Halo!

Welcome to the Devlog #2 of Finding Cinderella!

In today’s devlog we’d like to talk about early development of Finding Cinderella and our experimentation with various art styles and game play elements.

Let’s get to it!

Early Beginnings

At the beginning, there was a ball. And an assassin.

Since the assassin is a proper lady during the day, she can only strike at night, thus bringing us to the idea of the ball taking place over 3 days and nights.

Based on our own experience, we decided 3 days should be more than enough to find and get to know the love of your life, so there’s that.

During the day, the prince converses with the ladies and searches for clues revealing the assassin's identity.

OG Prince and Spy discussing a new clue about the assassin

During the night, the prince takes action and can choose a single lady to spend quality awkward time on the balcony with or deal with the assassin if a lady seems sus.

If the prince fails to reveal the assassin and find his Cinderella over the 3 days, he dies at the hands of the assassin.

The Journal

The prince’s journal is the most important item which will accompany you for most of the game. You will use it to select various actions for each lady, view their profiles and your relationship status, search for clues in ladies’ conversations and check any achievements you unlock throughout the game.

As such, the journal underwent many iterations in which both its functionality and visuals changed over time. You may see some of our early prototypes below, and finally the current (totally the final one or maybe not, who knows) version.

Journal #1 - The first journal prototype - can you recognize who is who?

Journal #2 - The second journal prototype - our journal got a facelift and new features

Journal #3 - The current journal

Finding "Finding Cinderella"'s art style

How to find an art style for a vn:

1. be able to draw
2. cry
3. cry some more
4. go with the easiest way to draw anything
5. spend less effort to save the time cus you gotta draw 923847580 drawings
6. convince everyone that it, in fact, is what you were going for from the start
7. style!

How the ladies were designed:

We had a general idea about the ladies personality traits before having any idea about their faces or names. As we fleshed their characters out more, a more solid image started coming to mind. We also made use of various tropes commonly used in the media to help with the designs. Anna is a sweet bubbly girl who’s a bit mischievous, so of course the hairstyle to go for was twintails lol. Also Katarzyna, horses, pants. Jewell regal as hell, so a more heavy patterned layered dress seemed fitting. 

Also we stole were inspired a lot from other vns and artworks, Pinterest was our best friend.

Yes. OWO.

Who is the dev’s favourite lady based solely on design?:

Aeestha: As a dev, I can’t pick favourites. It’s Lady Gwynne though.

Michal: Dang it, I wanted to pick Gwynne too, now I have to say either Anna or Katarzyna. Just kidding, team Sophie.

The coding of Finding Cinderella

When the original idea for Finding Cinderella was born, it was supposed to be a simple Visual Novel with some dating sim elements. The prince converses with the ladies, selects the right dialogue choices for each lady based on their interests and personality, unlocks some special scenes and finally chooses his Cinderella at the end. As such, we’ve decided to use Ren’Py visual novel engine as at the time we thought it had all the necessary functionality to be able to achieve our vision and much more.

Over the time as sleep was slept and dreams were dreamt, we’ve come up with many more unique visual and gameplay elements: the journal, animations, various mechanics connected to the assassin aaand… minigames. If you aren’t new to the world of visual novels, you’ve probably heard this one: we wanted to make a visual novel that’s different from other visual novels. We did our best to conceal it was made in Ren’Py because we didn’t like the default “Ren’Py” feeling many games made in the engine come with.

Although we’ve been successful at achieving everything we’ve envisioned so far, some gameplay elements proved more complicated than we’d like as the engine wasn’t built exactly with our use-case in mind. For future updates we therefore might look into using a more powerful game engine to bring us more flexibility and ease of use.

Anyway, let us know what you think once you play our first demo!

That’ll be it for today’s devlog. Thank you so much for your support and see you next time!

Have a nice day and owo!

@2humanstudiowo