Worst Girls Games

Worst Girls is Aevee Bee & Mia Schwartz, the creative duo behind We Know The Devil. Currently developing Heaven Will Be Mine, a visual novel about giant robots and irresponsible lesbians. Heaven Will Be Mine is now available on Steam and Itch.io!

[maxschwartz]

surprise saturn & string of pearls tee is up now - first run will be available until june 2nd. get em here

[worstgirlsgames]

Our reworked True End design is available again over here 🍎

[worstgirlsgames]

Now with crispy black ink tee options!

[worstgirlsgames]

Our reworked True End design is available again over here 🍎

[worstgirlsgames]

Huge update at worstgirlsgames.com/shop! New merch, reprint preorders and limited quantities of older WKTD items are up now. Get a free WGG sticker with your order. Preorders close March 23rd at midnight PST. See you there <3

[worstgirlsgames]

Small update - preorder period has been extended to 3/30! 💕

[worstgirlsgames]

Huge update at worstgirlsgames.com/shop! New merch, reprint preorders and limited quantities of older WKTD items are up now. Get a free WGG sticker with your order. Preorders close March 23rd at midnight PST. See you there <3

[worstgirlsgames]

Limited WKTD design for October available in prints, shirts and pullover sweatshirts - all glow in the dark. You have until October 20th to secure yours at worstgirlsgames.com ! 👻

[gaming]

Tumblr Game Time: Heaven Will Be Mine (@worstgirlsgames)

Calling all fans of 1980s giant robot anime and queer science fiction! We see you! In Heaven will Be Mine, you can choose one of three terribly behaved girls to fight a war that will determine the fate of space, all while making some terrible life decisions in the romance department—dun dun DUUUNN! This is a queer sci-fi visual novel about dying science fiction dreams and messy twenty-something lesbian dating. What’s not to love?

Head over to their Tumblr at @worstgirlsgames to find out more, or simply go directly to your vendor of choice, whether that’s Steam, itch, or the app store. And if you really can’t get enough, there’s some really cool merch over on their website.

[worstgirlsgames]

We made a limited shirt and tote design based on Mars’ shirt, available for preorder until September 9th. Grab it at worstgirlsgames.com!

[worstgirlsgames]

HEAVEN WILL BE MINE IS OUT NOW

Heaven Will Be Mine is a queer science fiction visual novel from the creators of queer cult horror visual novel We Know The Devil, about joyriding mecha, kissing your enemies, and fighting for a new future. A send-up of 1980s giant robot anime and 70s queer science fiction, Heaven Will Be Mine puts players in the cockpits of three women fighting on opposite sides of an interstellar war to decide who they’ll get to furiously make out with the very fate of humanity in space! A game about messy twentysomething lesbian dating and dying science fiction dreams that players will explore from three unique perspectives in missions across the solar system, leading to three different endings.

Features:

•Multiple Playable Protagonists: Watch the narrative unfold from the perspective of one of the three main characters.

•A Battle For The Fate Of Space: Your choices determine which of three factions will emerge victorious and determine the fate of space, as well as the messy arguments, makeouts, and love stories of three lesbian mecha pilots.

•A Rich World To Explore: Look through chat logs and emails to understand the rise and fall of an alternate universe’s 1980s space program, and the end of its dream for humanity’s future.

Available now on Steam and Itch.io, with the soundtrack on Steam and Bandcamp!

[worstgirlsgames]

Listen/purchase: Oxygen Ocean by Alec Lambert

Worst Girls, Pillow Fight and Alec Lambert are excited to share an exclusive mix of "Oxygen Ocean" from the upcoming 'Heaven Will Be Mine OST.' Nearly a full minute longer that the mix that will appear on the LP, "Oxygen Ocean (Extended Root Mix)" offers prolonged exposure to the head-down hypnotic punishment of deep space. Step into the Ship-Self and begin your acclimatization... H     E A      VE        N   W      I L              L     B         E       M       IN          E H         E         A  V E       N            W         I L LB       E      M    INE A R R I V I NGS O O N N O M E R C Y

[worstgirlsgames]

Today our developer Conrad of Pillowfight Games goes into the process behind Heaven Will Be Mine’s character-specific UI:

Building Three UIs for One Game

Heaven Will be Mine features three characters who represent three different factions: Saturn representing Celestial Mechanics, Pluto representing Cradles Graces, and Luna-Terra representing Memorial Foundation. One of the challenges we discovered early on was presenting the mood of both the character and their faction through the UI of the game.

A very early concept for unified UI.

Early comps had the UI looking the same for all characters, which we identified as underwhelming: each character had a unique personality, and we quickly realized we needed to more reinforce the character’s personality as you played through the cockpit sections.

Per-character UI, with extra flair per character. Much better!

Once we came to this realization, our UI designer Christopher Simon put together some beautiful comps, but this left me, our humble engineer, at a bit of an impasse: how do I reuse what is generally the same layout, with different colors and extra styling?

I decided to create a series of scripts that could conditionally control the display of objects on screen depending on which character was selected. These came down to three different kinds of scripts: PerCharacterColor, PerCharacterImage, and OnlyEnabledForCharacter.

PerCharacterColor will change the color of an item depending on the character, or optionally disable it entirely if the object isn’t meant to be displayed for that character. PerCharacterImage works similarly, but taking a reference to a Sprite instead of a Color. If I just wanted to turn something on or off depending on if a character was selected, OnlyEnabledForCharacter was able to do the simple comparison.

An example of the PerCharacterColor script. If a checkbox is unchecked, the object will simply not be displayed for that character.

Once I had these selection behaviours in place, I was able to put together a small tool to quickly allow me to signal to an entire menu that it was time to pretend you were in, say, Saturn’s colors.

An example of the control that allows me to quickly reassign UI presentation of an entire submenu.

Once I was able to efficiently do this reassignment, the UI came together extremely quickly. We’re currently in the process of adding animation to the UI to make it more dynamic, and I’m excited to show you all the results of our work!

[worstgirlsgames]

(video contains flashing)

Heaven Will Be Mine’s launch is getting closer! Add it to your wishlist on Steam today for more updates ✨

[worstgirlsgames]

So soon, Valentine. 💝

[worstgirlsgames]

CRADLE’S GRACES

This is Cradle’s Graces, who Pluto fights for. It’s the faction of futurism and optimism, and it’s definitely the most hopeless and disastrous of them all.

The colonization branch that was supposed to make outer space a suitable home for humans, which, as you can kind of tell, is kind of a stupid idea. What’s the point of leaving earth just to make everything like earth, when you’ve already got earth?

That’s why the space program lost all of its funding in the first place. Humans take over everything they touch. Even Cradle’s Graces, who wished dearly to find something new and beautiful in space, couldn’t help but do the same thing.

But they’re stubborn, and Pluto doesn’t give up on stubborn people so, that’s where we’re stuck!

[worstgirlsgames]

MEMORIAL FOUNDATION

Hey there everyone! We’re talking about another faction today!

This logo represents Memorial Foundation Native Sphere Existential Safety; but as the only branch of the Space program still loyal to the Memorial Foundation’s terrestrial branch, and by extension earth itself, “Memorial Foundation” is enough. 

While Existential Safety would protect humanity from theoretical threats outside of the native sphere, Existential Research would chart our path forward so Existential Expansion would prepare planets with the physical and cultural terraforming necessary to sustain human life. Memorial Foundation advances the agenda of Culture’s struggle for a foothold in reality, and at one time, it seems like there was no battleground or frontier more important for that struggle than space. 

But that was a long time ago, and it is clear to everyone but the poor children of Cradle’s Graces that humanity has no future in space. Everything we need is right here. It’s the eighties, for crying out loud; time to enjoy the bubble of endless prosperity that will never burst! 

But that’s cold comfort for most of its members, especially Luna-Terra, who already betrayed them once. No one will ever trust the double-crosser again, but it’s not like Memorial Foundation, made up of former child pilots who fought bravely against existential threats, feel some bitterness towards the planet that decided they were useless, and has ordered them to fight humans.

On the other hand, those humans are idiots that can’t face reality, and are acting like petulant babies. Space is not the future, and it’s pretty annoying to see your friends put everyone in danger chasing it. Why do you care about space more than us? Not that we’re jealous!

[worstgirlsgames]

FACTIONS / CELESTIAL MECHANICS

Hi there it’s Aevee again and this time we are talking about choices. Do you find yourself routinely making poor decisions despite your otherwise reasonable judgement? Then you will love Heaven Will Be Mine, where all of your choices will result in an ill-conceived love affair or a robot exploding. Sometimes both!

Similar to We Know The Devil, choices in Heaven Will Be Mine aren’t based around selecting dialogue so much as they’re about choosing a side. In this case, that side is one of the three factions fighting over the fate of the international space colonization program. As your faction sends you on various missions to advance their agenda over the course of the game, you can decide if in fact you believe space politics are boring and would rather make out with your enemy instead.

Each of the sides in this conflict has a grim, tragic, or insidious fate in mind for the human race, so don’t feel bad about betraying them. You should make your decisions based on your heart, or who seems cute, or who you’d most prefer to be elegantly stabbed by in space.

I will talk a little more about the system next week when we talk about the other factions, but for now we would like to show you who is trying and failing to be in charge of Saturn, the demo protagonist and least responsible heroine.

CELESTIAL MECHANICS

Celestial Mechanics has been doing a pretty great job pretending it isn’t Celestial Mechanics for almost the conflict’s entire year. Officially, Celestial Mechanics is supposed to be advancing human thought and potential and charting our future, and not inventing something existentially horrifying, but they are in fact doing that, and Memorial Foundation loyalists and Cradle’s Graces rebels are too into each other to pay attention to what’s happening at the lab in orbit around Cronus.

Nothing good, right? That’s what an anonymous test pilot thought, and she very helpfully leaked all the most damaging information she could get ahold of, resulting in and immediate end to the truce. That will teach the director to bench Saturn indefinitely from piloting duties! I mean, whoever did that!

[worstgirlsgames]

Development

Aevee here—we’ve been pretty quiet recently on account of having to make a video game, but we’re entering the final phases of development and so we wanted to talk a little bit about both the setting, characters, and mechanics of Heaven Will Be Mine, and how we are making the game! 

If not for spoiling everything, it would be kind of fun to a devblog about the game’s script, but those changes are too subtle to document:

*Came up with a mecha nomenclature based on planetary geography

*Made some adjustments to Saturn’s brattiness/likability ratios 

*Added some language to clarify the metaphorical implications of a certain worldbuilding device

I wrote this up as a joke but these were really things, and this is actually great, and maybe I will publicly write something someday. Well, anyways, I’m not going to do this, so I am going to talk about the other kind of writing I am doing for this game, which is working in the markup language Ink. It’s not coding, but it’s hard, so I consider it to be coding, emotionally. 

For We Know The Devil, I just sort of told Pillow Fight what I wanted to happen, and we figured it out together. It was a pretty simple mechanic, but this game is bigger and more complicated, and I wanted to be able to have a grip on how it worked as I was writing it. In the same way that you can have a wonderful idea that doesn’t sound any good on the page, the game’s logic feels kind of like a jumble until I can see it actually work. It also frees up the rest of the team to do more important things, and allows me to play more freely with the logic as I go.

Honestly, it’s kind of a nice break sometimes, because unlike writing, which has vague standards of quality, this stuff either does what I tell it or it doesn’t, so I either feel like a complete genius or an utter idiot, which has a kind of relaxing definitiveness to it. Inkle, the editor for Ink, also lets you see an html version of the script and choices, which lets me see what the logic actually does. This is frequently what I actually want it to do, and then I can decide if it was a good idea or not from there.

Heaven Will Be Mine is not that much more complicated, but it turns out: not much more complicated is still a lot complicated. It’s a really different experience to have control over the logic while I’m working on it—this is not news to probably most designers but as I am still pretty new to development, it’s exciting to me!