Sam's Follow-Up Commentary on Demon Hunt

If you're reading this, I assume that you've already played all 5 Chapters of my visual novel, Demon Hunt. (If not, go ahead and browse my gallery, because they're all in there) As the creator of DH, I can only hope that you the player have enjoyed them, or at least found some entertainment to kill time.

About the Game

Now there's a lot I have to say now that the whole game has been finished, and a lot of it has to do with the fact Demon Hunt is only the beginning of a big story saga I've been planning for a long time. I'll also be discussing the characters and whole story of the visual novel briefly so those that are still new to the whole thing can catch up.

Let's start with the background info!

Demon Hunt takes place in the fantasy world of Reflection, a land where demons and humans live in high tensions. This world is made up of several islands, and the most infamous of them is Xsainu, where the King of Demons, Chisoku, has been sealed away a century ago. This evil tyrant was released from his seal by two cursed demons named Dreymeil and Eclipse. The trio soon took control of the kingdom again, and are currently rebuilding it. Prior to the events of the game, Chisoku is attacked by an incubus known as Void, and is nearly defeated. With the help of Dreymeil and Eclipse, they are able to lock Void away in the dungeon below their castle and bind off his powers.

Now introduce our main character: A young demon slayer girl named Cisaya, who had traveled from another island to Xsainu to slay the demons. Cisaya has no idea what she's getting herself into, and as the player decides on her options and interactions, she ends up getting tangled within the events happening at the castle. She finds herself growing closer to each of the demons and getting involved in their lives.  

And there you have it, the main plot of the game. I won't get into too much detail about what happens, because that would be spoiling the good stuff.

What I would  like to talk about though is the whole premise of the story, and a bit about Cisaya's role. Although from first glance, people often mistake my visual novel as a 'dating sim' (even though there's no simulating or real dating to be done...), there is actually very little romance between the characters.

Overall, Cisaya acts as a window for the player to see into the world of Demon Hunt. She says very little about herself, and is instead focused on those around her. I've had people comment on how she's a very 'empty' character or is a 'self-insert', but that was originally SUPPOSED to be her role. She is the balance and order to the chaos of the demons around her, and her presence is meant to kickstart the development and change in the others.

The basis of the interactions are to build friendship, and throughout the game, friendship and companionship are displayed by the boys as they interact with each other as well. Cisaya spends perhaps only half of each path actually speaking with her chosen demon, and the other half exploring the castle, talking with the others, or listening to her 'man' talking with someone else. Cisaya herself is the newcomer, and as a result, she often acts as an observer to the scenarios going on.

While she learns much about each boy by talking and spending time with them, she is also able to find out much more about them from their friends or rivals. How the boys interact with Cisaya greatly differs from how they interact with each other, and this provides access to the many different sides of each. She also gains knowledge about their pasts and motives that she would have otherwise never been able to pry into by speaking to them directly.

Anyways, enough about FRIENDSHIP. Another big theme in Demon Hunt is Good vs Evil, which has been skewed very differently in each path. Due to the main cast being made up with 'evil' demons, you would think it's obvious that Cisaya's the only 'good' guy in the whole thing. However, each demon contains both a good and evil side, which is what causes Cisaya to hesitate in her mission to fight them. The demons themselves are surprisingly humane and treat her with (mostly) mutual respect. Most of their evil stems from their past deeds and motives, rather than in their actual actions in the game. In the end, it is up to the player to decide who is truly good and evil in their own mind.  

And lastly, one of my favourite themes in the game is Redemption. Due to the sins they have committed in the past, the demons are forced to suffer different curses given to them by 'Him'. They have all fallen from grace long ago, and have been shunned from the world and damned to a life of mostly solitude within the walls of Xsainu Castle. But what makes a demon different than any other person, aside from the weight of their sins? And are demons allowed to be forgiven? That's something that the player must also decide, as they watch the different struggles of each of the boys.

The Making Of Demon Hunt

The Art
The art in Demon Hunt has not always been very... consistent. Throughout the making of the game, I changed and upgraded the character sprites 3 times, and changed many backgrounds. The original first version of Demon Hunt included traditionally drawn sprites that were coloured in Photoshop, along with backgrounds photographed by myself. After several months, every character was redrawn digitally with my tablet, as well as all of the backgrounds. For Chapter 1-4, the text is much larger, but this changed in Chapter 5 as the dialogue responses became longer. Chapter 5 has a lot of new art, including cutscenes and short animations. All of the graphics were drawn outside of Flash and imported in, making the art unique from other flash games that use vectors drawn in the program. I like to think that my style evolved over time, and that it looks decent and unique enough to separate it from other anime-manga styles.

In addition to upgrading my art, I also changed the designs of the characters with each upgrade. While I kept each character's trademark colour scheme, their outfits become much more detailed to express their personalities as well. Yet at the same time, they all wear outfits that match the culture and fashion of their time and place in Reflection.

The Music
All of the themes in the game were made and recorded by myself, using the old digital piano I have. While it still works fine, the piano can only record songs onto old fashioned floppy disks, which my current laptop has no slot for. As a result, I had to record the songs with a separate microphone, which isn't great for capturing music in its full quality obviously. All of the music was improvised too, which is why they're all rather short.

Most of the sound effects used were downloaded from royalty free sites, but often required a lot of editing to suit their purposes in the game. Still, it was definitely worth it, as the music and sounds added to the environment of the game, and matched the different moods I was going for with each scene.

The Voices
As everyone knows, probably one of the biggest things that sets Demon Hunt apart from most free flash games and visual novels online is that it has a fully voiced cast. The process of adding voices into the game wasn't too difficult, although there were definitely a LOT of lines. My job was to script out all of the dialogue from the game and send it to each voice actor. Then I would usually wait a couple weeks for them to record each line separately, and then work on editing them to remove noise, amplify the volume, change the format and all of that. It's definitely tedious, but again, completely worth it since everyone seems to enjoy listening to the characters talk.

To me, the voices definitely add a lot of life to the game. I was fortunate enough to be friends with most of the voice actors, and be able to meet the talented man who auditioned for Void. Cisaya's, Eclipse's and Chisoku's voice actors had already been long time friends of mine and I was already aware of their talents when it comes to voice acting. Dreymeil's voice actor was a more recent friend, but he ended up being one of my closest supporters and the main man who spawned many silly extra flashes. The main cast definitely worked hard, recording several hundred lines for me. We also had some talented voice actors who played several other supporting characters in the games and showcased their variety of talents. I am especially pleased by how everyone's voices seem to really match my characters, and it's hard to imagine having any different voice actors now.

The Writing
Since I started Demon Hunt, I never had a solid idea of how I wanted the game to go, aside from that I wanted Cisaya to learn more about the demons. Most of the dialogue would be made up as I made the game, and the finalized scripts were made after all of the dialogue was inputted. However as time went on, I managed to develop the story around the two central conflicts of the game. For Chapter 5, Void's voice actor and I collaborated on most of the paths to create different climaxes that I wouldn't have been able to come up with on my own.

Demon Hunt has many elements of being a fantasy, comedy, romance and action series, except most of the real action doesn't take place until the end. What was important for me though was to write each character differently to express their personality and their role to the story faithfully. Chisoku, Dreymeil and Eclipse have been my characters for a long time, and I've written many stories in the past with them, so they already had solid backgrounds and personalities, making them easier to work with. On the other hand, Cisaya and Void were created right before production of Demon Hunt, so I had to develop them along the way. By the end though, Cisaya and Void managed to get fleshed out to the point Demon Hunt couldn't even cover their entire stories.

The Coding, Editing, Testing and Optimization
Demon Hunt is only my second full flash game. The first one I made several years ago was a truer dating sim, that was created within the span of a month. As a result, I already had some basic knowledge of how flash worked and some simple codes from that earlier project. Of course, making a button click and sprites move around was just the tip of the iceberg. I went from knowing about 3 codes to learning about 50 through tutorials online and lots, lots, LOTS of testing. As a visual novel, Demon Hunt is fairly simplistic, and I couldn't add all of the flash features that I wanted to (though that might have been going overboard). Overall, the game really is just a click-and-read kind of them, so coding wasn't too huge of a problem.

Editing and testing go hand-in-hand, because of all the mistakes I have to fix up each time I find something wrong. These could be anything from misbehaving buttons, misspelling in codes, graphic glitches, sound glitches and more. Every time I added some new frames to the game, I would usually have to test it from the beginning all the way until the new part. And of course, there's always room for improvement if I don't like how something is. I found myself going back to redraw a lot of art and fix many things that were already working perfectly fine, simply because I wanted it to be better.

The last thing that Demon Hunt required was a nice optimization, because its SWF file sizes were too large to upload to dA. I remember in the beginning, how I was furious over the fact Chapter 1 went over the 30 MB limit on this site. I spent a lot of time looking for other sites that could host big flash games, but the rest of them only accepted games that were even smaller. That forced me to split Demon Hunt into the chapters we have today, instead of being one big game like I had originally planned on. Chapter 1-4 all came close to the 30 MB limit, but were small enough to fit without any optimization. Unfortunately, with the sheer length and size of each of the Chapter 5 endings, I saw the flash files group to above 40 MB EACH. In order to solve the pressing issue of how to upload the game to dA, I began looking at flash optimizing programs online. Most of them offered free trials, that left ugly watermarks over my games, or turned them black and white. It took several months before I found a reliable optimizer that could compress my games without messing them up too much. It left a noticeable watermark in the corner of the games, but I managed to get rid of that several months later too. In the end, the optimizer did exactly what I needed it to, compressing the games down below 30 MB and still keeping most of their original quality. (It also caused a bunch of glitches to happen, but that's another story)

The Fans

It's hard to believe how many people have found Demon Hunt and started watching me since this project started. Back in the day, I had told my few fans that if I got to 100 watchers, I would make a dating sim. Now, just a few years alter, I have nearly 1000 watchers, and so many new friends because of this project.

Demon Hunt has always been something for the fans. It was never something I planned to make for myself. I wanted to please you guys, because I'm always so thankful for all of the support I receive on dA. Many of you have been with me long before I started this whole thing, and many more of shown up since then. It's really crazy to me how big the whole thing has gotten, and I really can't thank you guys enough.

I honestly feel like I have the nicest group of watchers ever? It's strange because I don't think I really deserve it. My experience on deviantart has been almost nothing but positive. I think that if it wasn't for you all, I wouldn't have nearly put even half the effort I did into making the game what it is. Although I'm always happy to express my ideas and bring my characters to life, it wouldn't be worth much if there wasn't someone else to enjoy it too. So like I said, you guys are great, and I just really hope you appreciate me as much as I appreciate you.

In Conclusion...

There's really nothing left for me to say, and if you have read this far, you deserve a sticker. Overall, Demon Hunt has been a great experience. I would even say life-changing, since it has taken away so many hours of my life haha. It was worth every day, hour and second though, since I have been able to meet a lot of amazing people, and do something that's a lot bigger than myself. The world of magic and demons that had only existed in my mind is now something that others can see and experience, and that makes me so happy.

As the creator of Demon Hunt, all there's left to say is thank you to everyone who's played the game, and everyone else who helped make it. I have only a few faint ideas of what projects I want to pursue in the future, so believe me, this is only the beginning.