I'm taking your heart, Cadi!

Promotional Art
Gameplay Still-frame
Tony Cadi
Sonia Online
Weenee the Poo

Promotional Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJGHm6189lY&ab_channel=SirVulpix

More "I'm taking your heart, Tony!" Gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL7--Is_u3g&ab_channel=SirVulpix

We wanted to make the visual novel easy to play, so we're planning on making an itch.io page. Link will be in comments.

Inspiration

Visual Novels/Dating Simulators Specifically "I love you Colonel Sanders"; it's bizarre yet intriguing storyline. Our (very eccentric) scriptwriter for this work attempted to utilize the same energy to make a small parody of our very own PEP program (of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with USYD's, I swear). This light-hearted story is not to be taken seriously, but to be enjoyed for a bit of a laugh.

How we built it

Visual Novels have a few crucial elements; those being the gameplay, the script to maintain, the audio and music to influence the mood, and the graphics visualize the characters for the player. We had a separate script that would be read in and played, with key dialogue choices separated when appropriate. In total, we have about 400 lines of dialogue, 6 different backdrops, 14 character sprites, and 5 music tracks, all compiled in this one work of art.

Challenges we ran into

"I'm taking your heart, Cadi!" was very demanding in terms of the resources we needed; a long script in order to maintain a decent chunk of gameplay, and a mechanic that allows the user to choose between different choices: this allows the user to have something more interactive than just a glorified slideshow of images.

These final choices lead to 2 different endings! Explore both of these to find out how they end!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting the bulk of it done in one day. Each of us have been slaving away trying to get each section done, as to not let the others down. This was our motivation and driving-factor to get it all finished in time.

What we learned

Visual novels take a long time to perfect, but once you get the hang of it, it starts getting easier. It was definitely a great experience for all of us to collaborate through separate mediums and bring it all together to create one final masterpiece.

What's next for I'm taking your heart, Cadi!

Obviously, this whole project ran off a single running joke, so its hit the end of the road. Post game-jam, there might be a few polishes to add user quality of life, such as clickable buttons, a save feature, and volume control, but for the most part we are done.

That's to say this project is, but who knows, maybe we'll make another novel sometime!