fairy chess. postmortem

Thanks so much for playing, and for everyone’s wildly thoughtful comments. It’s been so fun to see what everyone else has made, and we’ve really been so overjoyed both to be in such good company with the other jam projects and to have been so kindly received with ours. It really means the world!!

Some thoughts about the project from 63choux and ALTER, which will of course include minor spoilers.

63choux (art, writing assist)

Hi, it’s Bluzo (aka 63choux)! fairy chess was a really fun journey from an artistic perspective. Previously the only artistic collaborations I've done have been with Goblincat, where we have an initial meeting to align on things and hash some basics out together before then largely hammering out our own sections solo, then ultimately coming back and bringing it all together. fairy chess was my first time working with ALTER and with Greenie (well, sort of), and we wound up being much more rigorously collaborative every step of the way than what I'd done before. It was definitely a huge challenge but a really rewarding one, as looking back on it I can tell we all passionately showed up with our own specialties and interests. And I'm really proud of what we achieved!

Greenie and I were strongly aligned on wanting something non-traditional, insofar as it would be tailored to fairy chess's overall eccentricities. However, the issue I immediately ran into was scope—e.g. visual novels use sprites for a very predictable reason! My "solution" for this was what I've done every time I've hit this problem before: well let me just swing real hard and see what I can push myself to get done (unadvisable). This got a little complicated because life threw some not-minor hurdles my way, and the visual novel as a whole was on track to come together at the very last minute from the get-go. But it was thrilling…

To talk a little bit about the general look of the game—the mock scientific illustration/medical diagram for the start screen was the first actual part of the game I drew, and I spent a long time hammering out the look of it alongside the title treatment with Greenie. I wanted a sense of clinical observation and study inside a subjective/narrativized context, but it was also important to at least hint at the story's BDSM elements from the start, hence the duct tape. The alternating font was an idea from Greenie—I had a lot of fun sifting through fonts and figuring out the best way to implement it.

Honestly the most fun I had during the jam was assembling the various fonts—special shout out to Nishiki-teki, our chess symbol font that the chess pieces are modeled after. Introducing and then variously maintaining a sense of fractured multiplicity was really important, and it was really fun figuring out how to integrate that. One way is the font changes between the chess symbols (Nishiki-teki), standard font (Quivira), italics (Junicode, italics), and bold (Beholden, bold). The two in the title treatment are Beholden (italics) and Adelphe Trouble. 

Algie and Katurian were designed collaboratively between me and Greenie, with ALTER providing some inspo and general support. Panz was all Greenie’s beautiful work. The fairies are meant to be chimeras, but their decline in population has led to a loss of variability. This is why Algie just has her koala ears and butterfly wings, plus [spoiler for if we do more?]. Fairies were meant to look a little weird and alien, but we also wanted Algie to look cute and innocent in a bit of a cherubic way. Katurian on the other hand—we wanted her to look evil in a specific latex BDSM way, and watched Mugler's 1997 SS show together to get in the right headspace. Also shout out to my wonderful friend Elle, whose personal fashion sense definitely influenced Katurian's own fashion heavily.

Character art for Algie and Katurian. Algies in the center by Greenie, rest by 63choux.

As for the rest of the art—a lot of people have compared the vn to a movie, and I think that’s coming in part from the style of the “sprites” paired with the really great intertitles. We wanted non-traditional sprites that were more freewheeling in content, placement, and size, again to emphasize the fairy aspects, and I think it led to a dynamic perspective that felt cinematic, but to me felt very comic-y. ALTER also brought a lot in terms of creative presentation and really did so much fun work with the assets I'd passed along.

As for UI, this was a little chaotic and the most determined by the jam time limit. The idea of Katurian file cabinets for the submenu was picked so we could get away with reskinning the menu and not having to change anything, with the polaroid as a fun and easy addition to also add a bit to Katurian's character. The textbox was previously a microscope slide (RIP, you were so sexy and fun) but the tone slid away from the scientific and it needed to be changed to something still discreet and in the same position, that was decorative but still prioritized the panels. The chessboard was a trade off to help minimize new panels while keeping it visually interesting, and wound up being one of my favorite parts to make.

The last thing I will talk about is the ending! This was a wild ride of a jam project where the overall shape was changing up until the end. Originally Greenie had wanted to make music for the vn (we ran out of time), so we spent a lot of our downtime talking about what we thought it’d sound like—The Rite of Spring fell into place at this point by way of joint appreciation of the Drakengaard soundtrack and wanting fairy chess to sound similar. We ran out of time to make a custom soundtrack so ALTER saved our lives after Greenie suggested a song for the main menu (Le Vertigo) and I suggested the track for the ending (the opening for The Rite of Spring—Adoration of the Earth indeed!). But the ending… we were scrambling to find something to tie it up with the little time we had left when ALTER had the beautiful idea of another collage, and Greenie realized she could use old art she’d done (some of Katurian, some from elsewhere) for it as well. It honestly came together so feverishly and is my favorite part of the vn, both for the final product and my memories of making it!

The final collage without the text that loads in. All great art by Greenie.

ALTER (programming, bgs, design assist, sound design)

Hi, it’s ALTER. I’m starting off writing this by saying I don’t have much to cover that Bluzo hasn’t so that I can trick myself into starting to write this. Let’s see how true it is. 

I got involved in Fairy Chess from a “does anyone want to program for this” Bluzo bluesky post. After balancing programming with other tasks for the previous ebicon releases I thought I could really use a break from trying to do everything and that I was pretty well equipped to translate needs into Ren’py (true) and also “it’s Greenie's first VN and shaping up to be Bluzo's longest one so it’ll mostly come down to positioning text boxes and stuff right” (false! fully animated chessboard). 

I had never worked directly with Bluzo or Greenie before but I didn’t feel any trepidation at all. I’m a big fan of Bluzo’s prior work so I was hooked in pretty easily, and immediately dug through a big backlog of Greenie’s and loved it as well. 

I think liking their work is only the first and easiest qualifier for a team, though. If I had to summarize the rest they are trust (with a lot of subcategories) and respect (by itself). Trust has to encompass a lot of things:

• Trust that both explicit and tacit contracts will be fulfilled, like deadlines 
• Trust that you’re equally invested in the result 
• Trust that everyone is being honest when they say they like or dislike something 

And respect encompasses mostly not being a dick whenever the trust shows signs of being fragile. 

Anyway, I had a great time working with them so you can assume we did well on the conditions above. Would Fairy Chess again. 

A bit more on my contributions if you’re curious.

Code: Historically I’ve regretted losing all the different code snippets I mined from forums so I tracked them and published them on the itch page this time. The Renpy community is really beautiful, I’ve never seen someone get possessive over something they figured out instead of being excited to share it! I guess it helps that you can decompile it so easily. All good things. If I could pay someone for a year of work to touch up the Ren’py documentation I would. 

Couple of interesting quirks this time around…

• Partially “voiced” lines with dialogue sounds: can someone tell me if there are other Ren’py games that do this? I went through some truly stupid attempts at making this happen by trying to change what was going on in the callback, trying to add pauses, trying to detect where quotes started and stopped to turn off a channel etc before I (spoilers) just turned off the voice channel while the character wasn’t talking in the script itself. I would love to hear if anyone solved it in a better way. 
• Animated chessboard: I mean, there aren’t even that many squares. How hard can it be? I ended up hand-placing the positions and it wasn’t that bad. I would have liked to put the pieces on their own layer…I’m wondering if there’s a way that you can then apply a transformation to everything on that layer at the same time? I want to know. Call me if you know. I could probably look this up myself,  I'm just looking for an excuse to chat.

Backgrounds: I’ve loved photo backgrounds since I started reading visual novels. I love multimedia art, I love collages, and I’m just a guy that likes having pictures of stuff. All the Fairy Chess photo backgrounds are homemade. 

Design: I mean if you put something in front of me I’m going to say something about it…I had full confidence in my collaborators so it was mostly me saying “I like this. I like that too.” Can I take responsibility for anything specific…the YOU WIN screen! We went back and forth on this one a few times. The cool thing about having the code is that you can just make screens until people like it. 

Sound: While Greenie and Bluzo were crunching with other stuff I pinch hit on this thinking that something is better than nothing. In the end people seemed to like it! I liked it too, honestly! You really can’t go wrong with using stuff that’s already good. Or can you? Idk. Check the itch page for the full list of citations here as well. I got really into harpsichord music due to listening to it for about XX or XXX hours. I've been thinking about buying a CD player since it looks like that's where the secondhand market for niche recordings is…

THANKS FOR READING & PLAYING!