Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know

📍 Austin, TX (US)

🏷️ Video Games

"A modern visual novel made with love, of course."

(The demo is the best way to know if you are going to be interested in the final product.)

Details

Young adulthood. Failed romance. Baseball. These are but a few topics that are discussed in Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know.

This is a visual novel, but expect a certain level of mechanical depth. Inspired heavily by VA-11 Hall-A and Undertale, you can expect more complexity than VA-11 Hall-A, but less than Undertale.

You won't only be reading a playing baseball. There are many different systems to interact with throughout the novel.

It is also worth noting that the novel has no fail screens, if that is something interesting to you:)

Characters

Inspirations

Undertale: Heavily influenced the philosophy of minimalism found in Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know visuals. "For every pixel shown on screen, one is taken from the mind" is my philosophy. It is worth noting that Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know, unlike Undertale, is designed neither as primarily a comedy nor as a deconstructionist piece (though elements of both may be present).

Off: While, strangely enough, the protagonist's design was not directly influenced by Off, much of the novel's experimental design was influenced by Off and RPG Maker games of its era, such as Yume Nikki or Lisa.

VA-11 Hall-A: The structure of the novel was heavily influenced by VA-11 Hall-A. Va-11 Hall-A is also the novel that made me understand the untapped potential of the Visual Novel genre in the modern era.

Love-de-Lic: The “slightly off” tonality of Love-de-Lic’s works heavily influences Everything I Know, and Everything I’m Ever Gonna Know. Both Moon and, especially, Chulip shaped much of the character dialogue and overall personality of the novel.

Susumu Hirasawa: Musical stylings were heavily influenced by the works of Susumu Hirasawa.

The Brothers Karamazov: I was reading this novel throughout the production of Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know, and it influenced the novel to have a much broader tonal bandwidth.dialogue

Asheville, North Carolina: The setting and themes were heavily inspired by a year in which I stayed here.

Philosophy

As someone who grew up with video games, loving the mechanical variation from title to title, I've grown tired of what is being showcased... In order to solve this, I am attempting to introduce a new genre, the "modern visual novel", of which Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know is an example.

This genre is characterized by the following:

• Reading of text is the primary user action.
• Obstacles branch rather than halt nor reverse the user's progress.
• Rules 1 and 2 may be occasionally be broken if doing so provides clear narrative intent.

With these rules, I hope to allow for greater mechanical sophistication. I know these may not intuitively allow for mechanical variation ("Reading of text is the primary user action"???), but I promise there's a theory behind it all. A theory in which I hope to share on socials as time progresses. I truly believe these are the rules that are necessary for video games to "grow up". (Not that games that do not follow these rules are not valuable -- they are! -- I just long for the medium to get that next big "bump" of maturity.)

Note on Content

This is not a novel designed for children. That's not to say that I have not been intentional when covering heavy topics (religion, fornication, purpose, etc.), but this is not a novel for everyone at every stage of life. It is important to me that no one is surprised when reading this novel... There is at least one "shock" moment, but the intent is not to sensationalize. At least, not more than is necessary for the story...

Technical Details

NOTE: This is specifically for developers or enthusiasts interested in non-standard processes.

Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know is being developed without a game engine. Instead, we've opted to use the Raylib game development framework to aid development.

The program is also written primarily in C99, with additional custom scripting languages for unique behavior and dialogue. Yes, this means Everything I Know, and Everything I'm Ever Gonna Know is not primarily written with object oriented patterns. It is more similarly produced to pre-2000s era video games than the video games of today. Part of the reasoning for doing this was to based on the belief that the qualities of a product are heavily influenced by process... If I feel like some magic was lost in early 3D video games, why not reflect the process that created them?