Butterfly Æffect: Postmortem

Note from ALTERLNX, Director 

Butterfly Æffect is a game heavily informed by its setting and time period, a semi-rural college at the beginning of the web 2.0 era. I vividly remember some of my first exposures to “adult” media (not just explicit, but also violent, political, or emotionally intense) being through internet art, early social media, and English translations of works from Japan. Pre-North American anime “bubble”, meeting other fans in person was more rare and events like conventions were a much smaller affair—there were still large expos, but many more cons were held at smaller venues, such as colleges, than they are today. The passion, kinship, and alienation from larger culture pre-widespread social media led to a distinct culture which we reference heavily.

Back to media, though. Within visual novels, there was often an element of choice and “missed opportunity”—usually the missed opportunity of losing your potential relationships with beautiful women by “choosing one”, but often also by the implied or explicit threat that the girl was destined for a sad or lonely fate that could have been avoided with the power of your love. 

I pitched Butterfly Æffect to a group of friends as an exploration of these themes, of the culture of the era, and of what happens when you disturb the powder keg of a mutually obsessive relationship in delicate equilibrium. 

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably played our game (and if not, please consider it!). I hope you can see all of the passion that we put into realizing this concept. I am immensely proud of our team and our work. 

The following is authored and approved by the team, with individuals cited where relevant.

About the Characters 

Gabrielle 

Gabrielle was originally pitched as the cosplayer monarch of a college anime club. Her fashion inspiration was “rebuilding what you can find in a scanned Japanese fashion magazine at the local American mall.” 

She has plenty of orbiters, but has a hard time getting them to actually show up when the going gets tough, which is why she reluctantly keeps Damien on hand as labor. 

She’s terrified of change, even when it’s something that she wants badly. 

Raine

Raine was originally pitched as a reserved, shy fujoshi character living in her fantasies. She was initially planned to be roommates with Gabrielle, later becoming “ex-roommates.” When we were co-planning Raine and Gabrielle, we first thought “what if Raine’s anxiety is having her only friend taken away?” and quickly amended it. It would be a classic misunderstanding that a woman like Raine would not have an extremely active social life…online. I wish we could have included a bit more about how a notorious dark yaoi artist took livejournal by storm (being named BLOODRAIN or something of that nature). Like Gabrielle, she’s in the questionably pleasant position of being the queen of her social group. At one point, she was supposed to have a secret album of Gabrielle’s photos, which was replaced by her sculpture. 

She refuses to move back in with Gabrielle because she can’t stand the mess. She’s just as bad in her working areas, but spotless outside of those. Shes a bit afraid that if her reaction to being hugged changes, Gabrielle will stop finding it fun. 

Vi 

Vi was originally pitched as a cool, sadistic grad student, your TA for an introductory biology lab. Much of her initial concept was influenced by personal experiences with academic labs and bench science. Most people either come to terms with some amount of animal experiments depending on their field, or get out of the fire and pursue something a little less hands-on. Vi does neither.

Vi treats her relationship and appetites as an outlet for a very buttoned-up life she feels she has no control over. Her seemingly around-the-clock work schedule carries this in the final script; we did come up with a pretty clear portrait of her family life, but couldn't ever find a place for it where its appearance didn't feel abrupt. She has a lot of stress and anxiety about what she considers the 'immutable' expectations of her superiors (and mother, especially), and finds some joy in passing that stress onto others. Whether she loves or hates someone, she'll make time for them if they give her an outlet for her frustrations.

Ollie

Ollie was originally pitched as Vi’s devoted right hand, a younger childhood friend that studied tirelessly until she could follow Vi to her school… and something of a dog-girl. She’s the character who transformed the most from her initial pitch to her final shape in the script. Though she was always a 'jokey' character, the specific outdoorsy tomboy flavor didn't come until later.

Beneath the funny aphorisms, lively expressions, and credulous /x/ readership, Ollie is a pretty straightforward and serious character. Her relationship with Vi is grounded in a desire for penance and belonging; Vi’s tough love has been her north star through the ups and downs of a tumultuous life.

Marshall 

Marshall was originally just a ‘sidekick’ roommate character that gives questionable advice, but took on a voice of his own in the tradition of characters like Sunohara Youhei from CLANNAD and Koizumi Itsuki from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. He’s an interesting foil to Damien in that he’s also a true pushover, but doesn’t feel any resentment over it or expect any favors in return. He’s legitimately well-liked because of this.

Women don’t have any delusions about him, so he’s not popular romantically, but they do pass him around (so to speak). He has good social instincts, he just behaves poorly with Damien because he finds it funny. 

Damien 

We quickly realized that Damien would have to be a named character to be portrayed with enough agency to be annoying or sympathetic. He didn’t even do that much wrong, just caught everyone at a very difficult time in their lives.

His name was simply Darwin for a while, but in the process of trying to decide between two potential names for his roommate, the idea of those two names hanging out became appealing. One of those names was Damien, and so in the end our protagonist became Damien Darwin. The other name, Dean, did not survive. Marshall just swooped in.

ALTER: I wanted him to be called something unique that people could comment on, but nobody else wanted to name him Tiger. I got to have him nicknamed Tiger, as a treat.

About Development 

Pitch 

Below is an excerpt from the pitch doc. Most of this stayed pretty constant, just with a lot of extra color! Much love to Nth Circle Brian for having shown many of us on the team how a compelling pitch plants creative seeds in the participants 💭

ALTER: I showed up with character concepts and a rough gameplay outline as well. After years of dreaming about it I finally got to assist in the creation of my white whale of a character: “a tsundere that actually doesn’t like you.”

The Title 

We decided on this collaboratively. Butterfly Effect: you know the phrase, although the effects are much more immediate and intimate. Butterfly Affect: like the action of flitting back and forth from flower to flower, never caring for much of anything. Also, Æ forms a nice little ‘4’ at the junction of the two letters. Isn’t that neat?

The subtitle: 

Papillons á Quatre Mains

marinakazam did a great write up on our itch page:

'Quatre mains' is a duet where both players share a single piano.  By inserting yourself into a performance that's already begun, you'll just ruin the music and annoy the pianists.

The flavor text: 

Do you laugh or cry at Romeo and Juliet?

before I knew it, your sweet words became poison

but I’m not afraid.

With a kiss, even a lily can kill a tiger.

ALTER: this one was me. I’m obsessed with a little poem/flavor/decorative text on a game box cover. If you want a very intentional interpretation: lilies are highly toxic to cats, even their pollen. Lily can be read as yuri. Romeo and Juliet is the classic misunderstanding romcom that escalates quickly, of course. 

Gameplay 

We started out with a simple mechanic: “pursue one half of the pair to raise the hate of the other half, ending in your demise by the other half.” Most of this remained fairly consistent. It was a fun twist that the scoring process ended up being more opaque to the first-time player than expected. By the time you reach the point where you decide between the two pairs of girls, the points have already been finalized and your fate is sealed. There’s only one exception to the scoring system—if you reject Raine, she loses the energy to deal with you before Gabrielle does. 

Writing

After splitting up an outline by chapter, we all wrote collaboratively into a massive shared document. At 50k words, we were probably pushing the feasibility of this approach, but we powered through nonetheless. 

Most of the pair-centric scenes were written by teams of 2 (4 writers total), and then each person wrote a different ending with full creative control. The prompt at a very high level for these endings was “a girl’s best friend gets so mad at your interactions with your target that she kills you” but they all took very different directions!

Ophelia: I don’t think Gabrielle is a good person. I don’t think she’s a fundamentally bad person, either. She’s in love with her best friend but doesn’t have the insight to realize it, and that leads to her being jealous and possessive without really knowing why. She hates when men objectify her, but rather than calling them out and taking a stand against it she takes the opportunity to use those men for whatever she can get— free labor for the club, presents, alcohol. I think it’s more interesting when characters don’t make the most moral or kind choice available. People are complex, and college is a time when most people do stupid things. 

Incidentally, she was named after Gabrielle from Xena Warrior Princess. We threw around a lot of concepts for names, and landed on the through line that each girl feels very strongly about what they want to be called and who’s allowed to call them that. Gabrielle would hate to be called Gabby, and Vi would hate to be called by her full name, and Damien’s mild exasperation at not being able to figure out the “rules” for what names to call girls is just one more sign he doesn’t really see them as individuals.

Saturn: I split the Bio Lab storyline with Marinakazam – I championed Vi, and Marinakazam championed Ollie. The Bio Lab pair’s constitutional points were 1) they are a dom-sub manzai duo, and 2) they need to individually foil some part of Damien's character. Ollie naturally ended up sharing "dog behaviors" with him, and Vi got "predatory self-interest" -- a quality suited to her sadistic kuudere persona.

The trouble with taciturn and withdrawn characters like Vi is finding a way to make them act true to themselves while still conveying a necessary amount of character depth. Before the writing team formally took charge of their ‘champion’ characters, ALTER had written a few character psychology blurbs and interesting bio lab snippets for her. They didn't all make it in to the final script, but a lot of them are sprinkled into Vi's torture sequence.

Her earliest name was ‘An’, short for ‘Anastasia’; I felt weird about calling her Anastasia when her torture was concerned with anesthesia, though. ‘Vi’ / ‘Vivian’ has a similar unintended joke linkage to vivisection, but it’s a bit less direct, so it’s workable! I also, very stupidly, went “Vi is kinda Vampirey…” and that was all I really needed for it to stick. (I was also worried “An” would be An annoying name to CTRL+F replace if we needed to do any scripting changes, for reasons evidenced in this sentence.)

For Ollie, I mostly just wrote low stakes Part 1 stuff for her, and not any of the juicy later scenes. Her speaking voice comes very naturally to me; she’s the most fun character to write saying things. Unlike Vi, she also acts pretty uncomplicatedly friendly to Damien in a lot of Part 1. Mostly, it’s to contrast her with Vi, who is the least talkative of the four – but also I think Ollie is the kind of person who could make friends with anyone, as long as they didn’t try to get between her and her beloved. Whoops!!

I did also try to write both Vi and Ollie as characters who are culturally five or ten years out from knowing they’re Not Cisgender. I don’t think I conveyed this as well as I would have liked to, but it comes with the territory of having to rely on Damien’s perspective for like 90% of the story; one of his touchstones was “only intuits things correctly when it gets him in trouble”.

One last thing, on that note: whenever I was writing Damien in a scene, I imagined him talking like Tim Rogers in his review of Tokimeki Memorial. Damien would get really flustered about a girl calling him ‘Bubbus’, I think.

ALTER: Along with Raine’s ending, I split a significant portion of the Anime Club storyline writing with Ophelia. If I couldn’t get Marshall in a maid uniform sprite I would have forced everyone to read it anyway with their imaginations, I was so hellbent on it. 

Some more about Raine. We loosely planned out the type of ending scenes we would write before really buckling down into the meat of the story. As soon as I realized a few things about her, it became easy to reconcile her daily life with her ending. 

Part of Raine’s frustration is that she feels like she “has it pretty good.” She has an older brother who took on most of the family responsibilities—“all” she has to do is live the life that her family knows is best, and they’ll take care of her if she stumbles. It’s embarrassing for her to admit that she’s struggling or that she wants something else. She doesn’t really even realize that she’s boiling over until it’s too late to go back. 

She has trouble living in the moment, and envies that about Gabrielle. Despite Damien’s inner monologue, other than that, she’s really not jealous of her in the slightest. She does have feelings for Gabrielle, but they’re tightly locked within her heart. When they start to bother her too much, she pictures Gabrielle’s messy apartment. 

When we considered writing epilogues, I was split between “having that out of her system, Raine resigns herself to a return to the mundane and a desk job,” and “Raine decides to say fuck it to stability and do what she really wants to do, whatever the consequences,” so I chose neither. I think it would be interesting to explore what these characters do in the aftermath of their crimes, but to me that would also be opening pandora’s box. It’s something I’m not ready to face, the same way a high school drama ends at graduation. 

Sound

C.DLX: Everything was accomplished through Reaper and various combinations of Cymatics Origin, ReaEQ, FuzzPlus3, codec, Grace, Vital, and a limiter. I also made frequent use of em’s plugins and sound packs - you can hear CT-WS1’s stupid cute banjo soundfont in the lab theme, meatzone in most of the torture themes, and nuPLURR’s stabs pretty much everywhere. The M1 Korg “piano 16” sound is also a superstar classic and it basically exploded all over the OST.

It feels right to highlight arrangement as my primary musical role because much of the process could be boiled down to arrangement as a form of production. (The title theme is a cloyingly lovesick arrangement of Robert Schumann - Papillons Op. 2; by our director’s suggestion.) My workflow frequently involved crate digging and distorting things beyond recognition to find new meaning in collaging sound. On that note, reading about Hideki Naganuma producing the Sonic Rush OST to sound just as good on the tinny NDS speakers as it does on headphones changed the way I approach EQ forever. I tested with a few different setups: bad speakers, good speakers, and hyper-balanced over-ear monitors. They settled on a compromise in the end.

Doing foley was so much fun, and tickling the recordings to change their texture taught me a lot about how sound itself works. Other members of the team also pitched in when I was having trouble sourcing sounds, like Ophelia recording her sewing machine, Maxie standing outside in the rain, and Saturn handing me a great “daytime woods” sample. One of our biggest challenges was actually the fact that Ren’py doesn’t let you make sounds louder, and foley can sound like something completely different if it’s too loud, so I was sort of trust-falling into the final overall EQ. Unsure if it was a happy accident or what, but after fulfilling the instructions “shave-and-a-haircut knocks” and “two even knocks” for Ollie and Vi’s visits respectively, I realized Vi’s knock very cutely completes Ollie’s with her own “two bits”.

Even when I had a clear idea for a piece, it had the tendency to develop a mind of its own. Frequently encountering a disconnect between intent and result in this project was strangely apropos. The anime club theme was the result of my attempt to re-create the eponymous Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni opening by Eiko Shimamiya, Tomoyuki Nakazawa, and Kazuya Takase. Raine’s theme started as an experiment in copying the percussion from Inner Universe by Origa and Yoko Kanno. The delay plugin I was using (Deelay) did something weird to the drums, and that combined with my obsession with triplets caused her theme to have mixed meter and polyrhythmic elements, accidentally mirroring Damien’s flattened interpretation of her complex feelings as “tsundere”. Marshall’s theme was almost instantly born in a single night when I was delirious from my fluvid shot, proving himself to be a supernatural force immune to god, nature, and the very fabric of reality itself. The writing and direction made him too funny and the artists made him too actually cute and pretty… Damn it all.

Early on in concepting we were toying with the idea that each girl would have signature weapons. I started to imagine Vi as a scalpel gijinka; and Gabrielle, in turn, as a pin/needle elemental. The way ALTER used the pinprick sound effect so often for Gabrielle’s emotions was unexpected and so perfect. One of the funnest things about game jamming is that sort of transformative sequence of creation.

Maybe this is a headcanon based on earlier brainstorming, but in my mind Damien could be a California transplant who wound up in New England because that’s where his petty grass-is-always-greener, not-like-the-other-girls attitude brought him. He assumes that if he can just get away from home and carry his entitled perspective into unfamiliar territory, everyone will suddenly give him everything he wants. When assembling the general-purpose school theme, which wound up also unofficially functioning as Damien’s theme, these were the associations I had in mind.

Programming 

ALTER: Nothing groundbreaking happened here, but I have a newfound appreciation for Ren’py’s multiplatform build tools. It’s really incredible how many features the software offers despite how lightweight it is. Can’t believe it’s free! Long live open source! Thank you everyone who works on it!

I ended up going through the script in its entirety about four times (many, many, many more in bits and pieces)—once for text timing, once for image timing, once for sound, and once for final proofreading and bugfixes. Many lessons learned in the process. 

UI Design

marinakazam: I developed a casual interest in UI Design more than two years ago at this point, and I'm still really critical of my own work in that area. I think I'm making progress, though, and I genuinely hope that I'll look back on BÆ (as the second VN I ever worked on and the first project where I took the lead on UI and created all the assets myself) and go 'eugh well it was the best I could do at the time but I can see how much better I've gotten.' 

Let me be clear, though, this UI is full of details that I'm pretty pleased with. My personal approach to graphic design has always been focused on fun shapes and little motifs. I use vectors like a stretchy piece of play dough that I can pinch and pull and spin around until it's sufficiently cute ♡. 

It's a superfluous asset, but I wanted those little day/night calendar indicators soooo bad. I wanted the UI in part one to feel charming and memorable so that when we took it away in part 2, being dropped in front of the semi-transparent black box and NVL text would feel like getting pushed into a tiny windowless room.

I'm really grateful to have a space where I was allowed to practice a new skill, especially playing with visual design in a meta sense that I hope helped convey the tone of the game better than the default ren'py UI assets could have. (Though they were an extremely helpful template to work from. Thanks, ren'py!)

The following are individual comments from the developers. 

Ophelia: While writing for the game, by sheer coincidence Hurricane Gabrielle formed in the Atlantic. She fell apart fairly quickly, and a meteorologist I follow described her “naked, exposed swirl” “stripped of her thunderstorms”, just proving that men will sexualize just about anything. It helped inspire a certain tone for my writing. 

I couldn’t fit it in the script, but I want everyone to know that Gabrielle has a pink Motorola Razr with a pound of anime phone charms attached. I remember being nineteen and really excited that my new flip phone had a place to attach phone charms, just like I saw in magazine street snaps of girls in Tokyo. 

Anyway, while I’ve done art and character design work before for games like Model Employee and Kodokuhime, this was my first time taking such a big role in the writing process, and I really enjoyed it! We had a great team, and I can’t wait to work with them again.

Saturn: This is my first publicly published fiction writing experience! (Not counting a lot of years of doing TTRPG podcasts, anyway.) Getting to work with my extremely talented friends was a dream come true.

My secret: for all the things that happen in Vi’s route, the grandest moment of self-indulgent perversion was being able to namedrop Legend of the Galactic Heroes in the script diegetically as one of her favorite anime, then follow it with her taking her dogs to a screening of Mind Game. When I was settling on her character voice, I made a point that she never apologizes in casual conversation, nor does she ever qualify her opinions as opinions -- but I broke that second rule when she tells you about the anime she likes. I realized this early enough that I could have fixed it, but I liked the effect of her seeming kind of defensive about talking about herself, so I left it in. 

Core as “C.DLX”: To say the least, I’m immensely grateful and honored to have had the opportunity to work alongside such profoundly talented visionaries in my first experience with a game jam! I don’t make a lot of music so initially I felt a little insecure about being able to deliver on quality and quantity, but the whole team was so supportive and encouraging that I was able to do things I never thought possible. Even when I already knew what was going to happen, the final result blew me away and often had me laughing my ass off or scared shitless. It’s one of my favorite things when guys are cute and shitty and die a lot, I <3 this game so fucking much. All of these characters will live in my head forever but Marshall is the most convincing actual living tulpa I’ve ever met. Thank you so much for playing!

ALTER: Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to soapbox. In the early stages of development I stumbled upon Ju Wang’s ‘Anime Gaze’. It’s an incredible piece of work that channels so much of the affection and frustration that powered me while working on this game. The artists statements phrase it better than I ever could:

 https://actipedia.org/project/anime-gaze  

There are a few times while “advertising” (posting madly about) this project where I really wanted to yell from the rooftops something like: this game is about the relationships between the “love interests”. It’s about loving someone, or your vision of someone, so much you make bad decisions. But (1) it’s kind of a surprise, and (2) our team added so much color to the characters including Damien that I deleted all the posts I drafted trying to express it. Because this game is about a lot of things! Nostalgia and bitterness towards an era. The feelings of people “left behind” when their friends move on without them. The feelings that arise when you can’t “save” or “fix” anyone. What happens when being the target of the erotic gaze and tragic circumstances falls on the reader instead of the “target,” making them the article of consumption instead. And the fantasy(or would it have worked? who’s to say…) that everyone sitting around and being honest and vulnerable would be the only path to a good end. 

This was my first time managing a creative project. Thanks to everyone for being such an amazing team and making my dream come true. Also, I really love visual novels. 

marinakazam: I've been writing in different forms for a long.... long.... long time now. It used to embarrass me a lot, even though I felt like my work was pretty good. I'd tell my friends they were allowed to read my Persona 3 Portable and FFXIV fanfiction as long as they never ever ever told me that they did. 

Lemme tell you something.... I turned 32 during this game jam and wrote a petplay torture/murder sequence knowing full well that my friends and strangers would read it and have things to say about it. It feels nice to realize you've outgrown a decade-old insecurity!

Maxie (misc thoughts?): Oh, where to begin! The game jam experience is something I’ve come to look forward to around this time every year. It’s such a joy to work with some of my favorite people and help make their vision into something tangible. I have so much admiration for Alter (who scripted the heartfelt dating storylines in Marchen Line) as a writer, and after seeing their pitch I knew that this was going to be an extremely fun and interesting project.

Butterfly Æffect is a period piece in some ways, drawing heavily on an era that was incredibly formative for me that I now hold a lot of nostalgia for. My hope is that my fondness for the early-mid 2000’s comes through in all my contributions to the project, from the softened, not-quite-cel-shading style typical of anime-flavored VNs and illustrations from this period, to the slightly questionable fashion choices that certain characters make (very much informed by my own journey with dress and identity during this time). It can be a tricky thing to balance sometimes; trying to maintain authenticity to a certain era while still putting some creative spins on things so that they feel palatable and cohesive to the work you’re trying to make in the present day. This always leads to a lot of dialogue in the conceptual stages about where we want to land on the scale of “purely vibes-based” vs. “100% historical accuracy.” I think Butterfly Æffect ultimately leans a little toward the historical end of the scale, with the costumes feeling very grounded in reality, with enough anime flair in other aspects of the designs to ensure that they still feel like characters in a visual novel. 

Much in the way that the writers tell their stories through the text, I tried to use color to tell a bit of a story as well. As much affection as each pair of girls holds for each other, I think a lot of the struggles within their dynamics come from the fact that they are fundamentally very different types of people. I wanted to highlight this by giving each heroine a distinct palette that both informed their own character and was also, in some ways, a direct contrast to their partner: Ollie is warm and earthy to Vi’s cool and rich, Gabrielle is bright and saturated to Raine’s subdued, muted hues. Foil did an excellent job then unifying the palette so the characters would read harmoniously on screen in tandem with the backgrounds. 

As a fun little tidbit, the bright blue heart charm that Ollie wears (at odds with the rest of her outfit) is a bit of a vestigial artifact from my initial pass of proposed colors. My original vision for Vi leaned much more into an icy blue palette to reflect her outwardly cold demeanor, and Ollie’s necklace—decided in behind-the-scenes discussions to be fitted with a childish but sentimental “Best Friends” charm in a way that resembles a dog collar—was meant to serve as a visual tie between them, symbolic of their “master and pet” dynamic. After a lot of back and forth, Vi’s image color ended up being red, but Ollie’s sprite was the first to be completed—and I didn’t think to change it after the fact. Whoops!

Nick M: I came onto the project hoping to challenge myself with something new and Backgrounds presented itself as a perfect space to try new things. I was tasked with creating the dithering effect for the backgrounds as well as sourcing photographs from locations around my City.  It was nice to play in a space that I don't play in very often!   Ive collaborated with some members of the Team behind Butterfly Æffect in the past but everyone involved was vital to the experimentation process, showing me sites and tricks to achieve the desired Æffect  ;)

The challenge at hand for the Butterfly Æffect backgrounds was how do you create a feeling of unity from a series of photos, some taken and some sourced, from across the city?  Our solution was to feed all our photo backgrounds through a dithering filter I made, adding a few frames of very minor animation, and they were ready!  I'm really proud of this solution as we were able to produce over 50 backgrounds for the game.