An indie visual novel dating sim made by Chloekat1
Hi, I'm Chloekat1.
You may know me from my Instagram where I post all my art, or from my Twitch where I livestream making said art, or from my YouTube where I post speedpaints of those streams, or from ArtFight where I compete every year.
Can you believe all of this is just a hobby?
What is SF Slasher?
San Francisco Slasher is the first game that I aim to finish and publish publicly. It is a choose-your-own-adventure style story, where you make choices to change the events, meet a colourful and diverse cast of characters, and hope to get close enough to date them.
You will play as Kyle, an average unassuming white boy who just moved to the city as a college student transplant. Things aren't all that they seem however, because Kyle isn't just some nobody, he's a serial killer plaguing cities across the US. Kyle will you his charm, his good looks, and people's innate sense to help others to his advantage to get close to his targets. Will he be able to get close enough to kill?
Why am I making this game?
For a lot of my youthful years, I grew up playing video games of any and every kind. As I grew older I became a typical hopeless romantic, as many teen girls do I imagine. Enter: dating sims. There is no shortage of strange and wonderful dating sim games out there. Majority coming from Japan of course, but plenty of indie games too. My favourites were always the weird ones, like Hatoful Boyfriend.
I used to do a bit of writing back then too. I consumed books at a breakneck pace, and got into fanfiction; even going so far as to write some of my own. With this newfound love of writing, and my old love of visual novel games, a new interest was born. One long summer in Southern California I decided to try my hand at making a game...
There is a free open-source program called Ren'Py. It's specifically set up to make visual novel games, and it runs on Python as its code language. I had very little coding experience at the time, since I had only taken an intro to HTML class in high school, but I was determined to try. After much trial and error, I made a very basic very dull game that I'm not even sure had a title. It worked for about 2 weeks before my code broke somewhere. Despite the difficulty, I fell in love with code; it even lead to me taking an intro to Java course in college.
But all those nostalgic memories aside, why am I going through all this trouble?
For as long as I can remember, I have been making up characters. In my art my favourite thing to draw is people, and especially design new characters. In the course of all these creations, I have made a cast of OCs that have stuck with me. I want to share them with the world, and I want to tell their stories. I want everyone to see a little bit of themselves represented in these characters and stories. I think it is so so important to showcase a wide variety of lives in media, and frankly not enough companies are doing that still to this day.
So that's why I'm here making this, all by myself, on no budget, with just my dreams and a million ideas in my head.
What's next?
If you'd like to come along for the ride, please subscribe, so you can keep up with me as I work through this insane project!
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