Patrick Gardner

This comparative essay breaks through the bounds of comparison to provide some insights into how different cultures employ nostalgia in their games. In it, I've chosen to compare Butterfly Soup: a linear visual novel about four ethnically diverse girls trying to find themselves in a Californian high school set in 2008, with Tokimeki Memorial: A dating sim with visual novel elements that has you going to an idealized Japanese high school set in 1995 in order to fall in love with one of fourteen girls who attend.

This comparison lends itself well because it compares two games that were released in similar economic environments whose downturns led to similar yearnings to return to an idealized past. What each idealized high school looks like, and what either game does and doesn't shy away from their mutual goals of evoking nostalgia from the minds of the players, is at the core of this comparison and contrast.

The essay itself is formatted to be approachable for general audiences who don't know anything about the niche video game genre that is the visual novel. I employ this by using visual rhetoric (in the form of pictures and a GIF) and by summarizing the cultural contexts of when both games released. Japan is given more attention because it's history and development of the visual novel as a genre isn't as well known.

Terminal Panacea is a visual novel demo developed using Twine: a software program meant for users to easily craft interactive fiction. It only took me a few months of learning Twine (which was my first time learning any programming language in general) to understand that Twine as a game engine is way more powerful than at first glance. It can render images, play music, and get the player to interact in a variety of ways! All while being approachable to those who don't know a lick about coding.

My game demo wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Horror adventure novel games like 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors also feature escape room segments that require the player to solve them to move onto the visual novel story segments. What separates Terminal Panacea from games like 999, however, is how it utilizes Twine in unorthodox ways to achieve the look and feel of an adventure game, as well as how it uses its unique third person point of view to draw the player into the environment.

"Moon Logic" puzzles, or puzzles that don't use objects that would naturally be found in the established game word, have plagued adventure games since their inception. Games like Harvester and The Mystery of the Druids have been made fun of in retrospect because they feature puzzles in which the solution ends up being centered around clicking just the right set of pixels in the right order. Even the puzzle design of 999 or its sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, stretches the definition of mimetic puzzle design, but both games get away with it because the puzzles are extremely intertwined with their narratives. Terminal Panacea balances on this tightrope by choosing to showcase items that could be found in a hospital, and if a key or pack of silica gel shows up, they're given clear hintsto hint the player at their importance.

Try it out for yourself! If you'd like to see my Call to Artists video first, which doubles as a short trailer, click the "Watch Trailer" button. To quit the game at any time. Hit Esc on your keyboard and select the quit game option from the menu and you will return here. Note that returning here resets all progress!!

This completed comic strip details out the first issue of a comic that centers around an anthropomorphic tribal frog who comes to terms with his brother's sudden and violent passing via agreeing with a lightning struck mycelium deity to share its newly formed body with the spirit of brother. That long winded breakdown had to be told in twenty-four comic pages while strictly adhering to comic guidelines. This means one action per panel, 5-7 panels per page, and you can't have too many words in dialogue, or your entire panel becomes speech balloon.

Drafting and revising this comic script was a test of my skill to be able to communicate everything that I wanted to see through words only. To put it in today's context: It's like being able to successfully prompt an AI exactly what you want in an image, and work with it back and forth to eventually develop a finished creative work. This is something I had to do myself when it came to fleshing out potential ideas and generating a visual reference for one of the characters. While I prefer human hands on human art, I understand that being able to successfully communicate with both is sought more after than one over the other.

I knew nothing about comics before I took a single class , and by the end of the course, as well as some extra revisions later, I've developed what you see here: a testament to just how fast I can adapt my writing style to different genres by being given a little bit of guidance and a chance to succeed.