With love, PRINCESS

Shake Your Destiny Postmortem

Shake Your Destiny was made by me, PRINCESS INTERNET CAFé. I don't think anyone is going to be surprised by that fact. However, I wasn't alone!

As usual, KentuckyFriedDreams was incredibly helpful with the editing and proofreading of the game. And that's not all! He also made some of the art (the symbols you come across, the cover art...) for the game, including the super cool "Shake Your Destiny" animation. I was so pleased with it.

We also had the pleasure to collaborate with Renkon from Nice Gear Games. Renkon wrote some of the text in the initial route and contributed with a lot of concepts that were pivotal to the plot of the game. Including character names! Shake Your Destiny would've been a very different game without Renkon. And they also were a great play-tester!

And that's the full lineup! The three of us made Shake Your Destiny.

The game won the Morphogenetic Resonance award. A nice nod to the Zero Escape series, which was a heavy influence for the game. The award was made by computermilk.

LITHOBREAKERS award

The Concept

For people that are curious, this is the origin of Shake Your Destiny:

SHAKE YOUR DESTINY NEW PUSH UP JEANS

What you can see above is a photo I took back in May 2022 in Westfield Parquesur Shopping Centre in Leganés. KFD and I were leisurely walking around the place, as he noticed this sentence written on the shop window of a jeans shop. We thought it was hilarious and kinda cool. So I made a mental note that sometime, someday, I'd make a game called Shake Your Destiny. That day is now.

It truly was the sentence "Shake Your Destiny" that sparked the original concept of the game. With the whole game being build around it. The inspiration for the game was a fucking sentence on a jeans shop window LOL

But now that is out of the way, what does it mean to "shake your destiny"?

LIGHT SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT ONWARDS. PLEASE PLAY THE GAME BEFORE YOU READ

Shake Your Destiny as an antithesis of A Requiem for Richland Mall

Look, I just wanted to make another game with Lanzhu Zhong. Okay? Also, I'll preface this now: The reason why I aged them up is because I wanted to write Lanzhu being drunk. Then it worked wonderfully too: as having 3 teenagers being involved in a murder case would've been kinda traumatic fro them and I didn't want that. They are like my daughters, you know? So they are all over 18.

Writing A Requiem for Richland Mall was super fun and I wanted to make another game with the girlies. I love the dynamic they have. Also, using them as characters and being able to recycle their sprites and animations would allow me to not have to worry about visuals for the game1.

By the way, this is the first mockup I put together:

Mockup of Shake Your Destiny, with Lanzhu standing in front of the Tochiman. The text is a Lorem Ipsum placeholder

But going back to the question... what does it mean to "shake your destiny"?

Honestly, I wasn't too sure. I wanted to do something radically different to the main mechanic of Richland Mall. The PoV swapping mechanic was great (and I think it's still underdeveloped), but I wanted to make something new and fun. A step up. If Richland Mall heavily relied on making choices (in 2 dimensions: having the correct character selected, and then choosing an option at certain points) to get to the True End... What would the opposite look like? A game where your choices don't matter?

So I thought of a concept where the plot would revolve around several parallel timelines (let's just called them A, B, and C) and from time to time the game would force you to jump to a different timeline. If you were in Timeline A, suddenly destiny would shake and now you were in Timeline C. So the more you played the game, and with each play-through, you'd have to figure out the sequence of events in each timeline and piece the 3 stories little by little.

The more I thought about it, the more I disliked the idea. People would absolutely HATE it. So I scrapped it. However, I did like the concept of fairly distinct timelines, which made it into the game.

After some thought, I went back to the "A game where your choices don't matter". Which ultimately led me to a game where the branching is caused by the NPCs making choices, and you have no say in them. I really liked that. That was the opposite of Richland Mall.

Going back to what shaking your destiny means: I considered the concept of "Next Destination" in public transport as a visual metaphor for Destiny. I could have a game were each scene is its little stop in a train line or something... A game using storylets.

And "shaking" could be looked at in two ways:

  1. A play-through were all available scenes are shaken inside a (metaphorical) bag at runtime. Then they are picked one by one, at random to build a "timeline" of events.
  2. Shaking Your Destiny in the sense of shaking a die before you roll it. By shaking your destiny to get to re-roll the next "destiny": what scene you get in the next "stage" (or chapter, as it ended up in the game) from all the available options.

I had done something like like #1 in Airtime Media, so it didn't take me long to figure out how to do #2 and implement both things. It was actually super easy to put together in Python LOL

Below is a schema of how #1 works, #2 was just simply a re-roll and replace job.

A simplified version of how a Destiny/playthrough is generated

Shake Your Destiny was going to have "sister" games

Aside from the main mechanic that I just explained, another thing I wanted to I wanted do was an ARG. In their stream of A Requiem for Richland Mall, at some point Renkon thinks the game is an ARG and started checking my socials for clues... I thought that idea was super cool and I really wanted to make an ARG game for their sake.

The very concept I came up with was more of a thriller: Someone dies in an inn, and the killer leaves a calling card with some sort of symbol. This card leads the MC into discovering the existence of a cult, created around this very old video game.

If this prompt sounds very specific, it's because before the actual theme for the jam was announced I reviewed the top 5 themes that would most likely be chosen, and came up with something that would fit all of them. Sneaky, but I believe in pre-planning my games thoroughly!

And as a part of this, I was originally planning on making three (3), games for this jam: Shake Your Destiny as the main central piece; a shoot 'em up as a collab with someone whose name I will not reveal; and then a micro-game as some sort of diary for one of the characters in Shake Your Destiny.

Games #2 and #3 would provide extra context and allow the player to discover easter eggs in Shake Your Destiny. I was also sneaky about it and collaborator from game #2 had no idea this was my plan all along. I thought it'd be cool if they played Shake Your Destiny and the found out that the game we'd made was referenced in another game. However, they ended up being super busy and had to drop from the jam, which in retrospective was the best for Shake Your Destiny as it allowed me more time to work on it.

In the end, I managed to rework everything I had in mind for game #2 in SYD. You know what I'm talking about if you've played the game. As a response to this, I dropped game #3 too because once the jam theme was announced I didn't need it anymore. If you are part of LITHOBREAKERS, you should know what prospective theme I am alluding to.

Shake Your Destiny is a response to Umineko, AI: The Somnium Files and Enigma of Fear

As part of the fallout from having to drop the sister games, the ARG element became puzzles inside the game that you would need the outside (real) world to solve. Is that an ARG? I don't know! However...

Shake Your Destiny is the antithesis to A Requiem for Richland Mall for a second reason: While the latter was a game I made specifically for me, SYD is a game I made for my friends to play. For almost a year now, my IRL friend group has gotten together almost once a week to stream games and play them as a group. One of these games was Enigma of Fear2. So I made this game as a way to "give back", a little thank-you gift. Add this to wanting to make an ARG for Renkon, and this was indeed a game I made for other people.

But I also wanted to bring a little bit more of me. I've always wanted to write a murder mystery after the first time that I played Umineko no Naku Koro ni (in the early 2010s using the fan translation, those were the times). While I didn't finish the game at that point (the individual chapters were still being released), it always stuck with me. The format of introducing different topics (philosophical, literary, etc.) as part of the conversation between characters and later use them to drive the narrative blew my mind. Years later, I played the Zero Escape games, and they resonated with me in a very similar manner (especially Virtue's Last Reward). Only with the extra element of taking knowledge from a "route" and applying it to another one. Some people like metroidvanias, I like this very specific kind of visual novel.

Th-this is my hole! It was made for me! from that Jung Ito manga

I have been reading a few of the literary classics of murder mystery lately. Especially the Miss Marple books. And I found this kind of cosy mystery more fitting to me - as opposed to hardboiled fiction. I am actually super squeamish, you see? Also, when the jam started I didn't feel ready to make a murder mystery. Originally I just wanted to make a psychological thriller. It was going to be less work and I could leave the ending kinda open ended. Or several endings, even? However, once I started plotting up the series of events, and all of the scenes, the game started looking more and more like a murder mystery. So I fully committed to it. And it seems like I was indeed ready to write a murder mystery. One like Umineko's.

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the topics the game covers came up in conversations with Renkon. Obon and its spookiness, the rokuyō... Things that heavily influence the mood of the game and series of events. Aside from Umineko, the symbolism and mysticism came from, of course, all the Uchikoshi games I've played in the past. In fact, I started playing AI The Somnium Files: NirvanA Initiative just as the jam started to get my mind in the groove. However, I stopped playing it halfway so it wouldn't influence my writing too much3.

Shake Your Destiny is my best game to date

It is also the kind of game I've always wanted to make. The kind of game I started developing games for. What I have always strived for.

It is also a very bad LITHOBREAKERS game, I've come to realise, because of 3 things:

  1. It's long4, and I explicitly made it clear in the project page. This is in contrast to most of the LBK games so far, which are condensed pills of goodness with immediate effect. Shorter games no longer than... 30 minutes? Shake Your Destiny is a slow burn, and therefore ill-suited for LITHOBREAKERS. I believe most people found its length off-putting. I am so proud of this game and the fact that I put it together in 6 weeks. But I don't think I'll be making a game this long for the jam ever again.
  2. It is hard. Some of the puzzles are actually harder than I thought LOL Only people that are Uchikoshi- or Ryukishi07-pilled would find the game easy, I think.
  3. It also relies on a lot of gimmicks that need you to play the executable, instead of a web build. I did go out of my way to make the game fully playable on web, but a lot of the charm is lost5...

However, I hope that people who stuck to it were able to find joy in the game. I won't lie, I was cackling at some points while making it. I am so proud of this game.

The game has a few flaws, of course. I had to cut 3 scenes and 2 characters from the script. There were a few more topics I wanted to discuss in the game. The game has no SFX when it should have (to the point there 1 scene when the MC seemingly knows there's someone by the front door because the doorbell was meant to ring LOL). There were a few things my "destiny builder" function was able to do that I never got to use: like adding extra scenes to the list of available scenes based on previous actions.

I'd like to explore this setting, and characters a bit more. So it is highly likely that this jam build isn't the last version of Shake Your Destiny.

I have lots more to talk about the game, choices I made and other little details. But that is out of scope for this postmortem. If you want talk more about them, feel free to reach out. Thank you for reading up to this point.

With love,

PRINCESS

  1. This logic was flawed but I won't go into details here.

  2. I found some of the puzzles really cool so I literally stole one of them for Shake Your Destiny LOL

  3. I still stole a puzzle almost literally from this game, though (and probably made it much more difficult LOL)

  4. Funnily enough, it's actually 2000 words shorter than the whole length of Zøe's Zone, but most people that have played ZZ haven't realized they've missed like 2/3s of the game LOL By the way, did I mention that aside from Shake Your Destiny I made Zøe's Zone with Stanwixbuster and computermilk? LMAO

  5. The little things that pop out from time to time