Drawing the Curtain Back on Love Games & Love Signs

 What am I even going on about?

Here’s the story every writer wants to tell. They usually do, but they want to, too.

1. Why did I start this project?

Like many of you, I’m often on the other side of this equation. I’m scouring itch.io for some “good fucking food”. Thankfully, I am often fed.

The appeal of visual novels to me, is a sort of escapism. I’ve been an avid reader all my life, and what are visual novels if not another form of the written medium with some extra jazz. What you’ll find often in this sort of niche of the gay furry community is media actually written to appeal to our target audience. Mainstream media doesn’t have that.

For mainstream media, as members of the LGBT+ community we’ve been fed crumbs for years. It’s primarily been indie creators that have fed us anything worth consuming. The rest has been fanfiction, fan art, fanon of straight media, doing a queer reading of materials that were usually not written with us in mind. Some of them isn’t just breadcrumbs, while others were straight-up gaybaiting, dancing on the perimeter without being willing to confirm for the LGBT relationships (while the straight relationships were shifting like a snake’s mating ball.)

In the form of these gay visual novels (in a media that is already heavily gay friendly/leaning), I can live out some of the experiences that are frankly, impossible for me to experience at this point. As part of an older generation (not quite our forefathers who lived through the aids crisis but on the cusp of when being gay had the mainstream support it did), the thought of being able to have the archetypal experience of the childhood friend-to-lover was unthinkable. I wasn’t out until college even if I knew in myself that I was gay years earlier.

At the back of my mind that knowledge persisted, othering me from my classmates for years. My family moved when I was at a young age— while I wasn’t quite old enough to remember the full details, some friendships start even earlier than that and persist into school. It’s not quite always the case, but I had the strange fortune of people I thought I was making friends with moving away in my younger years. It’s a bit melodramatic to list this out, but I suppose the point is just to enforce the difficulty of the childhood trope of the friends-to-lovers that is so persistent in media.

The odds of finding the other gay kid in your school to end up friends with before lovers is unthinkable back then. Others could and would break through, but they were outliers. Being attacked  when children became aware of sexuality created a cruel game in my own mind. They were calling me gay. Gay was a pejorative, at least, in that childhood usecase. Even if it was true (and it was), accepting the label others thrust onto me would be letting those who harassed me have control over my life. It would be validating their harassment.

I was still fortunate for things to have been mild, but that was perhaps another element of my othering through my younger years. Being adrift from both those who liked me and those who disliked me. Never having the formative adolescent romances that plagued many of the people we knew (and perhaps contributing to some behaviors still scene at an older age, although that’s a speculative digression altogether.) Where was I have to a place to find this sort of forbidden experience? Why, in the furry visual novel.

I was part of the generation that played the original Morenatsu by downloading it from a website I couldn’t recall and having to follow the instructions to temporarily turn the computer’s language to japanese just so that the game could install. For many of us, that was our first introduction to gay furry visual novels (and perhaps visual novels altogether).  In it, you were able to fulfill that childhood dream narrative, given the whole cast was essentially that in differing degrees.

While Morenatsu was a flawed game, it remains evocative of as an inspiration for what I wanted to do years down the line, and a reflection of the greater community looking for such stories to appeal to them. I wanted to write one of my own.

2. My Desires & “Credentials”

I’ve been dabbling in writing in various means for years. Poetry, short stories, incomplete novels (and more lately, completed ones).

The issue with a visual novel, however, is the visual part. If you’re not a visual artist, it can be an uphill climb to complete this.

Earlier on, I tried doing some other works as a sort of testing ground. Some were written purely in twine (a choice engine sans visuals), others as visual novels with questionable graphics.

But for all that’s said and done, people are choosing a visual novel over a “regular” novel because of the visuals— ergo, if I was going to execute this game, I needed to get the visuals.

I tried doing some collaborative items prior, but the lesson that rings true is an eternal one: a person must have some reason to buy into a project to ensure it continues. If it isn’t monetary, they need to be invested creatively. As a writer, which is customarily a solitary effort on most projects, I already had my own ideas in mind. If I was going to get an artist, I needed to commission one. Which was fine.

2.5 A divergence in time.

I initially came up with the concept for Love Games & Love Signs back in 2019. I was willing to jump on producing it around then, as I was a strong believer in it as a concept. I infact, did get some of those assets completed, even if my current writing indicates that I was far too optimistic with the scope of what I had created against what I had commissioned back then.

What had stopped me from proceeding further was the sprite art, perhaps the most quintessentially important part of the game. The CGs are important, as are the backgrounds, but the sprites are on the screen all of the game. Shopping for a sprite artist that met my vision was an exercise in tenacity, in more ways than one.

I had finally found one that I thought I liked and put in my commission. And then I waited. And I waited. And I waited some more. I had tabled Love Games & Love Signs to work on other projects, so I was willing to wait, but this was an excessive wait. 

The artist I had commissioned continually worked on new commissions over mine I had put in years ago. I can only speculate it was due to my lack of pushing on the matter, but I had other things going on to care about. Too much time spent RPing. Other writing. Eventually, moving. I was fine keeping it on the backburner, although it wasn’t worth trying to work on it further than I already had without new assets. I finally pushed to the point where I couldn’t be deterred any further. I had finished up my RPs. I closed out the novels I was working on then. It was time to resurrect this. Frankly, I was lucky I managed to get a refund in the end with how long I waited (you can vaguely speculate given the timeframe between the concept and when I published Love Games).

And then I managed to find an artist and continue forward, bringing us to here.

3. The Concept

As alluded to before, the element of visual novels that speaks to me is a sort of escapism. An ability to live out the fantasies that aren’t viable in other mediums, fantasies that were just not viable based on where I was in life.

When I came out in college, dating didn’t inherently become easy. While the school had a large population of gays (thanks theater program), that didn’t necessarily make me interested in them. Those that I had a passing interest tended to be taken with each other. The few instances I went on dates just didn’t mesh.

I’m not, however, trying to denote that this is supposed to be a re-do of my college years, although that interpretation could be written. No, this is more of a reflection of the medium. The easiest way to meet lots of people is proximity. In college, your friendships there are often sculpted by proximity. The people the college thrusts onto you in your rooming or who you live with. The other secondary means is those you spend time with in class and clubs.

In the college environment, there’s built in time and efforts to ensure that these groupings can occur and will likely be easy to attend, given how you all live nearby.

I currently live around forty minutes outside of a major city by public transit. It’s not quite difficulty to get in there, but time makes it difficult to do things, let alone have people willing to perhaps engage with the prospect that any future interactions might be built around a 40+ requirement to travel to meet one another. Proximity still remains a factor. Ergo, college campus to reflect that sort of believability diagetically. 

Is it perhaps realistic that everyone is gay in your club? Yes and no. In Love Games, there are other members of the tabletop RPG club. They’re just not on screen yet. So yes, there are straights as part of the club, but as it often tends to be in real life, minority communities tend to self-select. In this instance of the currently available boys, this is reflected as a surprise that everyone is gay, with only two of them being open about it from the start (Rohan & Gin). 

The other element is one I did participate within college and have loved for years. I still do too, although writing tends to eat up my RPing spoons, meaning I minimize how much of it I do at this time. I tried joining the school’s official club my freshman year and played a 4E campaign that ended up… well, not quite as ideally as the one is Love Games & Love Signs. It fell apart for reasons I don’t quite recall, the other freshman that had joined with me ending up leaving my college.

From there, I saw a sort of reformation of the board games club, but when I signed up for it I didn’t even get an email— I suspected their appearance at the club fair was a ruse to keep up a personal club experience while still experiencing school budget, not that I could ever confirm. It took until like junior or senior year (my memory, she’s a sieve) to get a semi-reliable pathfinder group together, although that was partially through the tenuous connections of existing friendship rather than an official club & bonding.

That being said, I had always been a tabletop rpg stan. As I’ve alluded to, I’ve done a fair amount of RP— both in the means of a tabletop RPG as well as some play by post materials (a source of burgeoning writing experience for many of us, I’m sure).  Like most I first became aware of tabletop RPGs through the market presence of D&D, but from there I moved onto other game systems, as per the sort of story I wanted to play.

I still try to do PBTA hacks even, although I haven’t completed those, a testament to my earlier spoons distractions. New project energy running out and tenacity not quite fully developed yet.

This, however, was not to be a place where perseverance would die. The marriage of that escapism, that desire to have people enthusiastically dating each other with well-crafted writing meeting one another via the tabletop RPG club was a persistent thought at the back of my head.

However, I wanted a premise to stick out from other casts of other competing stories. I couldn’t just pick my favorite species. I wanted a theme. Thus, I decided to use a reliable media that many projects call upon, the zodiac, ergo my internal project way back  in 2019 being “The Zodiac Games.”

The long term project goal (spoilers), is the opportunity to date the whole zodiac, as split up into three different campaign groups. One is the cast you currently see, perhaps the most accessible game that most people are familiar with, a Dungeons & Dragons ersatz featuring the Tiger, the Dog, the Pig and the Horse from the Chinese zodiac. The other cast grouping down the line would be featuring different members of the zodiac and playing a different narrative of game, but we’re still a ways off from that all coming together over time.

Of the tabletop RPG, I wanted didn’t want to actually have like RPG gameplay.  Partially because that’s more complicated, but partially because this isn’t a story where you play the game. It’s a story where the players play the game. I wanted it to be authentic to reality, while not getting too quagmired in the nitty-gritty a real game can get into. A sort of abridged version of playing (in a playstyle that’s more evocative of some rules-lite systems than a more crunchy system, even if the inspiration is more crunchy.)

What I haven’t shown is another inspiration for the world in itself. What has been hinted at and not quite exactly shown, is how the world of Love Games & Love Signs comes to be a furry-existing world. I didn’t want to do the route of just saying “Yup, furries real.” I needed an explanation in my own mind. My inspiration? A seinen manga called Keyman: The Hand of Judgement, wherein a great change overtakes the world so that kids were basically basically born as furies. In a similar vein, I felt like I was riffing off of Hatoful Boyfriend for that. A light story that has dark underpinnings (well, the guise of being light).

Many furry stories use being a furry as a sort of metaphor for the social ills of the world, not unlike how the X-men comics were in the same vein, and I wanted to carry elements of that forward, albeit without it being a primary focus. The relatively recent lifespan of zoomorphs, as I call them within the narrative, gives rise to that as a background element.

But that’ really quite the gist of it. Romance for those romances that weren’t quite easily found, where boys are enthusiastically interested in you with a character that’s wholly himself. The choices you make compared to the other characters are largely aesthetic— Misha’s interests remain mostly static. He’s not a complete blank state to be imposed upon. While you play as Misha in this game and do make choices for him, I didn’t like how in some romance games, you essentially exist in a liminal state of your interests being whatever your romantic partner’s interests are.

While in real life, it’s quite nice if your interests align, sometimes it’s just a matter of being happy for your partner’s interests. That’s a pattern I try to evoke narratively. Relationship point gains (e.g. are you meshing with the boy or not) is not from “Oh yeah, I too like underwater basket weaving) but rather “Am I treating my love interest like a proper adult?” Maturity is what’s sexy, in the end. Misha can have some overlap in interests (and inherently does given they all play the tabletop rpg), but he’s not exclusively bound to liking the same thing as his love interests. Getting to know them is part of his interest— I wanted to have a verisimilitude in that approach to the dating.

But that’s really what it amounts to in the end. Accurate romance in both interactions and intent, as well as an approachable and enjoyable tabletop rpg to contrast to the players and give a sort of community that the kind of game can naturally build.

4. A conclusion for now.

Perhaps I can share some of my writing & notes later, but I hope this is interesting for those invested in the game. I hope an understanding of the game’s goals and what is shown helps peel back the curtain on my authorial intent and helps you connect with the game further. Thanks for reading as always.