Today, January 27th, marks one month since the release of our demo! :D

And we are so grateful for all the support! ❤️

We were surprised to see over 1,500 downloads in just one month, and not only that, we now have more than 250 followers and even surpassed 6k views on our page.

I don’t think you all realize how happy we are, because we thought this project, being a visual novel, wouldn’t get much attention.

But thanks to you all, Deltarune: Harmony of Hearts is becoming more relevant! And we hope that, in the future, when the final game is released, it will be even more so! ^^

Now, this devlog is to explain the entire development process of the visual novel.

So, let’s get started! ^^

As ridiculous as it sounds, the idea to create a visual novel came up while we were playing SCP. Yes, that’s right.

While waiting for a friend to join the game, we were just chatting and came up with the idea of making a visual novel. Eventually, the ones present agreed to do it.

And that’s how Team Kyrrent was born.

We decided to make a visual novel because it seemed like the "easiest" thing to create, more so than a fangame in itself.

A few weeks later, things fell into place, and we began developing Skullrune.

The visual novel is inspired by the concepts from Snootgame, where a human goes to a new institution that’s only populated by dinosaurs.

We also drew inspiration from Katawa Shoujo for the choices, where a good or bad choice will lead you to a specific character route.

However, don’t think this is just a simple copy.

We started with the same premise, but with a different development. It's no longer the world and lore of Deltarune; rather, the protagonist, Mirt, is very different from Anon.

We also wanted to give more importance to the secondary characters, like Asriel, Dess, Catti, and others. They’ll play a significant role in the different routes.

In terms of personalities, we based them on Deltarune, but exaggerated them. The most noticeable one is Berdly, whom we turned into a Reddit shitposter.

We want to remind you that Deltarune: Harmony of Hearts is a...

There are many differences from the original, such as the fact that there are no dark worlds, and everyone lives in the Light World.

The lore, personalities, designs, and many other aspects of the visual novel characters are also different.

There are some similarities we kept because they fit well with the plot of a music university, but again, we’ve made changes to ensure it feels distinct from the canon.

The art style is also inspired by Snootgame. Here’s a comparison so you can understand what we mean:

We really liked Snootgame's style and wanted to implement it for our visual novel, as we felt it would execute the story best.

However, despite this, we created our own designs, like the ones you see in the illustrations below:

We were even fortunate enough to get help from an artist dedicated to creating professional backgrounds, which is why the backgrounds have such quality:

Since we didn’t like what they did in Snootgame, where they just took images from Google and applied a filter, we decided to do things differently.

And just as a fun fact, the character sprites were created by three people: one was in charge of the sketch, another did the line art, and the last one did the coloring.

It was a great team effort!

Our musicians were inspired by artists like Daft Punk, Pablo Chill-E, and of course, Toby Fox.

We also took into account how music typically sounds in visual novels, so we could do a good job recreating how it would sound in our project.

Don’t think it was easy; taking this new style and making sure it didn’t sound like 8-bit music was quite a laborious task, but we ended up with some really great results!

And speaking of music, you can find the entire OST of the demo on Soundcloud.

To keep it interesting, let’s share some fun facts.

We spent a total of 8 months working on the demo. Now, remember that moment with the phone?

Well, our sole programmer spent 4 months making it functional to avoid bugs and little issues like that.

Just to show you how costly this part was.

It was actually quite fun positioning the character sprites so they looked right on screen. In the beginning, we ran into strange situations, like the Doki Doki reference...

And remember the little note that Noelle sends to Mirt? Well, here’s something we did just for fun:

Translation:

"Hi Kris"

"What the heck Kris."

If you want more details, here’s a video that explains the whole process better.

And the most curious thing of all? None of the team members have any experience in the video game industry.

We’re making fangames without any prior experience—this visual novel is our first project in every sense, and for it to turn out this well… it’s truly a marvel! :D

As for updates, we’ve released a new one where we fixed a few imperfections. However, we still haven’t solved the bugs on Android, it’s been tricky since some are Renpy’s issues, and it’s up to the creator to release a better version to fix them.

Others we’re working on how to fix, but as I said, we have only one programmer, and we’re figuring out what to do.

Either way, we’ll keep you updated on the news! ^^

Thank you so much for reading!

See you in March! ;D