new game! metamorphosis
queer vampire game jam 2026 devlog
I made a visual novel about a terrible vampire lady and her many, many batgirl lovers over thousands of years! I think this is my first finished game project that I released publicly in like seven years… what the heck. I should probably do this more often, huh.
Originally I was planning on making something that I could submit to the Sealed With A Kiss Jam and the Queer Vampire Game Jam, but I realized that I had too much stuff I wanted to add to make the first deadline. So I ended up only submitting to the Queer Vampire Game Jam, which was more fitting thematically in the end. 🧛🩸🦇
(Thanks to my friend kc for sharing the game jams with me, answering my Ren’Py questions, and for pointing out a pretty critical issue with my builds!)
I started off with some vague ideas:
- the natural affinity between vampires (immortal) and bats (mortal)
- being immortal is lonely and it probably distorts your psyche quite a bit
- what if a vampire falls in love with a bat???
- cycles of toxicity repeating, even when you love someone
For a while I was like “haha. how interesting :)” and I drafted out the character ideas/designs pretty quickly, and set up the Ren’Py project… And then for a couple weeks I didn’t really do much besides rotate the characters and scenarios in my brain…
I think it was a good time to let the ideas ferment. Game jams that are like a month-ish long are perfect for me, because I like to be able to slow down and take time to think. If I try to push through on ideas too quickly I feel like I end up getting lost, and I end up scrapping the idea before doing anything interesting with it. (also, I don’t feel super pressured, so I can still go out and do fun things with my friends without feeling guilty about not constantly working on my game. it’s important to go outside and cherish the precious time with your friends!)
For some reason I spent a full night painstakingly translating a song’s lyrics from Japanese into English, and timing the lyric display for my game’s ending… which is hilarious to me in hindsight that I made this game end with a pop song. But it’s a really cute song so please listen to it here! (or play my game to see real-time lyrics/visuals)
ヴァンパイアガール - ゆうり 歌詞（日本語・英語）
Vampire Girl - Yuli Audio Craft (Japanese + English lyrics)
確かに愛した 何千年も前の事だっけ 思い出すI remember that I loved you, once upon a time
So many thousands of centuries back in history
月夜がキラキラ幾千年もぐるぐる世界は回ってる
Starry skies were sparkling for millions of years
While Planet Earth was pirouetting, round and round
重い瞼をこじ開けて 朝日を睨みつけ
As I open up my heavy eyelids, I squint at the rising morning sun
今日も独りきりで 小さく歌を歌う
I'm still all alone, by myself, but I'll sing my little song
あなたの血が吸いたいの 今でも愛しているの
I want to suck all your blood for myself
Even to this day I still love you
気づくのが遅すぎたの 呪われて生きているの
It took me until now to realize that
I'm doomed to keep living with this curse now
あなたの手に触れたいの またあたためて欲しいの
I just want to hold your hand one more time
I want you to warm me up one last time
毎日泣いているの さよなら今もできないの
Every day I cry my heart out for you
I still can't bring myself to say goodbye to you
悪魔の口づけペペロンチーノ もう一度ちょうだい ウィジャボード
A Kiss from the Devil, was like peperoncino
Give it to me one more time, Ouija board
コインの裏とか表とか そういう問題ではないの
Flip a coin to see if it goes heads or maybe tails
either way I think it would be missing the point
痛いくらいの十字架が 胸に刺さって抜けなくて
The pain of a cross stabbed into my chest
as hard as I tried I couldn't pull it out
いつも独りきりで 苦しみもがいてる
Suffering with agony alone
forever I will be on my own
あなたの血が吸いたいの 今でも愛しているの
I want to suck all your blood for myself
Even to this day I still love you
気づくのが遅すぎたの 呪われて生きているの
It took me until now to realize that
I'm doomed to keep living with this curse now
あなたの手に触れたいの またあたためて欲しいの
I just want to hold your hand one more time
I want you to warm me up one last time
毎日泣いているの さよなら今もできないの
Every day I cry my heart out for you
I still can't bring myself to say goodbye to you
My overarching goal was to re-learn Ren’Py and get a feel for how to structure a project and pace things through art/transitions. I hadn’t touched it since I was in college, but it was surprisingly easy to jump into! Ren’Py feels like a breath of fresh air after primarily using Unity for the past 10 years. It’s so nice to use an engine and have competent documentation and vibrant community resources that don’t feel so grifty. And it’s so nice when basic functions just…. work, out-of-the-box, exactly how I expect them to. Amazing!!!
Process-wise, I used Procreate on my iPad to draw everything, and Figma to make the GUI and composite everything together. I’m happy with how quickly I was able to create a pretty large volume of assets (90 character sprites, 10 CG art). I pulled all of the backgrounds from Unsplash which was convenient… but I feel ambivalent about it since it seems like photographers basically upload free content to be paid in ~exposure~. I have no idea what stock photo sites are like these days but if I do another project where I need to source a lot of photos, maybe I’ll pay for a month of Unsplash+ or try to find a site that pays royalty fees per-image or something…
I think it was a little crazy of me to write over 18,000 words for this game jam so I’m looking forward to doing something less text-heavy for my next project. Maybe in the next game I make everyone will communicate in caveman grunts.
I’d love to make another visual novel-style game in Ren’Py in the future, but for my next project I’ll probably try out a different game genre and engine. Maybe Godot? It seems like the community resources have really stepped up recently.
Game jams are a great excuse to kick my ass into gear and finish stuff! Everyone should do game jams and make weird small games!!! Especially with the state of the games industry now, where all of these huge companies are terrified of losing profits, and can only commit to pumping out extremely polished remakes and sequels to established franchises that does nothing to creatively disrupt… I would love for people to create fresh stuff that cost less to make…
Making games that are smaller, cheaper, rougher around the edges, and more freaky and niche is really good, actually.
So one of my starting ideas in this game jam was the desire to use GUI/character art to visually enforce the passage of time. Originally I wanted to have three distinct settings - ancient Eastern Europe, medieval Korea (Cheongok), medieval Japan (Hokkaido), and finally modern America (Chicago). Each setting would have a unique GUI and the Vampire characters’ attire would change accordingly. In the end, that got pared down to two settings and basically two GUI styles.
Maybe I’ll try to revisit that idea again. It might be fun to make a PC-98-esque game that has over-the-top GUI elements… like this game I randomly came across - 「究極変幻バトルギャルさおり」 Ultimate Transformation Battle Girl Saori (1995).
Another idea I had was incorporating found-footage aspects, which is one of my favorite genres as of late. I wanted to set up a very specific kind of spooky vibe, but eventually I realized that I didn’t actually want to go through with it because:
- I had to spend a considerable amount of time creating assets with the right amount of “realness”. Social media with a bunch of unique users posting messages… A news report clip… A pile of cheesy occult magazines with articles…
- In found-footage horror, everyone loves to see a spooky video from a haunted tape or whatever… but I didn’t have the video-editing dog in me this month
- When I started gathering photos of various types of content, it made me think about how the fun of found-footage is the differences in each medium. I felt like I couldn’t execute on the idea too well by simply slapping some images and text into a visual novel
- I love found-footage/mockumentary too much, so if I wanted to make something in a similar vein for my first time, I wanted to do it properly!
- I had started the project with a far darker premise overall, planning to go much deeper into the dark/adult themes in the game. But as I kept writing, I was also writing a lot of stupid jokes and softer moments to show character appeal… it ended up being a lot lighter than I had anticipated. So the found-footage stuff felt like it clashed with what I was writing, and I decided to shelve those portions completely.
Anyway, I couldn’t make it work for this project, but I’d love to give it a shot someday!
Speaking of which, there are some total bangers in the genre that have been coming out recently!
放送局に届いたある映像 (Footage Received by a Broadcasting Station) by エンタメ～テレ
There are currently 5 episodes out in this collection of totally different stories that are all somehow connected by a single thread… I’m obsessed. This feels more like a typical scary found-footage horror. The next episode「Tape.6 AIの心霊動画は呪いを生むのか？」(Tape #6 Can AI-generated paranormal videos be cursed?) sounds like an interesting exploration of the idea of hauntings occuring in digital spaces…
(if you fuck with me even the littlest bit please watch 回路/Pulse directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
「UFO山」(UFO Mountain) by TXQ Fiction
TXQ Fiction’s second-newest series. It’s maybe not outwardly “scary” (which I was a little disappointed by because I grew up being terrified of the cheesy late-night TV shows on aliens) but it’s definitely unsettling. There were a ton of disparate plot points and possibly intentional red herrings, so watching it felt like I was being dragged all over the place and being shown a bunch of closed doors, never being given the key to unlock them… but in that confusion, it made me think pretty deeply on “why humans seek patterns” and “why humans need to create narratives”. One man’s conspiracy theory is another man’s cope.
I still haven’t checked out the newest series that they’re releasing (神木隆之介 Ryunosuke Kamiki) but oh man I hope it’s about parasociality, or like how insane cults of personality are around celebrities… Excited!
Okay! That wraps up my deranged ramblings for the month!!!