Hello! Thank you for blogging about our game! It's been really insightful, and I'm very grateful you took the time to write up so much about our little game. I'm really happy you enjoyed the ambiance and aesthetic of the game.
If you're interested in the details, I can provide some background on the game as a project. (This is mostly because you mentioned you were curious but don't feel the need to read this entire wall of text, lol)
This was a somewhat academic foray into narrative based game development for me. It was me and the artist seeing if we could actually get something done in a month while working our day jobs (also in game development, but in an entirely different genre).
I chose not to use third party plugins because I wanted to try to build a story system myself. It definitely isn't as polished as if we had used a pre-built solution, but I also wasn't sure how extensible pre-built solutions would be if we decided to add something really off -the-rails, like, I don't know, floating text that runs away from your cursor to reveal different parts of the story. Definitely not something that fits the VN genre, but that was one of the things on my mind at the start of the project. Ultimately too ambitious though LOL.
I personally wanted to learn 3 things out of the project; how to write custom Unity editor tools, how to build my own story system, and how to use Unity's 2D lighting package to achieve interesting effects. So that was my focus for the project. I can't speak for the artist but I think they mostly focused on creating the character assets. They also did the bulk of the writing. I contributed edits and suggestions. Because neither of us are writers, so there's definitely valid criticism to be made (The first part of the story was written in the very beginning of the game jam, and the after-transition part was written at the end. There definitely is a bit of a disconnect, like you mentioned)
I think for the next project, if it were to be a VN, we would go with a pre-built solution and also try to get a dedicated writer/designer. That being said, doing this game this way definitely allowed me personally to learn a lot that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
And that's pretty much how it went down. Thanks again for writing about this game! I think feedback is really eye-opening, and it's always great seeing the little details you put into a game get noticed.