This Post-Mortem (my very first) was a long time coming. After Yaoi Jam 2021 I got involved in other things, and between being busy and getting a clear head, it took a while to recall this had to be done.

Yaoi Jam 2012 was the first one I took part in. The first time I had to make something VN-related within a set time limit and abiding to guidelines. Lacking any real experience in putting out a completed ‘product’, and with no artistic skills to draw graphical assets, I decided to go the route of making what is essentially a fan-game after verifying that this kind of submission was acceptable..

As stated on the game page, LUNATICA is translation/adaptation/expansion of a short Japanese VN I had read from a certain Doujin circle called ‘GRACIAS’, who specialize in making short and shocking Yaoi visual and kinetic novels.  The picture below is quite self-evident on some of the type of conetent you may find in them.

LUNATICA was completed quite quickly. After all, apart from translation and expansion most of the work was done before it began- All the assets were available and the script laid out.

For a while I considered expanding the story more than I ended up doing, but decided against it in the end to avoid having it diverge from the original. Part of the dialogue was left as close to the original as possible rather than ‘westernizing’ them. This is why there are lines of dialogue and narration which might sound odd in English, and may clash with my own writing on the expanded scenes. One example is the overdone repetitions of thoughts or words “I won’t forgive! I won’t forgive! I absolutely won’t forgive!”. This was stylistic choice done by design, I believe the reason why the main character was written like this in the original was to express the mental pathology that takes hold of him as the tale progresses.

I can’t lay claim to any of LUNATICA’s story, art, or music. Even the narrative add-ons I made and expanded scenes are only additions to a foundation. The reasons for putting this ‘western’ version out on Yaoi Jam were twofold.

First, with a themed Jam there were bound to be persons interested in the genre paying attention, and thus a higher chance that someone would pick it up and comment.

Second, the polishing and expansions I did were to challenge myseçf and showcase my abilities as a programmer and ‘designer’, if I may be permitted to use that word.

Apart from one of the above, I consider it to be a failure. More on that in abit.

Runa Runa Lunatica, the original Japanese VN, was made using the Livemaker engine and, without wanting to sound disparaging in the least, it is minimalistic when compared to it’s Ren’Py sibling. That is simply the way GRACIAS makes their VNs.

Their strength lies in the characters sprites, with their simple, adorable design who nonetheless are very expressive, the choice of music, and the stories themselves which for the most part are sad, depressing, when not outright shocking. The level of violence (and gore) found in some of their titles are the kind of elements that require blaring trigger warnings in the western VN community.

This paradigm is somewhat new to me, who was ‘self-raised’ on a diet of JVNs and older anime titles. Drawn to them precisely because they were so much different from the safe, vanilla blandness found in their western equivalents. These Nipponese forms of media are not better per se, they are just different and much more  willing to touch on subject matters the Occident appears to be getting ever fearful of even dipping its toes into… if it ever did in the first place.

Considering what I now know,  and looking back upon it, I would not have submitted LUNATICA to Yaoi Jam if it took place today. It is absolutely not what the audience in this community is expecting from their Yaoi and BL titles.

This title would better fit (if it could have been submitted to) a Spooktober Jam. In terms of the ‘horror’ in its story, emboldened (I think) by my treatment of it and the addition of new graphics, effects, sound and music, it certainly seems to surpass that found in most of this year’s 114 submissions. This is neither a good nor bad thing, or a judgement of value. Simply my opinion based on what I can empirically perceive.

The reason I state LUNATICA is a failure lies upon the lack of feedback I received on it. Surprisingly, out of my modest solo output so far it is the most successful in terms of downloads, by an impressive margin of difference. Or perhaps, not so surprising... after all I didn’t write it, I merely repackaged it. As I stated on the post-game section after the two endings where seen by the player, all credit goes to the original authors.

Still, the utter lack of feedback on it (apart from some private ones in Discord chats, from fellow developers) cannot help but raise a brow.

I do not dabble in VNs for money (at least , not yet), or ‘for myself’. I wanted to tell stories, original or otherwise, and know they had an impact, even if on just a couple of persons.

I know folks who have written slews of stories or tales they will never release to the world. Not because they cannot, but because they won’t. They write and create for themselves. While I respect that stance, it is not for me. I do not expect cheers and adulation, certainly not for such modest efforts as LUNATICA. But I don't want to sculpt ‘statues in the desert’ and let the howling winds be the only thing affected by their existence either.

When I first set down to adapt LUNATICA, I had a lingering idea in my mind that if it proved popular I could return to other GRACIAS titles and give them a similar treatment. That will not be happening.

In the relatively short span of time since this title came out, I released another for Yaoi Jam (an original story this time) collaborated with a fellow amateur Dev on her own Yaoi Jam project (which fortunately proven to be a lot more popular than mine) and then joined a team for a Spooktober project.

From what now seems to feel like a hill of gathered experience, looking back upon the flat plain that is LUNATICA there's only one word that crops to my mind:

‘Naive.’

What working on LUNATICA did for me of positive, was add some height to that hill. And perhaps, that is good enough on its own.