A word from the Devs

After two months of work, we’ve finally released the initial demo of Meteor Shower. Now, truth be told, we entered Otome Jam on impulse but in the end, I’m glad we did.

Meteor Shower to me was an exercise in project management. I went into this with an idea and a vision, and our team was more than happy to make it happen. I’ve had several attempts at writing visual novels in the past but they ended up in development hell because I was alone. Being alone comes with the freedom of creative expression with the absence of checks and balances to actually push through with the product.

In my previous project, Ignis, I was set back for this very reason. I had the passion, the drive, the ideas, the vision, but I didn’t have limits. I didn’t have a concrete direction, and I didn’t have a team. Couple that in with years of improvement in terms of my art and my writing, and you’d have a solo dev who keeps on reworking the assets and the script every few months instead of writing more.

A schedule was an alien concept to me in the past and I would always tend to bite off more than I can chew. This time, however, since I have a few people in the team that have different lives and schedules to consider, I’ve learned a lot about organizing to make sure that nobody burns out and we have our product in time. It was also a great deal of practice to gauge our expectations.

Going forward, I’ve already written a long outline for what’s to come in the next chapters of Meteor Shower. Hopefully, readers will join us in our journey into the development of this cute little high school narrative that we all patterned after the realistic experiences we’ve seen and had from our time in the past.

I’m looking forward to organizing the pipeline ahead for us to continue our work, as well as to release the song that I wrote for this visual novel. Thank you so much for visiting our page.

Whenever people ask me about the music that I make, I always default to this thinking that I’m trying to make music that is “cinematic”. The idea is basically to ensure that every piece of music that I release evokes, or at least is attributed to a scene, a moment, an experience in one’s head. It doesn’t have to be a part of a movie, or a game, or any story. I’m pretty happy releasing music on my own.

Of course, I’m not saying that I don’t want to join a game or a film project. I’ve done a few commissions for my friends that use my work in their tabletop campaigns, their school projects, etc. But I’d happily be a part of any undertaking that allows me to hone my skills in music production and gives me the experience that can build the vision I have for my music.

I don’t play visual novels too often, but I understand them well enough to be confident in being a part of God’s Radio. Skai and I have actually been making music for a few years now, but Meteor Shower is definitely the roadmap to finally releasing the music concepts we’ve been working on for so long.

One thing I took note of in making the music for Meteor Shower is that it’s actually pretty distinct when you compare it to other mediums like video games and film. There are definitely conventions in VNs that becomes apparent when you’ve been playing them for a long time. There is similarity in the way video games handle location-based music, but with the way how programming is involved in VNs, there are limitations in how you should approach a whole scene. For instance, all that fancy-shmancy dynamic/reactive music for scenes need extensive programming. If you think about it, VN scenes are predominantly text reading, and it is better that the music covers the totality of the emotion of a scene. Music changes are indicative of mood changes in a scene, and it may take your reader out with a shotgun if you change them a lot. Skai helped point all that out to me, as I am only a lowly gamer boy who is in love with RPGs and she is the visual novel expert.

Not that the experience and understanding I have with video games and general soundtracks were not of any help! I’m no John Williams or Toby Fox, but we did take our time deciding on leitmotifs. Initially, my mind was pretty set on characters having their own themes but, in the end, with a game like Meteor Shower, motifs were better left to evoking a mood the reader is familiar with.  

Ultimately, the role I believe I had in this project is to not only evoke a vibe for the reader, like what music should do, but to also tell more about the story that is already being read. The inclusion of the (yes, very artificial) guitars is not merely for the aesthetic. In a way, it represents a lot of what Lori is, was, and will be [see what Jinn wrote I guess], and how the instruments evolve as the VN progresses tells a lot about her relationship with her friends, and, most importantly, how it intertwines with Taylor. I’m not going to sit here and write about every exact detail, however. I’ll just say we (or at least, I have been forced to) listened to a lot of early Taylor Swift and Mayday Parade. I’ll let you figure out the rest.

I had always been interested in writing stories, particularly romantic ones but never pursued it seriously due to circumstances. But when Skai invited me to work on Snowfall, which was one of her vault stories ideas, I figured it was my last shot at my childhood pipedream of being a writer.  

I’m glad I was able to be a part of Otome Jam and in the creation of Meteor Shower. The studio had already been created a few months before this game jam was announced, and we were working on Snowfall - Meteor Shower’s preceding sequel. But for Otome Jam we had decided it would fit the jam better if we told the protagonist’s high school experiences leading up to the events in Snowfall. As Skai mentioned, entering the jam had been on impulse and we weren’t entirely sure we were even gonna make it until I had finished the initial draft. Which was a feat that I didn’t think I could manage given I was juggling it with my internship and thesis work at the time. 

Moving forward with development, the studio will be simultaneously working on both highschool and grownup Lori’s stories. With priority on finishing Meteor Shower of course. Particularly, I’ll be switching between writing Snowfall and Meteor Shower initial drafts. If Meteor Shower ends up getting delayed, I probably got held back writing the drafts for either one or both. I hope it won’t happen, but just in case - I apologize in advance. 

I hope that you’ll come to enjoy the upcoming stories and music and we, the dev team, have had making it. Thank you.