The Free Game I Made

I've talked about it on here a few times before, but I made a visual novel that I decided to make free a few months ago. It's called Atlas Ablaze, on steam and itch.io for windows.

Description on Steam:

Atlas Ablaze is a visual novel that follows a girl named Andi as she discovers how it feels to yearn to know someone the way you know yourself. It's a story about a coming of age, sonder feelings, the acceptance of change and simply owning up to being human.

She's a 16 year old who finds herself falling in love with a young sex worker as she's simultaneously dealing with a sharp decline in her mental health. Her lack of experience in relationships not only affects her love life, but her friendships as well. As she begins to understand how it feels to care for people so much that love becomes your crutch, she also realizes just how many people care for themselves more than anyone else.

Acting as somewhat of a subconscious or an imaginary friend, you can help Andi make choices in her day to day life, influencing the way she interacts with the people around her. There are many different characters you can meet, some of which have secrets to be discovered. If your humor is warped to a point where you can't explain why any of it is funny anymore, living inside Andi's mind might be exactly what you need.

-Disclaimer: None of the characters, including the sex workers, are meant to be sexualized-

This game is my baby, something I had been writing since 2019 and developed for years with literally NO game development knowledge. I didn't learn to become a game developer, I learned to make this story interactive in a way where it could branch off into different directions. Originally it was gonna be a book and I'm actually slowly working on writing it back into a book, or maybe a trilogy. It'll have side plots about Andi's entire friend group and go deeper into some of the feelings both Andi and Iris have during their relationship.

Although the plot itself is dark, the humor is really, REALLY stupid. It's heavily based off my sense of humor when I was 17, since this game takes place in 2017. The characters are a bunch of idiots who cope with their problems with a horrible sense of humor :)

I found a lot of importance in making them actually FEEL like kids too. I HATEEE the way a lot of popular show and movies treat teenagers like mini adults. These kids are annoying, cringy and they try too hard to be edgy sometimes.

They're also emotional and vulnerable. They're meant to be taken seriously while you're still able to acknowledge that they don't really grasp the severity of some of the things going on around them. They block out their trauma with parties and poop jokes while there's still heavy expectations on them to grow up.