing I did was get a concept down for a story that fit the theme of both jams: A loose retelling of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of "M" from Winter Knight, a young squire struggling with intense feelings towards her best friend–and his wolfish father.

I took M's concept from Winter Knight to make a rough sketch of her younger self. 

Then, I got a good amount of the (initially under 2k words) first draft completed in a day or two. This is when I felt confident I knew *mostly* what visual assets the story would need. 

I’m notoriously not a planner. Kudos to the devs who can list out every scene in a story down to every audiovisual asset needed before writing! That’s definitely not me, and that’s what’s always made recruiting a team ahead of time feel impossible for game jams. 

In fact, I had no plans to recruit others initially. But because the story was so short and self-contained, I thought, why not see if anyone wants to join in on some last minute(ish) chaos? 

(This was a few days after the jam had already started).

I made a post on bluesky and very quickly, Polly, an artist and dev I’d already been following for a while, responded! 

I didn’t expect anyone to, to be honest! I thought this would end up being another solo project, so I hadn’t even put an outline of the game together yet–just a single visual mockup using some assets from Winter Knight. But quickly after that, Sparrowling and ArcanaXIX also responded–and just like that we had two artists and another musician.

I threw together a doc with a brief story, plot, character and game overview, along with a list of the sprites and backgrounds needed and some visual references for the art style: It would lean heavily into the fairy tale theme with paper cutouts and shadow puppets as inspiration. 

Music

The next person I dragged in invited was my friend Calamanser, who did the music and sound for my previous game, Portrait of a Ghost. The idea was that we’d divide up the music tracks between us.

I could honestly write an entire devlog about how we made the soundtrack, and I just might, but long story short that’s mostly how things ended up: Calamanser took over the intro + forest BGM and the title theme, and I wrote the night + Kiss themes. (ArcanaXIX did god's work by improvising and recording ALL the cello parts!)

Here’s a snippet of the outline for the “Forest” piece:

And a diagram of the structure:

I’m a composer myself so I can get somewhat technical and detailed in my descriptions. I’m good at 'visualising' or imagining what kind of sound I want in a scene, down to the texture and phrasing.

But sometimes I get so lost in the details that I forget basic things like ‘video game music repeats a LOT so it’s absolutely not necessary to score it like a film.’ lmao

So yeah. I realised I didn’t need as many tracks as I outlined at first and quickly cut them. (Having a separate intro track for the first scene was totally unnecessary because of how short it is, for example. We simply took the first part of the forest theme Calamanser wrote and looped it to get ‘A Note by Her Pillow’ while the rest became ‘Shaded Trails’.)

Another fun fact: Calamanser was supposed to cover the ‘night’ and romance themes while I covered Forest, but my first draft turned out to be an emotional piano piece while his was more atmospheric, so we swapped them.

Also depicted: My feedback style

CG and Illustrations

With the story’s draft complete, the last thing I wanted to add was three ending CGs.

I sketched out an example CG and made another recruitment post–and Akua responded! (I really loved their work on Shared Beauty, so I was super excited!) Seeking out an artist well after the jam already began definitely made for a tight timeline, but they graciously delivered and captured the characters' emotions so beautifully it tugged at my heart. T^T

(I loved the little touches they added like the two falling stars in the CG where both of them are running):

(Example CG by me for promoting the game):

Finally, with sprites done, Polly and I came up with a mockup for the main menu screen. She completed the beautiful illustration of the two characters gazing up at the stars, which I implemented into the evolving title screen of the game.

Thumbnails:

My mockup:

Coding

‘I’ve coded around half a dozen VNs already, surely this one won’t take that long!’ –the words of a fool about to add Ren’py animations into almost every line of the story. 

Out of my games, I’m not the most proud of Portrait of a Ghost, but Trail of Stars couldn’t have existed without this experimental little camera/ghost VN. That was the first game where I first got my feet wet with camera effects and simple animations like panning–and a non-traditional VN layout. 

I’d begin by mocking up a scene in photoshop, plugging numbers into the script, then adjusting it until it looked right.

The final script ended up with about 500 lines worth of animations:

Coding this took more than all the other tasks I had to do for the game combined (and it took more than a few late nights to complete it–not recommended!!) 

Not all the movements were perfect, and some could be a little smoother, but overall I definitely feel like the effort was worth it.

Story

Trail of Stars was always going to have two endings, but the initial draft was a kinetic story with a single choice at the end. I wanted the ending to feel more natural, so in the second draft I introduced choices throughout. 

These choices had to have limited impact on the story and characters–their personalities are pretty set, and the story couldn’t branch that much or it’d quickly balloon the scope of a very short game. 

In the end, the choices don’t change the plot, but do affect the main character’s feelings and perspective and guide her down two routes that both deal with the themes of growing up and innocence. 

Neither ending was meant to be a “good” or better ending than the other. The “white” path has the main characters holding onto innocence for just a bit longer, while the “red” path has them begin to embrace adulthood (literally!)

Like Portrait of a Ghost, Trail of Stars is written in third person in a somewhat antiquated style, but this time more poetic for an old timey storybook feeling. I enjoy writing in this style a lot (though I’m always worried it’s a bit Too Much for a full game, haha. I may have mentioned before, but my writing background isn’t so much in prose as it is choral/lyric music). 

The dialogue is purposefully poetic and unrealistic. To me, there’s something knife-twisting about two young characters forced to grow up quickly, struggling to envision a happy future for themselves and acting like adults most of the time–versus very much like kids when they feel safe (like playing a game of Truth or Dare that quickly becomes solemn again depending on what you ask). 

Side note: Have you tried saving and reloading at this point to see a different option? ;)

References and Allusions

Of course, the first thing you’re thinking is probably Little Red Riding Hood and then maybe Hansel and Gretel, but there is one direct reference to an existing poem:

It’s from ‘The Highwayman’, a famous romantic ballad by Alfred Noyes about two lovers who meet tragic ends but ultimately unite in death. (Interpret that how you will…)

He rose upright in the stirrups. He scarce could reach her hand,

But she loosened her hair in the casement. His face burnt like a brand

As the black cascade of perfume came tumbling over his breast;   

And he kissed its waves in the moonlight,

         (O, sweet black waves in the moonlight!)

Then he tugged at his rein in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.

Final Thoughts

This game’s development was a blur. I feel like I blinked and an entire month passed. I’m so happy with it, however! I had a lot of fun, and really feel like my team created something special. I’m so honoured to have worked on it with them, and it’s only made me more excited to hopefully do another collaborative project in the future!

Now, back to developing Winter Knight. Trust me, it won’t be the last time you see these characters…

Psst, you can wishlist Winter Knight on Steam or sign up for my newsletter to be notified when the new demo comes out.