I am delighted to announced that I am the brains behind A Requiem For Richland Mall. This will not come as a surprise to anyone that has played the game, as the game is so unapologetically me. I will go into detail about this, but I don't want to get too ahead of myself.

First of all, I am talking about being the brains, but it is pretty obvious that I did not create these characters, draw these sprites, and I have never been to Forest Acres, SC, so there's no way I could taken the pictures for the backgrounds. However, it will make more sense to credit  as I explain how the game came to be. So I'll be doing that instead.

Rationale

The theme for the LITHOBREAKERS 02 jam was internally chosen (at random) on the 22nd of December, a week and a half before the jam started. You can see my subtoots reacting to it here. I had a couple of ideas immediately, one of them to make a group chat game. However, I rapidly discarded the idea as I have actually made a game like that already. It is always my intention to use the LBK jams to innovate and do something I've never tried before. 

During the first LITHOBREAKERS jam I was absolutely obsessed with making it impossible to figure it out which game was mine. I Seriously CANNOT Stop Thinking About the Death of Gilles Deleuze was an interactive fiction puzzle unlike anything I had done before. And I also made a shitpost game in like 1 hour on the last day of the jam to throw people off and make them think that was my game. That's how the aptly named throw them off! was born. It worked.

This time around I decided I wasn't too bothered about that. I really wanted to make a game with people, as last time around it felt very exciting to keep the secret for so long. However, it was overall a very lonely experience and I was ultimately very jealous of the people that worked in teams. They got to talk about their game for the whole month, while I had to sit on my secret and couldn't talk to anyone about it. 

So I reached out to a couple of friends, hoping to make a Narrat game. One of them said they were probably gonna be busy.

The other one had years ago told me they wanted to make a game about Japanese idols with me. So I reached out and proposed making a game about 3 idols with an unhinged dynamic between them. They asked me to write down the game concept and what I'd require of them, with deadlines and said they'd get back to me. So I did. 

However, I started planning for the possibility that they wouldn't be available. And that's where my mind flew to School Idol Festival All Stars. This was a spin-off game to the very popular Love Live! School Idol Festival. The game shut down its servers in 2023, so effectively the game was dead. If my friend wasn't going to be able to make some sprites I could surely investigate if I could just lift some assets for my game, right? I went into a rabbit hole and eventually found sprites, backgrounds, fonts, etc. the holy grail. So while I was waiting for my friends to get back to me I just ran with it. 

The game contained 30 characters, the girls from μ's, Aqours and Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. The Niji girls are my favourite by far. But which three should I use? I certainly couldn't use Rina, as that's the character my "devsona" is based on LOL

Ultimately I settled for Shioriko, Lanzhu and Mia, which are conveniently in a sub-unit of their own, and already have a well explored dynamic between the three of them. I did make the decision at that point that I didn't want to make them be explicitly bitchy to each other. Yes, they have wildly opposing personalities, but they are good friends, and care for each other deeply.

The sprites were perfect for using in Ren'Py, and with some very light tweaking I could make the game look similar to SIFAS. So I completely abandoned the idea of Narrat and settled for Ren'Py.

Next, I needed a setting, and a story I wanted to tell.

The Setting

It was the end of December, it was dark and cold outside so we had been spending most of our time after work indoors. My Youtube algorithm kept giving me documentaries and video essays. There were videos about mega-construction projects, exploring abandoned places, etc. One of this was this video about the "Fake Paris" in China. While there are so many videos talking about failed mega-construction projects, this one was different. First of all, it didn't feel like an armchair analysis by some white dude, like many others. The title is mega click-baity (such is the nature of Youtube now), it actually does a lot to debunk the claims that this place is abandoned. It has so much heart, with the crew interacting with the people living in the city, and shows how lively the place is after hours. Definitely a breath of fresh air among my recommendations.

This video made me remember another one I watched a few months ago now. A video about an abandoned shopping mall. This place with salmon walls, and teal and brass fixtures. This beautifully liminal place. Richland Mall. What if the story of my LITHOBREAKERS took place in here? The girls could, just as the dudes in the video, infiltrate the building and explore it. Maybe talk about stuff, I don't know. The idea of exploring an abandoned shopping mall is already pretty cool. Malls, or dare I say Shopping Centres, have been a pillar in my life. I lived literally next to one for the first 21 years of my life. A place where we went shopping and dining with my family, and later in as a teenager I  could hang out cheaply or for free with my friends. I also got my first full time job in its anchor store.

My husband and I love exploring shopping centres whenever we visit a new place. There's something familiar about them that we really enjoy. And whenever we encounter one that is dying, we really enjoy the liminality of it. It is great. So I thought it'd be a really cool experience to distill all of this into a game.

I could take screenshots of the video to use as background images. And that's what I did.

So yeah, I had the characters and I had the setting now. Now I just had to figure out what to do with it. What would the game be about?

The Mechanics

And then the new year came. And with it the LITHOBREAKERS 02 jam started.

Okay, so this is something that many people may not know about me. Whenever I start making a game, I NEED to work on the look and feel first. It needs to look good, or at least look quite similar to what I had in my mind before I start writing. 

I thought it'd be cool to make the game look fairly similar to SIFAS, but not too similar - I don't want to get a cease and desist from Lantis or whatever. The game maybe abandonware now but the girls are probably trademarked. So I decided to make a few adjustments. The UI would be pink instead of yellow (pink was the colour for μ's, while Nijigasaki was yellow) and decided to keep the default dialogue box from Ren'Py.

This is what SIFAS looked like, by the way:

So on day one I started working on replicating it, here's a couple of WIP screenshots.

On day 2 I sat down and then thought to myself: "Okay, this is coming along nicely. I have a UI that mimics the OG game including the characters having their little icon next to their name in the name box" (not pictured above). 

The night before I had the idea of adding a pink filter to the game to simulate the pink wash in Sailor Moon and recreate that sense of nostalgia. It took me like 5 minutes and I dropped the hint on mastodon.

"But now what?"

What was the "Unhinged Group Dynamics" the game was meant to be about?

At this point Mia was the defacto main character in the game: 

1. She was the only one I had imported as an asset into the game so far.
2. The game was based in the US so I thought it'd make sense to make her the MC and the reason why the girls were in Richland Mall.
3. I thought it'd be cool to indirectly reference Window to Gaia, by having an MC called Mia who is also a singer.

So if Mia was the MC, was the narration from a 2nd person or 3rd person point of view? Probably 2nd. But then, it came to me:

"What if we could have there 3 girls as the narrator?" And I thought of those games where you can choose a character at the beginning of a section of the game and you can see the story from their perspective (and I say "those games" because I am not embarrassed to say the only fucking example I could think of was Sonic Adventure 2 LMAO. But I'm pretty sure there are VNs that do that, for sure). Okay, yes that's cool but... isn't that a bit too neat? Not very unhinged? Also, my goal for every LBK jam is to push myself and try new things. Wasn't this too simplistic? 

"What if we could swap characters at any point in the story?" YES.

"And depending on who the player is controlling at certain moments they can change how the story unfolds." YES.

"I could mix this with that Timed Choices code I found over a year ago and I haven't been able to put to use yet. This way the unhinged group dynamics is not only about the relationship between the girls, but also is a game mechanic." HOLY SHIT YES.

So I got to working and after a few hours I managed to get that working exactly as I wanted it:

Nice! Did I decide that was good enough and it was time to start working on the dialogue and THE PLOT?

Absolutely not. I thought that as it was looking so good already I could use those files I had found to make the girls blink and open their mouths when they talked. That took me several days, but when it was done it was glorious!

However, I found myself quite happy with that and decided to actually start working on the plot.

The Plot

Okay so, the girls come to Richland Mall and you can swap the characters practically any time (as long as they are together). What was IS the game about? (Round 2)

In a talk I gave a couple of years ago I talked about a 2-plot approach. I call them Plot A and Plot B.

• Plot A is effectively the premise: The R3BIRTH girls go and explore an abandoned shopping mall.
• Plot B is what the game is actually about. The themes and topics that the game covers.

I am about to start going into heavy spoiler territory, so if you have not played the game, please stop reading and go play it now. I even made a  guide that you can download so you can experience the true end of the game.

Work kicked my butt for the following weeks, so the game had to be released during the grace period after the official deadline. I won't say it is my best writing, as I think at some points it's a bit too on the nose. However, for the first time, I wrote a draft which I then revised and made changes to. Until now I had always just written the whole thing and that was the final script LOL So while the writing can be a bot abrupt at times (in my opinion), I feel like I have improved in the ways I write this time around. And that's progress!

Even if I had to write under pressure, I feel like the story ended with a nice and positive conclusion (both in the Good and True endings) which I figured out very late in the jam. I don't know if had I started writing earlier I would've come up with endings that satisfied me like these did. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, A Requiem for Richland Mall is the ultimate PRINCESS INTERNET CAFé game:

A game made for me, by smashing my favourite (seemingly unrelated) things into ;a single experience.  It has that nostalgia factor that I think is my trademark. 

I implemented a cool new mechanic that I haven't seen in any other VNs, which I can now add under my belt and use for future games. And I have learned how to use composite sprites and animations in Ren'Py which was a blast! It is definitely my most sophisticated game to date.

It also won a cool award! Lookit!

Art by Reyn

I also want to thank KentuckyFriedDreams for his help with editing and translating my British English into something more American. Apparently I made Mia sound like she was from London at some points LOL.

If anyone is curious, I am already working on my next game, which is going to be more personal and serious than this one. It is also a sequel to one of my games from last year. Hope you're looking forward to it.

And I hope you enjoyed this postmortem too.

With love,

PRINCESS