I wasn't expecting to see a visual novel in SBIG Jam. This might be the first one, in fact, though I'm not 100% sure about that.
I'm still not sure what to think about this one. Was it so bad it's good? I'm not sure. The premise is absurd, the dialogue is crude and coarse, and it (I think) riffs hard on romance manga. On the other hand, the story is surprisingly heartwarming, and the graphics, audio, and overall presentation are quite good.
Whatever it was, I enjoyed it.
Thank you for playing my game! I am more of a writer and music composer than a game developer so I stick to my strengths.
Because this game is a visual novel, it's not really something you can judge on gameplay, so for the "so bad it's good" premise, I decided to take this onto the writing. I think when people talk about things being so bad that they're good, I believe they talk about how that work is presented to the audience. To give a very broad example, media like Resident Evil have a basic idea that could be considered very basic and unsellable - RE4 is about a guy stuck in Spain full of zombies trying to save the President's daughter (lol) which is ridiculous on paper, but this is because the ideas never matter. While the idea of the game at its core is stupid, the dialogue and story are cheesy, funny, and don't take themselves seriously. When I think of RE4's story and the characters, I think the idea is very bad but the funny dialogue makes it good.
In the case of Breaking Out of My Shell, my process was to hinder myself with the worst possible idea I could use for a visual novel, which I decided to make one of those stereotypical "content" kinds of mangas that have massive, weird titles in them, while giving the main character a terrible rule that makes their dialogue awful (excessive and unneeded swearing in this case). In return, I needed to put a heavy focus on the execution of the game in order for it to succeed, which is why I put a lot of focus on characterful dialogue, character designs, the flow of the gameplay and the audio. I'm happy that you managed to find enjoyment in this because that was the goal of the project: "how do I get this terrible game idea and make it enjoyable?" It's very hard to make gold out of clay but I managed to get through.
