Tati Tatu is a visual novel developed during the 2019 Women Game Jam. Our team was composed of 8 women: 3 artists, 2 composers/sound designers, 2 writers, and myself as writer and programmer.
The theme for the jam was Identity and Independence, and we wanted to tell the story of a female character in a quest for self-knowledge. From the beginning, we felt it was important to make it a universal experience for the players--something that wouldn't be too closely tied to life events that players might or might not have experienced themselves. As a consequence, we decided to use anthropomorphic animals as characters and make ample use of symbolism and metaphore in the story.
There are 3 endings: one good, one neutral, and one bad ending. All members of the team were involved in deciding the plot. As soon as we had a summary, we picked out key scenes and characters so the artists and composers could start working, and the other two writers and I got together and worked out the details for the rest of the story. Since I had a good experience using Twine as a tool for prototyping branching narratives before, we made a graph of scenes and player choices that we used as a guide during development. Due to time constraints--the jam lasted only a weekend--we needed to write the screenplay in parallel, so each of us worked on one act from the story. I wrote Act 2, which focuses on the wildfire scene and the rainmaking ritual on the good ending branch.
I was also responsible for implementing the visual novel in Ren'py. To save us some time, before we started writing I made a script similar to the one I used in The Nest to convert the screenplay into Ren'py code. I came up with a simplified screenplay format that allowed writers to add instructions for when the game should add certain images or background music, which the script automatically converted to code as well.
Download the game here!
My work on the screenplay is available here. Note that due to time constraints, we didn't use the default screenplay format.
