Rose Garden 1 Year Anniversary

Hello, everyone! Rose Garden was released a year ago and since then, it has received over 600 downloads <3 Thank you from the bottom of my heart! I appreciate every one of the comments I've got about the game even after a year has passed, and nothing makes me smile more than seeing someone laugh at one of the game's jokes or get emotional at some of the VN's more emotional moments! This project has become extremely important to me, and thinking that it might be able to help people in any kind of way just warms my heart.

Have a Rosie/Camilla image I made to celebrate the occasion!

Now I'm going to talk a bit about the creation process for the game to give some insight into the project after it's been completed! This will contain spoilers for the whole game, so please proceed with caution!

First I should talk about how I got the idea for the game, but before that it would be convenient if I explained some things about Style Savvy: Styling Star, also known as New Style Boutique 3 in Europe for those of you who aren't familiar with the series (if you are, then feel free to skim through this paragraph! I'd still recommend you to play the game if you haven't already though, I love it so much). Styling Star is a fashion-themed simulation 3DS game, and it's the fourth installment from the Style Savvy series. I've been a fan of the series ever since I got my hands on the first game in the series, which was released for the original DS. It's always been a very important series to me and I've met so many great people through it! When the fourth game came out, I played it avidly; the game's main storyline felt more polished than the other game's, which were more on the weak side. The game actually made you felt like you had a choice, and it felt like it was closer to being a VN than the other games. 

I fell in love with the friendship two of the game's main characters shared, those two characters being Camilla and Rosie. The game never confirms it outright, but it kind of hints at Camilla having a crush on Rosie (whether that's intentional or unintentional) and it's really sweet to see that this doesn't bother Rosie at all and that she's very accepting of Camilla, though maybe she's just oblivious haha. There are many more things I could say about their relationship but I'll just conclude by saying that I adored their relationship in the game, and I decided to explore it more through fanarts and stuff. I thought it would be amazing if I could show my love for them and the game with something else. 

The idea of making a Visual Novel has always been something on the back on my mind for quite some time. Some VNs have been great inspirations to me, and I've always dreamed of making one myself. I wanted to show my love for Rosie and Camilla, my number one ship at the time, and I felt that making a VN would fit the kind of game Styling Star is, so I toyed with the idea of making a Rosie/Camilla VN. 

The ideas for the plot came to me from a surge of inspiration, though it mostly started as a series of jokes about how a game about them would be. I imagined how Rosie and Camilla's story could continue in the game and how it could end based on what happens in Styling Star, and I ended up writing a draft throughout 4 days! I honestly can't understand how I wrote it so quickly - usually I only get ideas for the general plot of hypothetical VNs of mine but can't come up with a way to write the individual scenes that make up the whole game, so I'm very glad I could get the plot done first. 

Some parts of the rough draft for the plot were pretty funny. For example, something I couldn't include in the game was Camilla googling "test to know if youre in love with a girl", and also when I wrote the scene with Rosie, Alina, Yolanda and Angèlique in the café I described Rosie's friends realising that she's in love with Camilla as "Alina and Yolanda look at each other like 'woah this girl is gay'".

When I was making a rough outline of the concert scene I couldn't hide my excitement about the protagonists finally kissing and wrote "...And then they kissAEGEFGGFGREJKHKJGHRRGTGFGRFHJHKA they kiss :'). The audience bursts into cheers. 'Oh my God!' 'I SHIP IT!' 'SAME!'"

...As you can see, I am a very serious writer. *ahem*

After the plot was done, I decided on the name for the game based on the VN's ending: Rosie and Camilla would end up living together in Rosie's farm, taking care of their very own rose garden. I also feel like the rose imagery fits Rosie/Camilla a lot, since that's Rosie's signature flower in the game and Camilla sounds like Camellia. It's a bit too on the nose but I thought it was the most clever thing ever

Anyways, at the beginning of it all, I wanted to make it on Cloud Novel since making a VN with it seemed fairly simple - But I ran into several technical problems, and eventually settled on Ren'py. I was a bit scared of jumping right in and making a game with the Ren'py engine, but with the help of a super kind Tumblr user and fellow Style Savvy fan I realized that making a simple VN with Ren'py was easier than I thought! That person also did the proofreading of the game's script, which was a huge, huge help considering how much of a mess my script was haha. After making the game, I'd definitely recommend using Ren'py as your engine if you're making a VN. Making a basic VN in it isn't super hard and if you don't know how to do something specific, the community is very helpful.

After getting used to Ren'py, the first thing I did for the game were the sprites. Camilla's sprite was the first one I made since a good portion of the game is told through her POV. Her alternate outfit was made mostly for fun, just like Rosie's alternate hairstyles, but I ended up using them in the story. I hoped that would make the player feel closer to the characters (and Style Savvy is a game based on fashion, after all!). Rosie was the next sprite I did, and then came the other characters. Originally I was also going to make a sprite for Melvin, but decided that it was too much work so he ended up being included in a CG. I honestly don't regret it because I ended up working throughout all of July to finish the game, and I completed about 2 sprites per day, including their expressions, which was insane haha. Talking about insane, as I was implementing the scenes from the plot I also settled on the scenes I wanted to make CGs for - I didn't put a limit on the number of CGs, so it turns out I made pictures for a lot of scenes... I remember one day I woke up at like, 7 AM and got out of bed just to work on the game so I texted my friend "guess who woke up at 7 am to work on the game?? this girl" and later she replied back something along the lines of "...ur becoming a workaholic teresa!!!!!!! DDDDD:" hahahaha. Looking back on it, I didn't really have a reason to spend the entirety of July finishing the game, because a lot of the CGs look kind of rushed as a result... Please, if you're working on a game that's not for a jam that runs for a limited time like Nanoreno, take regular breaks and don't be like me omg. I thought about remaking some of the game's CGs - but I decided to leave them as they are right now. I'd like to look back on them in the future and see them as proof of my improvement - I hope to keep working hard to achieve that!!

Going back to the sprites, I hope they did the characters' personalities justice. Styling Star's writing may be far from perfect, but the characters had much more personality than in previous games imo. Alina and Yolanda were particularly great, though they don't play a big role in Styling Star's story. I wanted to show them supporting Rosie in their own way though, their friendship in the game is also very heartwarming and shouldn't be forgotten about! Though, they'd also make a really cute couple. I need to make some Alina/Yolanda fanart;; Alina/Melvin is also cute, though Melvin barely appears in this game lol. I feel like he'd also be one of the biggest supporters of Rosie and Camilla's relationship.

Camilla's father doesn't make an appearance in the original game, so I had to envision how he would be myself. Interestingly, he's described as a CEO in Styling Star but he's also the town's mayor in Rose Garden because in the localization I played he was described as a very influential person within the town hall lol. I'm sorry if that caused any confusion. Camilla's mother isn't mentioned, my headcanon is that she passed away and that's why her father is so insistent on her inheriting the company. I feel like her mother would have been way more supportive of Camilla's identity had she been alive. :( As for Angèlique, I gave her a "hidden" harsh side when confronting Camilla's father. I hope it didn't come off as OOC, since she's been in showbiz for a long time and she can come off as intimidating early in the game, especially in Rosie's storyline. She does get better though, I'm glad her role wasn't limited to being the mean rival girl!

Aside from working on the sprites, I also made some time to gather free use music and backgrounds I could need for certain scenes. Having a rough draft of the plot helped a lot since I mostly knew what I needed. I'd love to make my own backgrounds for my next game, if I ever make another one.

Thankfully the programming for the game went smoothly thanks to Alphard's help! I had to go through the entire script of the game several times to make changes but no game-breaking bugs popped up, so I'm very thankful for that. After the game was done I translated the game to Spanish; I hope the translation isn't too weird-sounding, Spanish is my first language but I mostly went with what my gut said and translated it quickly haha. I wonder how many Spanish people played the game :o I'd love to meet more Spanish Style Savvy fans!!

That also reminds me that for April Fools, I was going to make an "April Fools" version of the game that allowed you to replace the dialogue with a joke version of the script. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it done by April 1st, but here are some snippets of what it could have been haha.

I'm so happy that I was able to complete this project - I couldn't have completed it without my love for Style Savvy. I'd also like to give a shout out to the Style Savvy community - they were super supportive of the game and in general, they're just a super chill and accepting community, who simply likes to share their love for cute clothes and characters. As cheesy as it sounds, I couldn't have done it without you. Again, thank you for playing my game and sharing your love for the game (and Rosie/Camilla) with me! I hope that my VN has inspired people to go and do fanarts of their own, that'd make me feel extremely happy :)

As for future projects, I have many ideas I'd love to get done in the future - I'm just not very good at plot outlining and stuff haha. But once that's out of the way, I might start another project! I'm crossing my fingers to get another surge of inspiration one of these days. >_< What I do know though is that if I ever make another game, it will probably be an original story so I hope I can start working on it someday. :)

Another thing I found interesting was the sheer number of people who downloaded the Android version! Since the GUI I used was the default one to keep things simple, everything went very smoothly! It seems a lot of people are interested in mobile yuri VNs so I'd love for my next project to be available as an app too. ><

If you somehow read all this post up until now, thank you so much for making some time to read this! Keep being awesome! <3