The Game
Seeds of Love is a hybrid visual novel/rhythm game about gay love and farming, developed in 2018-2019 by the UCSC Game Developer and Artist Collaboration. The game follows Maria, a stressed out college student, as she moves to her abuela’s farm to try and escape the stresses of college life. As she learns the meaning of hard work from her abuela, Rosa, she starts to grow close to Sunny, a girl that she meets at the local bar. Seeds of Love is about meeting new people, trying new things, and messing up… a lot. Your performance in the rhythm game segments determines Maria’s mood, which affects how she interacts with the people around her in the visual novel. You can also choose how Maria responds to certain situations through selecting dialogue options in the visual novel portions of the game.
An example of the way that a scene’s dialogue would be formatted behind the scenes.
My Role
My contribution to Seeds of Love was the visual novel system with branching capabilities. This system works by reading in a specially formatted text file that has been formatted like a screenplay for the current scene. The game writers specify who is speaking, what they say, what character pose to use, and what side of the screen this character should be on, as well as whether or not the line should prompt the player to choose a dialogue option or not. This screenplay also specifies when certain characters enter and exit the scene, along with triggering the transition from the current Unity scene into the next one. This system manages all of the character art, the visual novel UI, and the visual novel text blip audio. Because I designed the visual novel system incredibly generically, once it was implemented it could be put into any scene and given any screenplay and character art to generate a polished visual novel sequence, allowing for us to expand the scope of our game far beyond what we had initially hoped to accomplish.
