The Biggest Visual Novel Jam Gets Bigger Every Year — An Interview with Stella and Vimi from DevTalk

Making games can be a very fun and expressive experience. While many people decide to take on their ideas by themselves, game development remains a very collaborative space.

It’s a space where information tends to flow freely, where people share resources, tutorials, and ideas, trying to make better games and help other people do the same. It’s also quite common to find a team online, be it for a temporary project or for a long-term endeavor. It’s hard to overstate how much of hobbyist game development relies on the collaborative, community-focused environment.

Among the many rites of the game dev community, few are as popular and beloved as the game jams. During a typically short period of time, a solo developer or a small group of people tries to make a game from scratch and see what they’re able to deliver by the end.

It’s not a mere show of talent, it’s a display of resourcefulness: can you pace yourself? Can you manage the team? Can you determine a good scope? You could be the best game developer ever, and bad planning would still be more than enough to ruin your chances of getting to the finish line.

While general game jams are very popular, there’s a big space dedicated to more specific events. Maybe they’re dedicated to a specific engine or a certain genre. In the case that concerns us today, we’re talking about visual novels.

STELLA — I’m Stella. Used to go by a different name. So most people might not recognize that name yet, but that’s what I’m going by these days. And I founded DevTalk in 2016 (…), there was, like, a big need for a space for visual novel developers that was just about the creation of visual novels and the business around visual novels. (…) And Spooktober is one of our avenues of helping other people do that, helping other people make visual novels, make crazy good visual novels.

VIMI — Matthew Vimislik. I run a channel called Visual Novel Design, which, pretty much anyone who’s learned how to use RenPy, they’re probably learning it from one of my videos. 37,000 subscribers. I’ve been a dev for about 12 years now, and I am one of three moderators for DevTalk here.

I had the wonderful chance to meet both Stella and Vimi, both integral parts of the DevTalk community and the visual novel community as a whole.

Stella has an Itch page full of wonderful tools for visual novel creators, while Vimi’s YouTube channel is an excellent source of invaluable information. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that both of them have helped thousands of people in their quest to make narrative games.

Spooktober is one of the various visual novel jams that DevTalk manages, and it’s certainly the most popular. According to Stella, it was a natural part of growing the community.

STELLA — So, how it came about is that our community had gotten to the size, like, DevTalk had gotten to the size, where it made more sense to put effort into events as a means of growing the community and kind of establishing our presence in the creative sphere more solidly.

(…) And game jams were just the natural thing for us to go to because it’s the kind of stuff that people are already doing as part of our community, right? So, originally, it – I wanted it to be a competitive event because there wasn’t really a whole lot of competitive events out there for visual novels. (…) So, the first year, I put out some cash from just straight out of my own pocket to make a competition.

The event actually used to take place in October, but they quickly found out it wasn’t the best approach.

STELLA — It was the – I think it was the first, maybe the end of the second year that we ran it in October. But we started in October because it made the most sense. It was a holiday-themed jam. And, you know, obviously, I love Halloween. Halloween’s my favorite holiday by far. But I think after the second, maybe in the third year, we decided, hey, let’s shift it back a month. Because (..) we noticed that, you know, by the time that the first and second year were over, nobody was really reading horror visual novels or Halloween-themed visual novels because (..) the season was over.

People had already moved on to, you know, the Thanksgiving visual novels. I’m kidding. That’s not a thing. But, you know, but they had already moved on away from that content. So, it didn’t really make a lot of sense to tell people, hey, let’s make it right now. Let’s go make it when – right before people are going to start consuming it and then make sure it releases right at that peak point where it can start to build up an actual awareness for people.

VIMI — As far as managing it, Stella does, I think, the biggest amount of the work there. Just in terms of reaching out to sponsors, in terms of just arranging the whole event. But just like any big operation like this, it really depends on having volunteers. It depends on having, like, a community there that can kind of help pick up the slack at any point.

Spooktober is anything but a small community event, after all.

VIMI — This is a tentpole event for the whole community to come together. The people who are already here, and we’re drawing new people in and making our community larger year after year after year. (…) More and more people who are participating, and as those people participate and they become part of the community, it just allows us to get larger and larger and put on bigger events.

STELLA — Initially, it was largely me doing most of the lifting early on. But, like, over the years, I’ve needed to lean on more and more people to do it. And at some point, it stopped being me doing everything, and it wound up being this huge, huge collaborative effort between a lot of our core members and a lot of the other community members that come in.

Naturally, with such an influx of people and the desire to help them create new stories and narrative games, having great educational resources becomes a must.

VIMI — The reason why I started the channel was literally just… I was part of the DevTalk community right before I released my first visual novel, King of the Cul-de-sac. It was just something where I was floundering with it for a while. I didn’t even like settle on the term visual novel for what I was doing. Just because I wasn’t sure where there were other devs that were kind of interested in like that intersection of narrative and gameplay.

So, I found DevTalk. It was really a great way for me to learn, expand my skills. You know, learn the audience that I was making stuff for. And once people saw the game, like it did okay with players. Like it’s just a free game. Like I didn’t really care. It’s just a fun thing. But other devs here like really liked it. And they wanted to know, like, how I did these things. And for this community that did so much to like help me get there, I wanted to give back.

And that’s what the channel was all about. Like initially it was just, hey, let’s just do these tutorials on Ren’Py. Just show people like some of the things that I’ve been doing. So, I don’t have to have this conversation face-to-face with people on the server every day. I can just send them a link to the video.

I asked Vimi if there was a spike in viewership during jams, Spooktober in particular. To my surprise, that didn’t seem to be the case.

VIMI — Generally, the videos that I make are considered evergreen. Very rarely do events cause a big spike in videos. Even the video that I made specifically for jams, it gets a little spike, but it never gets above How to Write Visual Novels.

While many people see visual novels as an easy genre, Vimi and Stella are clearly passionate about them. I wanted to know what makes the genre so special to them. Full disclosure, visual novels are my favorite genre too, so I was eager to know.

STELLA — I played a couple of visual novels when I was younger. Probably shouldn’t have. I’m not going to tell you which ones. But anyway. I had wanted to pursue game development long-term anyway. This is something I was already passionate about. I was already programming for a long time. I think at that point I was already programming for, like, 10 years. Um, so I had a good foundation in programming.

So I wanted to be, like, a game dev, right? And I could not figure out what, for the life of me, what I wanted to make. I was working with mobile game folks. I was working with sim game folks. I was working with FPS people who were really ambitious, who were biting off way more than they could chew. Learned a lot of netcode. I was working with a bunch of things. And nothing really felt right. Like, I felt like I was missing something every time I did that.

(…) The very last thing that pushed me off into visual novels is I had been competing in other game jams that my university was putting through. It was the very last one that I attended. (…) I didn’t know what to do. I was like, you know what? Let’s just, let’s just make a visual novel. I didn’t call it a visual novel when I made it. I wanted to make a mystery game. Um, but the mystery game had a lot of story in it.

So, this was, I think, 2015, no, this was 2014 for sure. (…) I was like, I’m going to make a puzzle game or a mystery game. And we’re going to do point and click stuff and tell a big story with it and have fun with it and make kooky expressions and such.

And the end of the competition was held at a place called 1986. Um, which was, I found out later, a bar. So, I was showing off a visual novel to a bunch of people at a bar. That was great. That was very funny. At my expense, mostly, but still.

(…) nobody liked it. But you know what? This is my favorite thing that I’ve ever made. And I remember I was, I was, um, I was driving home with the program director from the game dev thing. And I said to him, “I think I know what I want to do with the rest of my life.” And he looked at me and was like, are you f—ing crazy? And I’m like, no, I’m not. I mean, yeah, but not for this. So, that’s kind of like why visual novels for me. It’s just been visual novels all the way down from there out.

VIMI — I’ve always been a fan of just independent media. Independent comics. I actually love just picking up, like, self-published comics that I find in places. I love watching independent films. I grew up, like, right when fan fiction was taking off. And that one, like, already by the time I started getting into independent media, that was already way too deep for me.

But visual novels just kind of became an extension of that. I’ve always liked games made by, you know, singular people or small teams. I like seeing really interesting things. I like seeing really experimental stuff. And I really like seeing people, like, put their hearts on their sleeves with their games. I really enjoy that sort of stuff.

When I was making (…) King of the Cul-de-sac, I really was trying to find where those communities were, where they were making that sort of stuff with that sort of mentality. And DevTalk was really it.

And I’ve been judging for the Spooktober Game Jam for a couple years now. After I stopped submitting my games for it, because at a certain point, it’s just, like, I want to play more of these games. And I love, I absolutely love just being able to read these and, like, totally understand where the authors are coming from.

I love being able to play games that people have made with, like, certain mechanics. And I go, I know exactly what they were going for. I know the sensibility. I know the other media they were drawing from. These aren’t things that are made by committee. These aren’t things that are made by big studios. Just with every, you know, game element calculated to maximize ROI. Like, these are real passion projects. And that’s the stuff that makes me excited to open up every weird, sketchy file on itch.io. I should probably actually not use my main computer for this. I just realized now. That’s, I probably have a lot of viruses.

With the community growing every year, and more people getting into Spooktober, a higher number of troublemakers is inevitable. But Stella and Vimi had a very different perspective.

STELLA — We occasionally have people who are upset about this or that. It’s usually… (…) They want to make psychological horror… Where, like, suicide is a major component of it, right? Those are the people that usually get the angriest about it.

I understand that people want to make a psychological horror that features suicide. But we’ve had incidents in the past where it’s, like… We’ve had judges had to stop and go “Is this person actually writing an SOS?” We’ve had a situation where someone wrote in their files in the submission… A suicide note. Basically. And we couldn’t tell if it was in character… Or if it was something from the dev.

So we’ve kind of categorically stopped that particular type of submission because they shouldn’t have to deal with it. I mean, it’s really… It’s taxing to them. You know? And we do stuff, obviously, to support people who are in that position where it’s like, hey… If they’re trying to write out their trauma, I get that. We tell them about the crisis hotlines and such. But… I can’t ask my judges to keep putting themselves through that because it takes a toll on them. I can’t do that to them.

Other than that, the bulk of the complaints seem to be about the people submitting late and being left out of the competition.

STELLA — Itch’s platform (…) doesn’t always work. Sometimes people get really upset about it. And, like, rightfully so. So, they just spent the month. And because of, like, a three-second difference between their clock and Itch.io‘s clock, they got locked out. And I can’t fix that for them. So, it’s a tough position for them to be in. And it’s a tough position for us to be in.

Rules are rules after all, that’s why DevTalk always recommends not submitting at the last possible moment.

STELLA — But honestly, though, despite the fact that our community has grown and grown and grown, I think it’s actually gotten easier. We’ve gotten better at writing rules. We’ve gotten better at, you know, talking about rules, the justification for the rules.

VIMI — Like, as the jam has gotten bigger, I think most people kind of get it. Most participants, real nice. They’re just making their stuff. They’re just putting it out there.

Naturally, I wanted to know if they had some memorable highlights from previous years that they’d like to recommend.

STELLA — I got a submission that I remember very clearly from somebody. So, in the judging process, I think I was the only person who favored it. I loved it when I saw it. And I had this little gremlin of a guy who had Cheeto dust all over his fingers. And he was the worst person imaginable.

And I was the only one rooting for that game because I thought it was so well composed. And it was so funny. And even if the guy was a complete dirtbag, it was great. I knew it was going to be great.

Oh, Terry was one of my favorite submissions from the earlier years. And I was the only one who thought so. That was my first experience with Vimi. Oh, Terry is such a weird, fun little thing.

VIMI — Necromance is probably one that pops in mind. It’s like a 1920s throwback, like, silent film style, like, comedy. Like, it’s like a just funny 1930s wordplay with, you know, 23 skidoo, like, kind of style music. But it’s like a classic Tolkien-esque, like, fantasy story. So, I loved that combination of it. Then, let’s see here. A Witch is Getting Married, I think, is another one.

Closing out the interview, I just wanted to know their favorite visual novels.

VIMI — I feel like it’s got to be The House of Fata Morgana. It’s got to be, if we’re going with a classic, like, everyone agrees this is a visual novel. But I think the… I’m trying to remember (…) Florence. It was this little, half-hour, mobile-first-designed, little narrative game where it was mostly textless, but it was just gameplay interactions.

VIMI — And I was still, like, working on my, like, initial game and trying to figure out how I was going to work the mechanics into the gameplay, when all of a sudden that game did everything that I wanted to do, but just did it so artistically that all of a sudden (…) there was a lot of work where I was like, I need to throw it out because I don’t think it’s anywhere near that conceptual level. So Florence is one that I go back to a lot.

And then 1000xRESIST. I think it’s terms of, like, more recent narrative games. That’s one where I also have some serious problems with it, but, like, man, that one was a blast.

STELLA — For me, so I have two loves when it comes to these. It’s hard for me to pick one specifically. I’m very much of two different minds. I love comedy VNs (…) so that’s gonna be a big thing. If you can make me laugh, that sells a lot to me. I also love action and drama visual novels, so if you can get me on either one of those things, you might have me hooked.

So, this is gonna be a silly one, and I’m sure someone will give me shit for it, but I really love Plaster Brain’s pizza game. It is such a silly little thing; it was intentionally shitpost the VN, and it’s very funny. It was made by Plaster Brain, if you guys might know, might know of her more as Jello’s sister, Jello Apocalypse’s sister. Very funny little VN.

STELLA — And on the other side, I would say Root Double is probably my favorite when it comes to drama or suspense. (…) Very different worlds when it comes to visual novels, but both of them are really competing for the top spot in my head most of the time, so. Yeah, those have to be my two.

Steins;Gate is also up there somewhere, but it’s not funny enough to displace pizza game, and it’s not dramatic enough to be Root Double, so it’s somewhere up there.

The jam started September 1st and lasts a whole month, so you’re still able to participate if you want to! Stella told me they have a lot of plans for this year and to try to keep making the event bigger and better.

STELLA — (…) This year we’re looking at another kind of big and crazy year. We’re introducing a bunch of new stuff that we’re hoping is going to help people take off. And we’re currently working on a big project related to collaborative fundraising that might be coming in the future. It’s something to be really excited about.

And I really hope everyone who is participating this year has a lot of fun with it. And I wish them good luck because it’s going to be another tough year.

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