The Night Shift is Lonely
"I called my ex, but I don't think what picked up was her."
Night Shift is a visual novel created by Diana Nguyen (Go check her out!) as the artist and character designer, Ferrohound on additional assets & the script and myself as the lead programmer and writer. We borrowed some royalty-free tracks and some tracks from Somnium Music (huge thanks!) for the game's soundtrack.
We originally made it to participate in itch.io's 2020 Spooktober Visual Novel Halloween gamejam. I chose to use Godot over Ren'py because I wanted to use this project as the groundwork for my future game project workflows. It was actually this game that motivated me to develop my own dialogue editor to suit the needs we had for this and future projects!
I was inspired to write this kind of story by the creepypasta that Dark Somnium performs. I wanted to recreate the eerie atmosphere spiked with the flavor of despair that I was feeling at the time.
In order to save time and go with the somber atmosphere, we decide to theme the artstyle with monochromatic screentones and juxtapose that with simple animal characters.
When it comes to creating fun and quirky character designs that exude personality Diana truly excels. She really brought the characters and environments to life despite the time constraints. No spoilers, but you should definitely check out her ingame and concept work in the game's gallery.
Despite the fact that Spooktober was over, I really wanted to push this to a final, polished state. With the extra time, I also want to expand the scope slightly by introducing other elements to the gameplay and story that we previously didn't have time for.
That was the intention for 2022 but then I got the idea to build a dialogue editor to streamline the process and thus missed Halloween. Afterwards, Godot 4.0 started to approach completion so I decided to halt development until that was released so I could have a shiny new toy to develop with.
The tentative release date is Halloween 2023, check it out if you want a spooky read for Hallows Eve!
To Do
- Rewrite main story & script
- More game mechanics
- Promo Art
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