With Love

With Love is a short visual novel developed over the course of 3 weeks. You take yourself on a solo roadtrip around either New England or New York state, visiting 5 locations in any order. During these stops, there’s no dialogue or character interactions. Instead, the story unfolds through postcards you write from each location, personalized for the specific decisions you make on your trip. Each postcard has an air of sadness to it, lightly masked by humor and a lighthearted, informal writing style.

Player Projection

When I started writing the player character (PC), I knew I wanted them to be easy for a wide variety of people to project onto. To achieve this, I aimed for a characterization that was, for the most part, relatable to the general public. To achieve this, I first made sure the PC was entirely gender-neutral. There’s no use of any gendered pronouns in the game, which makes their gender whatever the player decides they are. This way, players are more likely to think of the PC as the same gender as them, making the storyline feel more personalized.

Now, gender isn’t the only thing that makes a character feel relatable. Behavior and personality play a huge role in this as well. To work with this, I wrote the narration as fairly general, but still customizable. Players have the option to make a few simple decisions during their trip that play a role in narration later on. For example, towards the beginning of the game, the player can choose whether to double-check their bags or just leave the house. This decision doesn’t affect the ending at all, but at a specific point in the game, they’ll either discover that they forgot something (getting some mildly frustrated narration) or they’ll get to use the item they remembered to grab. I wanted to use this as a narrative technique to give the player a little extra freedom to make choices, and ended up turning it into something to further help players identify with the PC.

Last, but certainly not least, is name customization. When starting the game, players can put in any name of their choice. Of course, not every player is going to input their actual name, but the hope is that players who do use their name, or at least something they identify with, will find it satisfying to have each postcard signed by them. Custom names are a really simple way to add that extra touch of personalization to a game, and that was crucial for With Love.

With Love can be found on itch.io! https://across-violet-skies.itch.io/with-love