This article is fully public.
I’m comfortable with complete strangers getting to read it, in any context. Feel free to share it with anyone who could enjoy it, in any online community you may think of—I’d love for this piece to be read widely!
As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on another visual novel for a little while now! I’d like to start raising the curtain on it little by little, starting with this devlog.
This new project is called Blooming Chasm, and I’d describe it as a “class reunion Gothic mystery visual novel”! I’ve created a landing page for it, which is also acessible from the sidebar. Please check it back from time to time, I’ll update it throughout the development! Here’s the synopsis, copied directly from that page:
Synopsis
A hot summer day in the suburbs of Paris. In the park of the prestigious Lycée Laclos, the class reunion is in full swing, but Stella Sawadogo remains apart, a single thought in mind:
None of this needed to happen.
This isn’t the reality we should be living in, we’re in the wrong place;
we got the worst deal of them all.
Four years ago, twenty graduate students dropped out within a single night. No one seems to know why, nor what became of them afterwards. Even Estée d’Orville, the most talented student of her year, was among them —and not one person has heard of her since.
Stella’s the only remaining one out of twenty. Wasn’t she very close to Estée? They say her eyes haven’t been the same since, that she’s had to rebuild her whole life anew, somewhere abroad.
No one expected to see her again on the day of the class reunion, but there she is. Insisting that none of this needed to happen, that this shouldn’t be the reality we live in —that we got the worst deal of them all.
A class reunion story?
I really love mysteries, and I love using some kind of frame story to tell them even more: Upon a Darkening Flood relied on a defendant’s testimony during a criminal trial, and Sylvan Disappearance was an epistolary VN.
Blooming Chasm is no different, but this time I wanted to use a class reunion setting to retell events set in the past.
During the first lockdown of 2020, a friend got me to watch the classic 2012 Korean drama Reply 1997, which is set in a high school reunion dinner during which friends reminisce on their teenage days. It’s well-known for its humour and nostalgic depiction of late 90s Korean fan culture, and although I didn’t warm up much to its romance1, I was really impressed by its usage of flashbacks and present-day scenes to sustain a mystery on a love triangle’s resolution until the very end.
A few weeks later, when lockdown ended, the first outside people I got to meet again were high school friends, but we were brought together only because of a much sadder occasion. After coming home at night, to unwind, I watched the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves, which is also set during a high school reunion. It’s remained a huge favourite ever since, on a lot of levels, in part of because of the context for watching it. Like Reply 1997, it’s a really nostalgic story, features a love triangle and sustains a little share of mystery about it.
I’ve been meaning to write a similar story ever since, but by shifting around the slice-of-life and romantic tone of these two sources of inspiration to something more mystery-focused, and with a hint of supernatural!
What kind of story will this be?
Blooming Chasm will be a much more conventional mystery than what I’ve done in the past! I never ended up writing any postmortem on Sylvan Disappearance (I still want to even after all this time!!), but I’m still very fond of its atmosphere and presentation.
The plot and characterisation, though, were… all over the place. The horror and mystery genres are places I feel very comfortable playing around with, even in a self-indugent way, so I do not mind, I’m glad I got to have fun in the first place. I think I’d even be fine endlessly writing “the same story” so to speak, with the same tropes, just because it’s fun, and because the more you do it, the more creative you can get within these limits.
Still, I’d like to write something with a more focused plot, and with a more conventional resolution this time! The Gothic aesthetics will be familiar, although this time I’ll be taking bits from Tsukihime and Shinsekai Yori.
Blooming Chasm is also going to be a bit more personal, and with a more familiar, contemporary setting than things I’ve done in the past.
What’s next?
I’m still in the middle of writing! The full story should be about 50 000 words long, and I’ve written ~18 000 words since starting in May.
Since I’m not an artist, and don’t want to commission any assets before having finished writing, I won’t have visible results to show before a while. I have worked on the UI a little bit to get the atmosphere right, but I’m leaving all scripting aside until I’ve finished writing.
I’ll be using photographic backgrounds again, and I’m planning to take some of my own photographs this time! So I might share about this aspect from time to time; taking little photo research trips in the area is going to be fun!
At least for now, I won’t impose any marketing- or result-oriented pressure on myself to produce interesting devlogs regularly: I want to make the process of writing about this project as enjoyable as the writing of the story itself has been so far. Updates here may not be so very frequent, though I promise to write everything with a lot of heart!
Until then, take care and enjoy October, everyone!
P.S. I’m not forgetting my next Fata Morgana post! I ended up reading it through the end and loving it, so I think I’ll just write a post with final thoughts on the main story, before proceeding with the side stories.
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On the other hand, I’m a huge, huge fan of Reply 1988, the 2015 drama with the same concept but where the past is set in the late 1980s! ↩