Poseidon’s Orb
Genre: Visual novel
Engine: Ren’Py
Team size: 15
My roles: Writer, VO review, assistant programmer
Development time: 9 weeks
Created for SuNoFes, July/August 2021
Storytelling
About three weeks into the development of Poseidon’s Orb, the game’s director contacted me to ask for help finishing the script. Initially, I was tasked with writing 2-3 scenes involving one of the story’s love interests; however, as the director’s other responsibilities kept them from writing, I took over completion of the script based on their outline.
In the end, I wrote about 60% of the 31,000-word script. While the story was already outlined, individual dialogue branches were not.
I wrote relationship building scenes and backstory for 2 of the 3 potential love interests in the game, as well as some of the world lore. I also wrote all 5 of the game’s possible endings and 7 epilogues.
There are a couple choices in the game that lead directly to bad endings, but most of the choices affect the player character’s relationships. Friendship and romance points are tracked for each potential love interest, and these not only affect who the player ends up with at the end but can also indirectly alter the plot. (If you’re mean to everyone, don’t expect a happy ending!)
VO Review
Poseidon’s Orb features a full voice cast, including 5 principal actors and 2 extras. There are over 800 lines of recorded dialogue.
As each chapter of the script was finalized, it was sent to the voice actors for them to perform. The actors recorded their characters individually, providing at least two takes for each line of dialogue.
The recordings were provided as one file that sometimes covered multiple chapters. I listened to the files as they were submitted to ensure every line was recorded with correct wording and pronunciation, then passed the file to a sound engineer for balancing and mixing.
Once each voice file was mixed, I split them into individual lines to be integrated into the game. This involved selecting the best take, extracting the audio using Audacity, and correctly naming the files based on the character and a sequence number.
Programming
I assisted with integrating the branching narrative in Ren’Py and performed some testing and debugging.