the world needs the matryoshka doll of age gap yuri, where a girl, is attracted to a younger girl, who in turn is attracted to an even younger girl. I need to find a way to deliver this unto the people

- me, bluesky post, November 11, 2025

there's spoilers for The Angel Factory in this, if that wasn't clear, so if you didn't know that, go away, leave, and go PLAY IT. it's FREE on itch.io. it runs on probably whatever computer you have and also android! and if for some reason you don't want to download it or can't because you're using a chromebook or something I have a secret web build here. (however I cannot promise that it will not be broken)

uh. I guess general content warning for brief mentions of all the things that are in the game. sexuality and violence and whatnot. we warned about these things in the game. if you didn't play the game why are you still here...???? spoilers! go play game!

okay, you're back!... or you didn't leave. you're still reading. sigh... sure. i can't stop you. be a spoiler pervert

Concept

The idea that would metastasize into The Angel Factory came to me last year, while reading Yuzumori-san, a yuri manga about a high school girl who develops a crush on an elementary school girl, and said elementary school girl who reciprocates that crush.

I like Yuzumori-san a lot. It's a compelling story of two girls struggling with their sexual and romantic desires for one another, in a world hostile to those desires. And, yeah, homosexual romance stories are often already forbidden love stories, but come on, girls, it's the twenty-first century. We can get way spicier than just simply being gay. So, age gap!

If you read my blog post on our Toxic Yuri VN Jam entry from last year, Gravity House Duology, you'll know that I really enjoy age gap yuri. Which is why I've been writing it, obviously. My preference tends to be for adult/teen age gap stories because that hits me the most personally as someone whose sexual awakening was primarily centralized in their teen years, but I am a flexible pervert sicko, and I also quite like onee-loli yuri.

Onee-loli yuri- "onee" meaning "older sister", "loli" meaning, well, I mean, the Lolicon article on Wikipedia- is a subcategory of yuri that focuses on the relationship between an older girl and a younger girl, and specifically, a particularly small girl who fits the "loli" type. So, usually this means the younger girl is a child between the ages of 6 and 12, and the "onee" is generally either a young adult woman or a teenage girl.

I have a lot of lolicon friends who like this genre, and I think there's really something to it. I like the drama from an older girl feeling afraid of or apprehensive towards her desires for the younger girl. I like it when the younger girl is just becoming conscious of her own sexuality and feeling newly curious, while the older girl is trying to repress her own feelings. I like seeing these stories play on the age (and height!) difference to heighten tension or raise laughs. I like child characters who have interiority, who aren't necessarily pure and chaste in the way that children are usually portrayed.

In an adult-teen age gap yuri story, the teenage girl is often sexually active, or at the very least, actively sexual, and sexually interested in the older woman. Depending on where the story's set and how old she is, she might even be legal. But in an onee-loli story, it's not a given that the little girl character has any sexual feelings or knowledge (the conventional expectation, often contrary to reality, being that she doesn't), so the story can play into, with, or against that expectation.

All of this makes for really interesting dramatic friction, and I think it's compelling. And it's compelling in a different way, with a different flavor of drama, from teen-adult yuri stories. I'm not nearly as into it as much as my lolicon friends, like, it's not really my preferred flavor, I like fictional teenage girls and I probably always will, but it is nonetheless a flavor that I like and find fun and fascinating. It's good!

So, given that I like onee-loli, and also like adult-teen yuri, and enjoy both varieties of tension that these two different configurations of age gap yuri create, and also am what I would call an extreme polygamy cultist, the idea came naturally. I like Yuzumori-san, Wataten!, and Onee-san wa Joshi, and I also like My First Love's Kiss, Contract Sisters, and Hitozuma Kyoushi ga Oshiego no Joshikousei ni Dohamari Suru Hanashi. Why not combine them?

Hence, the matryoshka doll of age gap yuri.

I sat on the concept while we got to work on Codename: TYPHOON for the Ryona Yuri VN Jam, and then we finished Codename: TYPHOON for the Ryona Yuri VN Jam. And then the Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2 dates and prize pool were announced, and despite a plurality of the team being kind of burnt out and/or busy with other projects after the Ryona Jam, I didn't hesitate for even a minute. I tried my best to stir up as much of the Gravity House discord server as I could into gearing up for the jam, and then I set about devising the matryoshka doll.

The Matryoshka Doll

The first question you always have to answer with age gap stories, or at least, the first that comes to mind, is: how old exactly are your principal characters? The answer can change depending on the context of the story and its needs, and also how much you want to risk getting cancelled. Anyway, my answer was something like: the youngest girl is 8-12, teen girl is 15-17, and older woman is somewhere like, late twenties to early thirties. I also decided early on that they would be related, for bonus incest points!

Beyond that, my initial pitch was pretty different from what actually got made. The oldest girl would've been a mentally ill shut-in coasting by on the financial support of her distant parents. She'd meet a teenage girl online, become attracted to her, and because of undetermined plot contrivances, not know this girl was her niece. She would only find out after they encounter each other at a family reunion. Unfortunately her niece wouldn't reciprocate her affections, instead being interested in… her other, significantly younger, niece!

And after that, um… actually, I just kind of didn't know what happened after that. The implication that something terrible happens offscreen, most likely. I mean, since we can't actually show the child getting sexually assaulted. Probably.

kirin was open to the idea, but Ophelia was more apprehensive. She really didn't want to write an age gap story involving a younger girl, for fear of backlash and/or harassment. I told her I was open to aging the girls up a bit, or compromising in some other which way. She eventually agreed to help, but firmly stipulated that she be allowed to make the story as fucked up as possible, to squash as much possibility of it being taken the wrong way as could be done.

I agreed to this, because I mean, why wouldn't I? It's the toxic yuri jam, we obviously want it toxic and fucked up. She also said she would only do one draft, and no more, because Typhoon had taken a lot out of her, and she didn't want to do that again. I agreed to this as well, thinking that kirin would help.

And on this note, I should probably take a minute to introduce kirin.

Introducing kirin (麒麟)!

kirin is one of two core members of kirinkoumori, another doujin circle that submitted a game to the Toxic Yuri VN Jam of 2025— paranoia hyponoia.

Like Gravity House Duology, paranoia hyponoia harkened back to '00s/early '10s eroge. Like the Duology, paranoia hyponoia presented itself in 4:3— although while I went with the retro-modern resolution of 1440×1080, kirin and their team opted for the common throwback sizing of 800×600. Also like the Duology, paranoia hyponoia involved a lesbian shooting the people who ruined her lesbian relationship with a gun. But, unlike the Duology, which was developed by two Americans, one mixed-race Latino (me) and one white (Ophelia), kirin and koumori were Chinese, and paranoia hyponoia was set in Japan.

So back in July, after the jam's development period, kirin and I were both present in the official Toxic Yuri VN Jam discord server, each representing our respective team and their collective work. We played each other's games and both liked them. We got along pretty well, talked about other stuff we liked, and kirin offered to join our circle as an artist on a future project. We talked terms, the (lack of) budget, I convinced Ophelia to socialize, and then we created the Gravity House developer discord.

kirin proved to be reliable and amiable, and just as fervently passionate as Ophelia and I. So, the three of us worked together on Gravity House's second project, Letters to Rosa. With a script solely conceived and written by Ophelia (one of her best works ever, I might add), I took a creative backseat in the role of programmer and freely licensed asset finder, much as I had for Colony-Organism, while kirin created the game's sprites and a couple of event CGs. Overally, it went pretty well, although kirin struggled with drawing the two middle aged men characters.

paranoia hyponoia, and a later VN that kirin's team did called urara in satsuki, were both pretty fascinating to me. I really enjoyed their fixation on the eroticism of sapphic suffering, the unashamed edgy quality about them, the ways in which they portrayed their teenage characters as uncompromisingly vicious. Their joyful reveling in cute moe girls doing terrible things to one another— I just love all that. It's great fun and I thought kirin wrote it very entertainingly.

So I wanted, for our entry, to try and see if we could make something that was like those two VNs, and by extension, like the many "denpa" eroge of the mid-to-late 1990s to early 2010s or so that had inspired them. I figured kirin would most likely be able to come up with something like that just like they'd come up with the scripts for paranoia hyponoia and urara in satsuki, so I told them I wanted to be one of the co-writers on the project.

Seemed like fun, would probably help take the pressure off of Ophelia, and with our talents combined we'd get to have an even more denpa VN than the two separate ones we made last time! Couldn't imagine what could possibly go wrong with that.

kirin was open to the idea, and so, we set about brainstorming in our DMs.

The Korean Element

I was a little unsure on what direction exactly the story could or should take, until a DM with kirin sparked a new idea.

They recounted their high school experiences to me, involving a Korean classmate who had bullied them and peer pressured them into bullying others. A lot of their anecdotes reminded me of some of the toxic yuri stories I'd read, so I casually floated the idea that they help write our Toxic Yuri Jam entry, potentially incorporating some of their real life experiences into it.

kirin said they could try, but that, if they did, they would probably make the cast Koreans. Yeah, why not? We discussed things further, and as the characters took shape in our conversations, I encouraged kirin to share their ideas with Ophelia. When they did, they told us that they wanted to cast to be Korean, the story to be set in South Korea, and they wanted us to change their initial draft for the story as much as possible but not remove the Korean aspects.

Ophelia was generally fine with this, as was I, but neither of us knew anything about what South Korea was like— certainly not enough to write about it. I suggested we set it in the US instead, specifically in Ophelia's home state of California, to make the writing on our end go more smoothly. I knew this would potentially make things more difficult for kirin, but Ophelia had already written a lot of stories set in California so I figured any mistakes could be corrected by her.

kirin was reticent, but ultimately agreed. And so, with these parameters settled, we set about doing pre-jam preparations.

First, I set about engaging with media relevant to the, for lack of a better term, lolicon lineage. I picked up Lolita, the book, and read it, cover to cover, foreword to afterward, for the first time ever. (I did so while listening along to Jeremy Irons' slimy audiobook narration, mostly to keep myself on pace to actually finish it because god damn Nabakov's prose is dense as hell, but also, because it's a pretty damn good audiobook.)

I read another onee-loli yuri manga, Sakisome Complex, and attempted to read more of Onee-san wa Joshi, which I still haven't yet finished. I also watched most of the Wataten! anime, which is great.

I looked at some stuff kirin suggested, some Korean webtoons they'd been into, though I did not read any of them to completion. And— and this was really, very, completely unrelated— Ophelia and I watched Michael Haneke's so-called "Glaciation Trilogy".

Second, kirin and I had numerous brainstorming sessions where we tossed around ideas. A loose narrative outline began forming, kirin drew a few rough sketches, and we built up a healthily sized dossier of disparately connected notes, names, and possible plotlines. And once the jam began proper, we set about scrambling to assemble all our notes into a workable story.

Writing

I: First Draft

The plan was simple. First draft is written, Ophelia iterates on it in a second draft, we make the thing, yay. The first draft was to be written by me and kirin, working together, which sounded simple enough.

But it wasn't. It wasn't even close to simple. kirin and I have wildly different styles of writing and approaches to creation, and our differences in priorities and preferences led to a lot of complications. I won't get into all the specifics, but, to sum it up, kirin is the type who insists on deciding exactly what the thing is and how it will play out before they start, while my approach bends more towards sketching out a loose set of guidelines and then finding the particulars in the process.

Our first big disagreement was on the title. When it comes to my works, the title is usually the last priority. It's the most audience-facing aspect of anything I make, the first thing about the work that everyone who is not me or any of my collaborators ever sees, and I want to be sure that it's representative of what the work actually is. Since the work is naturally going to change as I create it, I rarely choose my titles first. I make the thing, I look at what the thing is, and then I think of how to sell the thing.

kirin's thinking is the inverse: They want to know what the thing is before they make it, so they decide the title first, and then create the thing to match the title… I think. I'm not going to pretend we understood each other perfectly. A lot of their process was pretty foreign to me. They insisted on drawing the character designs before we began outlining the story, so I let them. They insisted the title was a prerequisite to writing the story, so we chose one. They insisted on outlining every story beat before we began writing, so, we did.

I would describe the resulting creative act as less of a co-writing, and more of a cooperative stream of consciousness generation. A lot of issues in both of our additions emerged, and, at several points, I kind of wanted to start over. But I just went with it without questioning it too much, because, again, I figured we'd sort it all out with revisions. In hindsight, I was kind of waiting for Ophelia to save me on this. She's a much more ruthless critic than I am, and I tend to be pretty bad at bringing up problems with other people's work on my own.

Anyway, I don't want to belauger the point, so I'll just briefly summarize all the things that were different and/or strange about this first kirin/Joyce draft. The pacing was a pretty big mess, hopping between the points of view for Han-byeol, Ga-yeong, and Jenny, in a way that, when you read it all back, felt extremely random. It wasn't, at least not completely; kirin and I had planned every POV change in our outline, but when we wrote all the planned scenes out, and then added the other scenes I was dreaming up at actually basically random on top of them, they started to feel really random.

Ga-yeong was much more aggressively compulsorily heterosexual, and her relationship with Paul was a lot more sexually violent and violently sexual. Han-byeol and Jenny weren't quite there. We both agreed that Han-byeol was mentally ill and had problems relating to others, but her character was uneven and unrefined. Jenny was a mishmash between me making her more of an otaku and kirin making her more of a Catholic. I had ideas about a fourth character, a convenience store clerk who Jenny would commisserate with when buying alcohol, and a loose sense of where her arc might go, but that plotline collided with kirin's own ideas and withered on the vine.

kirin wrote a scene of Han-byeol killing a dog, for no other reason than just because she felt like it. kirin also wrote a fragment of a plotline about Ga-yeong planning on getting a classmate who she hated in trouble by planting drugs on her, and that also didn't go anywhere. Overall, a whole lot of stuff was written, but none of it really added up or drove the story to anywhere definite.

But, more than that, the biggest issue with the script was that it didn't feel toxic enough to me. There was a lot of promise, a lot of buildup, a lot of story threads with implication, but the story didn't have the big shock I wanted. It didn't have the huge explosions of emotion and desire I felt were needed, none of the crime, deviancy, trespass, the denpa extremity I had enjoyed about paranoia hyponoia and urara in satsuki.

I prodded kirin about this, and they told me that they hadn't actually come up with the plots for those stories, they'd just been given an outline by their collaborators and written it all according to their directions. They also expressed that they were nervous about taking the story in more extreme directions, especially with an eight-year-old girl character in the mix, for fear of backlash.

Ophelia read the draft, and pointed out many of the issues I'd identified. We all knew it needed work— a lot of work. This would have to be more or less completely re-envisioned.

I thought about the dog.

Ophelia had singled out the scene of Han-byeol killing the dog, in particular. She said she hadn't cared for it, that it felt unmotivated, and that, by and large, Han-byeol was the most passive character in the story. I agreed. She needed something to do. Something that would have consequence, would pose a narrative challenge. A dog's death is a classic shock moment, but it didn't cut it as an inciting incident here. We needed something with impact.

And then I thought about Michael Haneke's "Glaciation Trilogy".

Writing II: Revisions

Specifically, I thought about the 1992 film Benny's Video, written and directed by Haneke, in which the titular Benny, an amateur teenage hobbyist filmmaker, lures a girl to his apartment while his parents are away on a trip and home-produces a snuff film with her.

A minor killing another minor is a profound shock, one reasonably on par with the death of a dog, and a human's death is a definite incident, a dead body an unignorable problem. It easily serves as an immediate challenge to a story and its characters, one which poses obvious questions that demand compelling answers. All we needed was a victim.

kirin immediately approved, and suggested we repurpose Ga-yeong's hated classmate as part of this plot point. This gave me the idea that, if the victim was the classmate's sister, Ga-yeong would have a reason to feel some kind of a way about the child's death. Ga-yeong being happy about the child being dead would work to enhance the sadistic aspect of her character, and also meant she had a good reason to want to keep the death covered up. Jenny could get dragged into it by Ga-yeong, and there! A conflict that ties all three of the girls together! Yay!

On this premise, I set to work, this time writing the story completely on my own in my own style, without relying on kirin's outline.

My draft was much more coherent than the one kirin and I wrote together, but it was also, I will admit, a disaster. Ga-yeong was an atheistic misandrist who kept getting suspended for assaulting her classmates, Jenny was an otaku cinephile who kept going on rants about movies I liked, Han-byeol was basically little Patricia Bateman. My take on the psychosexual trauma theme was half-baked, with some contrived plotting of Ga-yeong and Jenny both having been raped by Ga-yeong's father and being mutually traumatized by it. There was an explicit sex scene between Ga-yeong and Jenny. There were two endings; in the bad ending Han-byeol kills herself, but in the "good" ending she catches Ga-yeong and Jenny having sex, kills her parents, and then decides she wants to be a serial killer when she grows up. (Yeah, I know, another variation on the same plot fixations I had been rotating in my brain before I wrote the intial drafts of Prisoners in the Mirror. i have brainworms sorry)

kirin enjoyed it, I enjoyed writing it, and it was definitely more toxic yuri, but it was also a big fucking mess. While kirin said it was fun and that my characterization was definitely playing more to the toxic yuri jam crowd's interests more than theirs had been, they also said it was missing the Korean culture elements they thought were needed. I passed it off to Ophelia, who agreed it was better than the first draft, but nonetheless didn't like it.

Anyway, then Ophelia wrote her draft. It was this third draft that firmly established the key element kirin and I had been waffling over: the damage. Each of the three girls finally had their damage. It was Ophelia who came up with Ga-yeong's bulimia, Han-byeol's delusions, and Jenny's flameout. She kept several of the elements kirin and I had introduced, albeit while changing their circumstances, but removed many others. Her draft was the most cohesive, and without question the best written, and I… didn't like it.

I wasn't satisfied with how much she'd changed. Many of her changes were justified, but I particularly took issue with how she'd left out scenes I'd written showing the incestuous tensions between Jenny and Ga-yeong, and Han-byeol's friendship with Eun-mi. I didn't think what I'd written was perfect, nor that she had to keep the events exactly as I'd written them, but she hadn't really written anything new to develop the relationships between these characters. And the ending was… just too abrupt for me. The denouement I desired just wasn't there.

I knew kirin and I couldn't fix these issues on our own. I knew that if we tried, we'd inevitably run into issues of the same sort that both of our drafts had, and potentially the issues would be even worse. Ophelia was the most skilled writer out of the three of us, and I felt her draft, with a little more work, would be the thing… probably. Or at least a good enough thing.

But as I said earlier, Ophelia had told me in no uncertain terms that she would only do one draft, and that was all. She balked at the idea of reworking her draft, but… she also wasn't satisfied with it. After we argued over it for a short while, she was convinced to give it one more crack. I told her I would ask her to do so… after I made my own revision of her revision for her to revise.

I set about trying to do so, but I immediately became intensely frustrated. I didn't feel like my writing was working, I wasn't sure that Ophelia or kirin would be able or willing to tell the story I wanted told. I wondered if it would even be worth trying.

I wondered if it would be worth trying anything anymore.

Writing III: Friction

We were almost two weeks into the hole of the six week jam timeframe. We didn't have art or music, nor had we agreed upon a script. At this point, I thought, maybe this isn't going to work. Maybe there's just nothing here, and we're all scrambling for scraps. Maybe it's time to give up.

I didn't know what I would do if I spent another week writing another draft and it was bad, and then Ophelia wrote another draft that was good but which I didn't like, and then we were back here again, but with another week gone. I didn't want to make something that didn't live up to what I wanted, so I thought, maybe it's better if we make nothing.

I said we were done, that I wanted to quit and forget about it, and move on. That there would be no game. Ophelia was disappointed, but said she'd accept it if I wanted to stop. harm.less and kirin encouraged me not to give up, saying they wanted to make something, and, after thinking on it for a day, I decided to try again.

I wrote some more, but was still frustrated. I waffled between ideas for additional scenes that could possibly tie the story together somehow, and I came up with a few things, but nothing that felt like the silver bullet. I continued banging my head, but after thinking more on it, I thought about how I would really feel about having nothing.

I would feel sad, I realized. I would feel terrible. I would beat myself up over it, over missing the Toxic Yuri VN Jam of 2026, and I would too upset to engage with anyone else's entries. Not having what I wanted might feel bad, but I would feel worse having nothing. I realized, then, that for the sake of my future self, I needed to get my head out of my ass, stop being precious about the darlings I didn't want to kill, and fucking MAKE SOMETHING YOU GODDAMNED COWARD.

I gave myself a little longer to work the script over, but I had to be done with the waffling. I gave Ophelia what I had, and told everyone that whatever she came up with was going to be the final script. If I didn't like it, tough luck. I would just have to live with that.

And so, Ophelia wrote the final draft.

And I loved it.

Structurally, it was the same as her earlier draft. However, that draft had been around 10,000 words, while this revision had gained an extra six thousand or so. Ophelia had made a lot of small edits fleshing out the story, but there were also obviously bigger changes. Most notably, she added new scenes between Jenny and Ga-yeong, restoring their incestuous relationship. When I saw the first new scene, the kiss Ga-yeong forces onto her at the table, I was immediately overjoyed. But the second new scene, with Han-byeol and Eun-mi, was even better.

It was the stick scene.

During our conversations about my draft of the story, I'd highlighted how Wataten had influenced my approach to writing Han-byeol and Eun-mi. In particular, I cited one part of episode five, where Koyori, a supporting child character, ties up her friend Kanon's wrists while they're playing together at school.

In a bit of cartoon whimsy, Koyori finds that she can't untie her own knot, and so Kanon goes the whole remainder of the day with her wrists still tied. They spend the day together like this, and find out that they like tying each other up.

I found that whole episode really beautiful and heartwarming, because, like… yeah! That's realistic! Children have kinks! I'm into vore, and though I didn't figure it out till I was an adult, in hindsight, I've always been into vore. As a little kid I used to eat tiny scraps of paper I'd cut into the shapes of people and houses and eat them, imagining I was eating real tiny people in them. It was a weird little thing I did because it made me feel something good that I didn't fully understand, that I knew instinctively was really weird but did anyway.

This wasn't the only weird thing I did, and, as I would find out from talking to friends when I got older, I wasn't the only weird little kid who did things like this. Children are like this, and it's normal! And, I found the stick scene in Ophelia's draft beautiful and heartwarming in the same way, and also it made me happy because I realized she'd been listening to me when I told her what I'd been trying to do. Han-byeol's impact kink had been present to some degree in the original draft, but here it had been made far more central, made into an explicit motivating force.

And that made me happy! That genuinely made me really, really happy.

Ophelia told me that she hadn't deliberately written the scene with that intention, but regardless, I still felt it worked really, really well. There was now another flavor of yuri in the story. We had toxic age gap yuri, and we also had doomed childhood yuri. The scene added more to Han-byeol's character, enhanced the tragedy of Eun-mi's death, and now there was now a thematic link with Jenny's story, too, because now they had the same kink, and that was kind of awesome!

It was also, I realized, a brilliantly elegant way of fulfilling the psychosexual trauma theme. My attempt at the theme, with Jenny and Ga-yeong both finding out they'd been raped by Ga-yeong's father, was overdone and kind of hack, and I realized I'd been overthinking it.

Spanking is already sexual abuse. We hadn't needed to add more and more shocking forms of sexual abuse. All Ophelia had had to do to make the theme work was heighten the story's focus on the abuse we already had. Really, I was kicking myself for not thinking of that before, because, like, that's my psychosexual trauma. Like Jenny and Han-byeol, my parents spanked me as a little kid, and it also made my brain weird and made me think domestic violence was an acceptable and reasonable thing to do when people did something I didn't think was good!

Like, fuck, that theme was already in my draft, even! It was just… y'know, framed differently. So, yeah, that's a writing lesson for me, I guess. Sometimes instead of inventing new shit, you just need to think a little bit deeper about the shit you already have.

Anyway. I was obviously happy with this final draft, so I declared that writing was done. Full production was finally a go.

Writing IV: The Title

As I said earlier, kirin had insisted on choosing a title before we began writing. For the first draft, their title was "CAN YOU BE FULL FROM ONE SPOONFUL OF FOOD? (한 술 밥에 배부르랴?)", which Ophelia and I both agreed was overly verbose and didn't work as a hook at all. I didn't establish a title for my draft, but Ophelia's working title was "Four Fragments". She didn't intend it as a final title at all, but that also obviously wasn't going to cut it.

When thinking about what would work best as a title, I tried, as I usually do, to think about the overall themes of the story. And in considering what those were, I thought about Han-byeol's delusions, her idea of the Factory. Her childish fear was, to my mind, a clear embodiment of the entire story's themes, the perception of the social order as a big meat grinder whose primary function is to weed out the undesirables and mold them into desirables, or, if they cannot be, to dispose of them.

And like, that is true, isn't it? People aren't literally chewed up and spat out, but they are chewed up and spat out. That is a function of our society as designed, and it is what all three of the lead characters are suffering from, the malaise they experience as a result of being raised in a family and a society that doesn't want them, doesn't love them as they are, demands that they mold themselves into a model of a desirable person, and punishes them for deviance.

I said a title referencing this aspect of the story would make sense, and Ophelia suggested The Angel Factory. kirin and I both liked that, and so we went with it.

The Asset Scramble

So now we needed to make the damned game.

And we only had a little more than three weeks left to do it.

…Fuck.

Could we do it?

I didn't know.

But kirin and harm.less, bless them, were both ready to do their best.

A few things complicated the production of the assets. For one, the chaotic development of the story had led to confusion and disarray among the team, who now all had less time to make the game as a consequence of our creative disagreements. Also, not everyone had the same amount of time to work, nor was everyone working on the same schedule, which had consequences for team coordination.

On top of that, and this was the most minor of things, because we had already known about this beforehand, but kirin was working on two other projects for the jam at the same time. Between that, and obligations in their real life, they were further squeezed for time to draw the sprites. I'm by no means blaming them for this— the fault is all on me, for not having planned better, and also for spending so much time bickering over my issues with their and Ophelia's writing. Had I not made those mistakes, they might have had more time to draw more, and we might have been able to polish the final game more in general.

On the Soundtrack:

I'd brought on two additional people to do music, and now I needed to communicate the new direction of the game to them. Neither of them seemed to be checking the Gravity House developer discord regularly, which complicated things since I had to fill them in on our discussions. I'd hoped that Henni, who worked with us on Codename: TYPHOON, would be able to make some music as well, but she'd been busy elsewhere and hadn't had time to keep up with our bickering, nor to read our script, and hadn't really been all that interested in the project in the first place.

A key idea I had for the soundtrack was for each chapter to have its own musical flavor, with each of our (hopefully) three composers giving the three characters' stories their own particular sound and mood. But because both of our composers were slow to respond, I ended up adding stock music from bandcamp to the game, just so I knew we would have something and I wouldn't be scrambling for music at the last minute.

One of our new composers managed to deliver the music for Han-byeol's chapter right down to the wire, but the other composer was ultimately unable to provide any more than a single track for Ga-yeong's chapter. They told me after the game was finished that they'd been discouraged and fallen off the project because of their inexperience and unfamiliarity with the visual novel medium, and our creative differences. As they told it to me, they regretted getting invested in their initial WIP tracks and said that, with the benefit of hindsight, they would have tried to make shorter and simpler musical sketches to get feedback before developing them further. (If you're reading this, I do still really appreciate you trying your best despite that, and want to once again wish you the best of luck with any future creative work you do.)

Henni provided a track as well, which I used in Jenny's chapter. So, we ended up with a mix of the stock music, and the original tracks. It did kind of end up fulfilling my idea for each chapter to have its own sound, but obviously it wasn't what I would have preferred. After we finished the game I played a few other jam entries and stumbled into another developer using one of the exact same stock tracks that I used, which, is always a real risk with stock music, but did make me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA FUCK a bit-

If we were going to do any sort of big update for The Angel Factory, I would want the rest of the stock music replaced with more original soundtrack, but considering the game's content, it's probably not eligible for a Steam release that would justify any additional polish. Which is a shame, but hey, I kinda knew that going in. Not to say it's totally impossible, but I don't think we'll ever bother trying.

On the visuals:

In many ways, this project ended up being the polar opposite of Codename: TYPHOON. While Typhoon was a high concept story set in a fictional universe and taking inspiration from big mainstream spy film productions, and therefore required a lot of original art assets to execute on effectively, The Angel Factory was intended from the start to have a more grounded and realistic setting, which would facilitate leaning more on stock photos. This was made even more necessary after the writing process ate into the time we had to work on visuals. We didn't have that problem on Typhoon, in large part because the story and aesthetic direction for that game was nailed down pretty early on without too much conflict.

As with their CGs on Typhoon, harm.less chose to use color very selectively, mostly highlighting the characters with the colors of their outfits. Following from kirin's character designs, the primary binding color ended up being a dark blue, and everything else followed from that. In editing the background photos, I tried to make them similarly almost entirely monochromatic, suppressing their color but adding a light blue tint for visual cohesion. kirin provided the color palette for reference, and this proved invaluable in keeping things stylistically consistent. I think the mostly monochromatic aesthetic really worked to help kirin's sprites stand out more, and to set the vibe effectively.

Out of all the CGs, we had a lot of interesting conversations about the scene of Eun-mi's death in particular. harm.less drew the scene of Han-byeol staring in shock at the aftermath first, but I felt that we also needed some visuals for Han-byeol about to swing the board. I suggested drawing just one more CG showing Eun-mi still standing from the same angle, but harm.less decided to do a redraw of her death to facilitate a better angle for the moment before.

We all agreed that the depiction needed to be really careful, since we wanted the scene to shock, but also to not disgust. This in mind, I pointed to one particular shot from Michael Haneke's Funny Games (if you've seen it, you know which one) as an example of how Eun-mi's death ought to be depicted. The violence in that film, and in most of Haneke's films, is generally not shown directly, and instead Haneke chooses to focus on the aftermath, the impact of the violence upon those who experienced it. Funny Games is full of brutal violence, but it's almost always just offscreen, left to the imagination of the audience, denying any sense of catharsis in the carnage wrought upon the victims. In regards to The Shot, Haneke says:

"I intentionally filmed it as a wide shot. You can't film a person who's suffering that intensely as a close-up. It becomes obscene, pornographic. You can't do that."

- Michael Haneke, 2017 interview (Funny Games Criterion Collection Special Features, link contains scenes of graphic violence)

The murder in Benny's Video is staged similarly, where we never directly see the moment of the kill, instead being forced to imagine what's offscreen while the sound does the work, and the film focuses its attention on Benny's callous attitude in the aftermath. Eun-mi's death isn't technically a murder, but the same idea was central here. The final result really effectively communicates the tragedy and horror of Han-byeol's mistake, and I am, just, genuinely stupidly proud of the work we did on it.

I flagged the scene of Ga-yeong kissing Jenny as especially important pretty early on, but it actually didn't get drawn until the very end, because harm.less wasn't confident in their ability to draw mouths interacting. I'm really glad it did manage to get drawn in the end, because, even though it's only there for a couple lines, I think it was vastly better to have it illustrated instead of just me smooshing their sprites together. Also: bonus incest points. Need all the incest points.

In the end, harm.less got basically every event CG that I felt we really needed, and kirin drew all the essential sprites. Most of the backgrounds had to be stock photos from Wikimedia Commons and elsewhere, but harm.less took a few photos themselves, and Mirai pitched in to make the background image of Jenny's bedroom after I failed to find a particularly good image for that. I even got a bit creative myself, photoshopping a stock picture of a billboard to be the Kim's Computers billboard image. It's obviously not the best, but it worked perfectly well given the time we had.

Overall, despite the troubled development on the writing part, the actual making of the game generally went smoothly. Though I obviously wish we could have had more of everything, we got more than I thought we would, and I'm really happy with how the game came together in the end.

kirin on writing and character design

Thanks to kirin for taking the time to write this section! - Joyce

Hello, this is kirin from kirinkoumori (麒麟蝙蝠). I don't have too much to add onto Joyce's thoughts, but I wanted to explain a bit about the first draft I wrote with her and my character design choices.

To start with, some background. My main group, kirinkoumori, was extremely busy this summer, and everyone apart from me was unavailable to work on something for the TYVNJ2 this year, compared to last year. One friend had a 9 to 5, another one was working late part time and had art convention/art café things, and the last one was getting their life together by doing various "normal people things". We considered together briefly if we should do anything, but our schedules did not line up at all, and the one who was most free to work on game development with me was not all too interested in making yuri.

Since I had a lot of free time, I still wanted to do something. I didn't really want to make something on my own, so I decided to work with other groups this time around. Not having to be the director for these projects took a big load off my shoulders. However, in terms of writing and art, I was definitely most involved with the production of The Angel Factory — 엔젤 팩토리 over my other projects. Joyce was telling me about her idea of onee/loli age gap incest yuri, and I had been wanting to draw a loli character for a very long time.

As shown earlier, I drew up a very quick sketch of my ideal loli character, Han-byeol. This was done on paper and encompassed everything I liked about a loli. A black-haired beauty with a hime-cut. School uniform that showed her age. A bandage on her knee, and uneven white socks. I thought to myself that this was what moe was all about. Joyce seemed to agree, so I got to drawing the rest of the cast.

The only character that hasn't changed throughout the re-designs was Han-byeol. Her name means "star", so we cycled through a few English equivalent names before settling on Astrid.

Next was Ga-yeong, who I originally conceptualised as a sort of "mean high school girl bully" character. Her name, funnily enough, means "lily". We thought this would be too literal, so Joyce picked the English equivalent name Sage. I was also thinking about the sort of mesugaki character you see in seasonal ecchi anime where the viewer is meant to feel complicated about her: in between wanting to hurt her, and wanting to be hurt by her. Oh, the story was also originally meant to take place in summer, so I wanted to show off her legs. I also tried to make use of early 2010s fashion popular with ABGs at the time.

Jenny was the last character to be designed. I drew her as the sort of female otaku NEET character that most of us can probably relate to. She dressed sort of sloppily, she looks sad, and obviously she wears rabbit ear slippers around the house. Does she go out of the house often? Not really.

As Joyce has said, we have completely opposite writing philosophies. I'm the type that usually draws the characters before even starting on the writing, or someone else will usually draw the character designs for me and then tell me what I should be writing for it. I feel like the literal appearance of a character should be solidified before any of the writing for a visual novel, because the visuals are half of the visual novel. This, obviously, directly contradicts with Joyce and Ophelia's writing styles, as they both are not artists.

That wasn't too big of a problem though. The problems sort of came after. As I was writing with Joyce, I realised I actually wasn't sure what I was doing. The original direction I took the first draft of The Angel Factory had wildly different intentions than she had in mind, and we were both pretty frustrated by the end of the first draft. One of my other friends describes my writing process as the "reverse" of most writers: because I typically have a message/intention to convey in mind first, and then I write from there. This is the complete opposite of how Joyce and Ophelia write. I noticed they focus on the plot and technical aspects prior to straightening out intentions and target audience. Because I was unsure of the intention of this work originally, I was confused on how to write it, since I usually decide intention first.

This is what the title thing is about, too. Typically, my writing process goes like this:

• I have a message/an intention to convey to a type of person/target audience
• I write out a few bullet points about what I want to write
• I decide the character designs, and then flesh out personalities a little bit
• I choose a title of some sort, and then write up a summary of the work prior to even writing it
• I write the actual thing
• Additional: I sometimes change the title down the line if I feel like it doesn't fit, but often times I usually just stick with the title decided at the start

So, to most people, I assume my writing process is a bit insane. I'm less concerned on the actual plot of the work or its technical aspects, and I heavily prioritise intention + target audience. My previous works 妄想発想 Paranoia Hyponoia and うららで五月 Urara in Satsuki have very similar intentions and target audiences. Intention: love letter to early 2000s denpa eroge and making the specific yuri work(s) my friends wanted to see. Target audience: those familiar with early 2000s denpa eroge and people who like this type of toxic yuri pornography. The intention is a little bit hazy if you're unfamiliar with early 2000s denpa eroge, but I wrote both those works in mind without caring for anyone outside of the target audience. I won't get too into that here, since those are just examples to contrast against this work. The point is, the plot is actually the last thing on my mind.

So… when "co-writing" with someone who prioritises plot first, it felt a lot like bumping heads. Joyce described it as "[…] then create the thing to match the title", but that's not completely right. I'm the type of person who's quite confident in their writing if I have full control over it, so it's not exactly "match the title," but more in a sense I know that the two will mesh well together even before starting, since I already have an outline and solid idea before I even start writing. When writing for non-game development things, this is the same case. My intentions are usually summed up in the title, and those intentions will be there for the rest of the writing.

I thought we could clear any potential issues from the very start, by planning together with an outline. In fact, I sort of expected that Joyce would do something similar to other people I worked with: give me some sort of outline with a clear intent to work off.

This is not what happened, to say the least. We ended up writing some sort of outline together, mostly just the two of us throwing around random ideas we thought could be interesting. So, yeah, the result was a first draft full of random ideas, lol.

Later down the draft, Joyce asked me what was going on, and where the ideas of PH and UDS came from. I told her those were not my ideas. I think this was the moment we both realised what was sort of happening, and why our first draft had so many issues. We were NOT on the same page at all. I then clarified that I struggle to take the lead with my own ideas of a story (due to a variety of reasons I won't get into here) so I usually prefer to work with others, or not have my core ideas as the basis of the work. Basically, I need to be filtered through various layers and other people, because I consider my "core" work to be unpresentable to people. In fact, while working on The Angel Factory, I was writing a different story using mostly my own ideas, and shortly after I got feedback from a beta reader that I shouldn't release this as it is, which confirmed my feelings of doubt.

With that, I told Joyce I had no idea what to do here, and that it was probably best for me to step out of the writing process for the time being. Joyce agreed, and then wrote the second iteration.

When I read the second iteration, I realised I had to change the character designs. I never made proper reference sheets for the second iteration, as I was uncertain if the project was still even going. However, you can see the draft of Ga-yeong 2 I made for the second iteration in Joyce's section. I think the second interation written by Joyce was much more cohesive than what we wrote together, but it obviously still had a lot of issues, removing the parts I liked the most from the first draft, such as the Korean diaspora elements which I leaned more towards.

Finally, Ophelia got around to re-writing everything.

The third iteration still had issues, but I decided to go completely hands off from the writing at this stage, which was a good decision. Joyce and Ophelia refined it further into the final fourth draft, which is the story you see in the game. From this third-fourth draft, I re-did the character designs again for Ga-yeong and Jenny, and also drew up Eun-mi properly, who now had a lot of plot relevance. I kept Ga-yeong and Jenny's hair styles from the second draft's rough sketches. Ophelia also changed the setting to winter, so I adjusted their clothes for the colder climate. I had been playing some JRPGs prior to the conception of this project, so some design aspects of those JRPGs definitely leaked into these designs.

As I was also scrolling the seasonal anime, I found an anime called Otonari Tenshi (Next-door Angel) and I thought to myself: oh, that's it, I'm going to rip this off for Jenny's anime hoodie. For anyone curious, her hoodie says Kinou no Tenshi (Yesterday's Angel). I have not seen Otonari Tenshi and I do not plan to.

After that, making the sprites and other art mostly went smoothly. A big thank you to harm.less for helping out on all the CGs and additional art. You are an absolute life saver.

I would say the development of this game has been a total mess. I definitely need a good, long, break after this. Another big thank you to Ophelia who was able to put our mess together into something presentable, and thank you to Joyce for all the programming and apt communication. Thank you also to the musicians and our beta reader, RailgunRabbit. This would not have been possible without you. I'm very glad we got this game out, despite all of our earlier issues.

Lessons Learned

Now we've released the game, I guess. It's done! It's live! And a lot of people seem to like it! It didn't go totally perfectly, and there's some lessons I learned that I intend to carry forward into future projects, so, I'll share those.

In this project, as I did with Codename: TYPHOON, I took on the functional role of project manager/leader/director/whatever you want to call it. The person answering everyone else's questions so everyone else knows what to do. And, with regards to how I performed in that capacity while we made The Angel Factory, there are a few decisions I made along the way that I regret, although it feels a bit weird to use that word. The decisions I made led to what the game is, and the game is good, so… yeah. But, yes, with the benefit of hindsight, I would certainly have made some different decisions.

I learned from this project that I still have work to do in the humility department. I would have done well to be less attached to my ideas, and more specifically, less attached to the idea that my particular vision of the story was the correct one. Which isn't to say that none of my ideas were worthwhile, but I'm not the only one with worthwhile ideas. After reading Ophelia's draft, I got a bit too obsessed with getting everything exactly perfect before I let her give it another try. I could probably have saved a few days of precious production time if I had tried a bit harder, and a bit sooner, to acknowledge my own weaknesses and have more faith in my collaborators.

I also could have done better when it came to coordinating our team. Some of this was a result of the story not quite solidifying until late into the project, but also I should have done more to account for the fact that not everyone had the same amount of experience and commitment. The impact of this was most felt on the music, as I said earlier. Both of our rookie musicians expressed feelings of being overwhelmed and unprepared.

If I could do the whole thing over, I would have ideally looked a little harder for more options before going with the first two people to message me expressing interest, and tried to find people who had a bit more of a portfolio than just one or two pieces of music. But once I'd made that mistake, and their inexperience became clear, I really should have tried to touch base with them, to help open more lines communication to them than just keeping up with the discord chat. Had I done so, I maybe could have helped them or, failing that, maybe helped them gracefully exit the project, hopefully with time left over to find someone else to fill in for them.

So, my advice for everyone else:

1. Don't get attached to your darlings. Try to be open to everyone else's ideas, and try to not get too bogged down in your ideas being preserved exactly as you want them, and don't throw in the towel if you don't get your way. It can hurt to make sacrifices sometimes, but at the end of the day you'll be happier to have made something that wasn't exactly to your plan than to have not made anything at all.
2. Know what the thing is! Seriously, know what the thing is and what you want so that you can tell everyone else and everyone else can also know. Sometimes things change, and sometimes things need to change, but also sometimes things need to not change.
3. And most importantly, find collaborators who you'll work well with. Ideally, you want people with whom you'll have a good rapport, but that'll only happen after you have experience with them, and that's never going to be a reality for everyone. At a minimum, try to choose collaborators who are as experienced as you are, and especially make sure that they're as committed as you. It won't guarantee that you'll get along, but it'll at least make it more likely that they'll finish their side of the project to your standards.

If you're creatively inexperienced, working with other similarly inexperienced people is probably fine, but if you've got a few projects under your belt, try to get someone with a portfolio, or at least some credits on projects of a similar scale to what you want to do. A few albums, a finished game, a bluesky where they post their art regularly, whatever. Make sure that they're as engaged as you are in the project, and that they care as much as you do, and have about as much time as you do, or at the very least have time. If you're a NEET sitting in a basement somewhere with nothing to do and nowhere to go but game jam, you're probably not going to work super good with a uni student whose month is all booked up studying for finals.

But they have to tell you that, so, y'know, contrasting with the three leads and their black hair/grey eyes ask. And also, try to work with people who are in the habit of telling you that sort of thing before you ask. Try to be in the habit of telling people that sort of thing, too. No one wants their collaborator who they're counting on to finish all the sprites for their big visual novel to just suddenly disappear! (kirin did make pretty clear to us the whole time that they might not be on time and might disappear, and I can't express how invaluable and appreciated that was. seriously, communication is important! do it!)

Conclusion

The Angel Factory was an interesting project, and, for me at least, an edifying one. 

The Korean diaspora elements of the story were a big challenge. Ophelia and kirin both have known Koreans in real life, but writing this was unavoidably an exercise in trying to figure out how to best write about the experience of being of the Korean-American diaspora, when none of us were Korean, only one of us was any kind of Asian, and the one Asian person on the writing team who was responsible for conceiving the bulk of the story and characters was not in any way American. Obviously we were liable to get some stuff wrong.

In the first draft, kirin wrote a handful of scenes where Jenny was drinking in public, which is... not realistic, in the US. I know people do it a lot in other countries, but public drunkenness is a big faux paus here and is liable to get you arrested. In my draft, I... well, I wrote a lot of nonsense in my draft, but in general, I just didn't write the characters very credibly. The family I wrote just wasn't Korean.

And Ophelia... well, Ophelia's only real mistake was just one she inherited from kirin, and that was the Korean honorifics, which kirin got wrong first. But RailgunRabbit caught that in her beta read, and well, that's why we asked an actual Korean person to have a look. So yeah. (Big thanks to her for the help there and also for helping make sure we got the Korean text and terms right!)

I think, overall, I learned a lot about myself, my limits, and also a bit more about just, other people and the world. This game's development was a cultural exchange, and I think we all learned something from it! And now the game exists, and it's good, and we're all proud of it.

If you haven't yet played it, well, I don't know why you read all the way to down here if you haven't. Maybe you're a spoiler pervert, which, like, sure. That's cool. If you have played it, yay! Thank you! Thank you for playing, for reading this, and for any other support you've given us.

And also, thank you to kirin for creating the characters, to Ophelia for helping us define them, to harm.less for their beautiful illustrations, to all three of our composers, again to RailgunRabbit once again for checking our work, and to the entire team for putting up with me and my indecision through the whole process. (Sorry.)

I hope you all stick around to follow what we do next, cause, we are going to do something else next. I have some idea what it is, but, y'know, you don't ever want to jinx yourself by promising a thing that's nowhere near done when you don't know for sure if it will ever get anywhere near done. Maybe also follow us on bluesky if you want to know about that when that's coming up!

And also also, read Yuzumori-san.

Because that manga’s really fucking good.

Thank you once again for reading! Comments about this postmortem are welcome on itch.io or on my bluesky.