A Very Important Date is an otome visual novel game inspired by Lewis Caroll’s Alice stories. I was brought onto the Naive Sprites team to develop a custom visual novel system in Unity, implement various features, and help them release the game on PC, Linux, MacOS, Android, and iOS.

I initially found Naive Sprites on Tumblr back in 2016. At the time, I was looking to get more direct game development experience and went looking for projects that caught my eye. Being a visual novel fan myself, I asked them if they were looking for any programming help. They took me in and it’s been a really great experience working with them.

This was the first project where I’ve had to collaborate directly with artists and writers for a game, and I’ve learned a ton from it. We’re able to bounce ideas and problem solutions off of each other.

They would design the user interface elements and a mock-up and I would import them into Unity and make it all functional. A process which seemed easy until we introduced multiple resolutions into the equations. I had to learn about Canvas scaling, Aspect Ratio Fitters, and proper anchoring in order to provide a good experience on all our supported screen sizes.

Probably the most important work I did for this went into the visual novel system. This was not only a way for the game to handle updating the visual novel itself as the player progressed, but also allowed the writers to have an interactive way to write the story in the Unity editor. It kind of looked clunky, but it made it so that writers could just work on the scenes pretty easily without having to worry about programming. I initially wanted to implement a whole system similar to Ren’Py, a very popular, easy to script, visual novel engine, but it turned out that would be a whole huge project in itself.

Creating a saving and loading system was also very challenging at first. Making a save file and loading it in Unity isn’t that challenging by itself, but this game being a visual novel makes it tricky. I had to make the system save the game at a specific line of dialog and load from that same exact line. It had to also remember which graphics were currently on screen and where, which music or sounds were currently playing, all the past text logs, whether or not we’re currently on a choice, the character story we’re on, and if we’re in a specific choice dialog branch. All of which added up to a headache of problems, but eventually they were all worked out.

I also had to integrate certain special settings into the game. Resolutions and volumes are one thing, but we also had settings for player names and whether or not the player’s eyes could be seen in the CGs of the game.

The player names settings seemed straight forward, the solution I used was to just tell the writers to leave the character default name (Alison) the same everywhere and then I could just script the game to replace the default name with the set player name. Thankfully this meant I didn’t have to do a lot of changing for the saving system, which was what I was the most worries about.