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I’ve always loved to write stories from being a child, but despite being a dedicated gamer, making a game was never something I’d ever thought about. I think being a musician was most of the reason I even made a game in the first place. Did your music expertise help you a lot in creating the soundtrack and shaping the story of the game? You’ve been a musician for quite a while so it’s no surprise that music plays a big part in the story of Venus: Improbable Dream. It can be pretty disheartening, but I keep hoping that the right people will find Venus: Improbable Dream if I keep plugging away.Ĥ.
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The industry is saturated with so many content creators trying to get you to buy their thing, so it’s like trying to yell over the noise of an entire stadium full of screaming people – it’s very difficult to make yourself heard. It’s incredibly hard to stand out on Steam, and as an indie dev in general! I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve made much progress with it at all. How hard it is for an indie dev to stand out on Steam? Valve has fairly recently eased up the restrictions on accepting games to their store (and sometimes they were pretty strict on vsual novels). I kinda just went with what I felt was right.ģ. I have to say though, I didn’t really have other VNs in mind when I was creating my own. It was the first visual novel I ever played back in 2013, and thanks to how well it dealt with those themes, I really identified with it. As you say, Katawa Shoujo was massive for me. I love content that shows mental health/disability in a realistic way and highlights important issues that often get ignored, like support for boys/men with mental health struggles especially – that’s the whole reason I made Kakeru a male protagonist. That topic ended up being much more prominent than I’d originally planned, but I’m happy about it. However, the more I started to flesh out the story and explore who the characters were and what their feelings and motivations were for things, I realized that I wanted to incorporate mental health struggles.
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The game’s story was mainly born from wanting to portray two people coming together to achieve something great through the power of music, as music is the biggest thing in my life. What was the main inspiration behind the story of Venus: Improbable Dream? I noticed that the main character has a body disfigurement and another character later in the story is shown as disabled so obviously, that made me remember Katawa Shoujo. Other than that, I wrote the story, coded the game, wrote and recorded the soundtrack, and edited/produced everything.Ģ. I hired an artist to create the character sprites and CGs, because that’s the only area I’m not capable of, and a friend lent a hand with some of the GUI customizations. Is Shirli also the mastermind behind the soundtrack, the art, and not just the story? Today we are chatting with Shirli Ainsworth, the person behind Borealis and the sole creator of Venus: Improbable Dream, a visual novel that doesn’t shy away from being honest, as well as engaging.įirst of all, am I correct in labeling you as the sole creator of the game? Just a quick glance at the Steam store page tells me that it probably took a lot of effort and work hours to piece all that together. That is why only a small selection of games that have dealt with such topics have been brutally honest and unforgiving in the depiction of depression and anxiety. If you depict it only as a selling point of your game, you might make even more people mad. If you do it wrong, you’ll just get some people mad. With all that said, the topic of depression and anxiety is something that you’ll rarely see in this medium. The ending of Mass Effect 3 taught us that we should never have high expectations from life, especially when it comes to decent video game endings. Macfield and the Island of Memories, can teach you a lot about gender identity and being comfortable with who you are. Spec Ops: The Line showed us that war isn’t all that magnificent as Hollywood tends to portray it Another game with an incredibly long name, The Missing: J.J. As much as they can be a form of escapism from life, video games can also be a good medium to tackle some more serious topics.