Phew, what a ride!

HELL is the first game dew and I have ever worked on. We’re devs now! I’ll speak to the writing side of things.

I initially wrote the script in the beginning of July, over the course of three days. The inspiration was this: My basic bitch best friend had become newly afflicted with a fixation on these ugly-ass critters called LABUBUs, and I thought I would get brownie points by scoring one for her. I didn’t know anything about Pop Mart though, so I contacted my friend in China who also didn’t know how to get one. We found some gacha websites and proceeded to blow forty dollars in the span of about ten minutes, succeeding in only pulling exactly forty articles of clothing for a nonexistent Labubu. It was my first real experience with gacha and I was so distraught in the face of my own helplessness that I converted my experience into vent art. My original intent was to write a short story, but it wasn’t clicking until I experimentally switched to second person. I was like, wait, could this be a twine script? I’d only played a handful of twine games in my life—predictably, this lack of fluency with the medium would prove problematic for us down the line.

I had been introduced to Itchio jams during Citrus Con (thank you Destini Islands!), and had already submitted to Monster Manor’s Hot Wet Queer Summer Jam. Unfortunately, with the censorship bullshit that rolled out shortly after (I took down my HWQS submission out of an abundance of caution, but you can find it on Smashwords), I sort of lost steam with a lot of projects, and became disillusioned with Itchio on the whole.

It wasn’t until I got that email from Red letting us know that the Yaoi Game Jam had been extended two weeks that I thought, you know what, let’s just do it. Labubus aren’t gonna stay relevant forever. (And by the way, by this point, I had come down with a case of basic bitchitis myself; I now own a handful of Labubus, and have outfits for them and everything. The allure of those Pop Mart drops is frightening.) So I roped in my sibling, dew (RIP his eyes for my having subjected them to the crudeness of this particular piece, haha) for the coding side of things.

The script didn’t even have “passage” (page) divisions, or spots to denote what should be interacted with. It was pretty much just a short story told in second person, with a few notes as to cool effects that may or may not be possible (I don’t know a lick of CSS myself). Once dew started learning Sugarcube, he let me know I needed to provide more specific directions in the script. He was about two chapters in when he asked me if I could draw a mindmap to explain all the different endings. And that’s when it dawned on us: Oh fuck, this script is a MESS.

Cue another day of dew ripping my script to shreds (/pos), telling me I needed to simplify, condense, and cut. After the script was overhauled, coding could continue. At this point, with just a handful of days left before the deadline, I wasn’t sure we would make it, but dew really pulled through. And even added that cool endings tracker, which I think really completes the game experience.

Funny note: dew was so burned out by the end that I ended up editing the HTML file in Notepad to get some last-minute adjustments in. And when I mentioned that to him, he was like fucking Christ just DOWNLOAD TWINE. Once I did, that certainly made things easier lmfao.

In retrospect, I need to buff up my knowledge of interactive fiction, play more twine games and VNs, etc. It’s so fucking important that the script be solid on my end before the coder spends all this time coding it. I’m not a very structured writer. With my short stories and novellas, I tend to rely on a lot of improvisation. But for interactive fiction, the structure is the foundation. Also, the scope was way too fucking big for our first game. I had fourteen endings planned (one for each Labubu from the Big Into Energy series and Exciting Macaron series.) The endings you’re playing are the ones that survived the cull! 

There was one ending planned where you reincarnate as a duck. There was another ending planned where you astral project, see into the future that tariffs are coming, and use that knowledge to make a fuckton of money reselling Labibaps, only to transform into a blood-drinking capitalist Eldritch horror that locks Sejik in a sex oubliette and uses him as a bloodbag. Haha.

Anyway, this game certainly won’t be the last one we ever do! Dew needs time to recover from the burnout this caused, as do I. We’ll very likely be back for the Yaoi Game Jam next year, and we’re excited to try something completely new!

Thank you to everyone who has played the game so far and for the kind words. We were feeling really hard on ourselves, so every encouraging comment/review gives us the zoomies. And thank you also to the betas who volunteered to playtest for us, you guys rock.

—Piamo