NEW STORY: Murder Gods Play Pachinko
An Anti-Mystery.
A group of friends gathers in a remote house for the first time in two years.
This is the place where Kaya took his life. Tensions are high, to say the least.
The snowstorm isn’t letting up. It appears they’re trapped. The only company they have is each other.
Little do they know – time isn’t on their side.
He’s on his way.
This was an idea I had for the Videotome Jam, as a way of playing around with the Videotome engine itself. Unfortunately, due to some real life commitments, I didn’t manage to submit it in time.
I’ve obviously written things that can be considered “anti-mysteries” before, but I think this particular story is a small and digestible slice of the idea to the uninitiated.
This was created using the Modded Super Videotome Engine by Freya C and Stanley Baxton.
Overall, I’d say putting this together was pretty fun! It’s been a minute since I wrote a VN, and getting to just write dialogue throughout the entire thing reminded me of why I like the format so much.
Engine-wise, I think I’d still probably prefer to use RenPy – Videotome saved me time by not needing to deal with the general setup I’d typically do when setting up a RenPy project, but I hit a couple of walls that caused me to have to edit some parts of the engine myself. For example, text being typed out instead of showing up instantly or tweaking the auto-progression system to allow me to pause the screen for different amounts of time. Still – the fact I managed to do those things fairly easily speaks to how small and tweakable the engine itself is. The code was fairly straightforward, and it was easy to understand what went where.
Hope you enjoy the story!