What is Mycorrhiza? Why is Mycorrhiza? Who is Mycorrhiza?

The Mycorrhiza demo is finally out, which is obviously a big milestone for us. And what better way to celebrate the occasion than with a devlog talking about why Mycorrhiza exists in the first place.

As you may already know, Mycorrhiza is being developed as a love letter to horror manga. After stumbling over the horror manga inspired visual novel "Grotesque Beauty", I wanted to make something similar. In 2018 I started drafting the script and the rest is history. Aside from creating something in the style of a medium that I really enjoyed, horror manga, I also wanted to gain experience making a game as the main game director. That way I could gain experience managing a team, which is a good skill to have as an audio director, which is a position that I'd like to fill more, and I'd see game development from a different perspective than just from the viewpoint of an audio freelancer. Another reason is that I wanted to make a visual novel project that utilizes dynamic audio more.
There were two major features I wanted to focus on when developing Mycorrhiza: The horror manga aesthetic and dynamic audio.

Horror manga aesthetic:

This one turned out to be rather difficult to realize, I found, considering that I’m not an artist. The game is noncommercial, which also means that it has no budget (which was fortunately mitigated to a degree by me being able to handle all of the audio). Being able to edit images definitely helped since I was able to use free assets from Unsplash with some adjustments. The character sprites were also taken from Tokudaya's site, who offer sprites for free use.

The title screen was drawn by missyozart and they did a great job with it! We were able to make the title screen dynamic (meaning that it changes as you progress through the game) thanks to them.

The monster CGs were drawn by Black Wing Bin Lan (黑翼冰嵐) who have drawn actual horror manga before! They really nailed the style that we wanted to go for.

So while the lack of budget makes solidifying the horror manga aesthetic hard, we’ve tried our best to work around it and, at least according to the feedback we received so far, it seems like we did a decent job! We’re of course planning to work even more on the horror manga aesthetic. One thing that’s already planned is for example changing the menu screens, as well as some other features that we’re currently still mulling over. We got lots of feedback regarding the character sprites specifically and will see how we can adjust them (if my wallet allows it).

Dynamic audio:

Dynamic audio in general is just audio that changes and it's a huge part of video game music. This does include reactive audio, which is switching out the music completely, for example when the player character in a game enters a shop. This is something that's common in games in general, including indie visual novels. We tried to expand the usage of dynamic audio by adding other features that are less used in indie visual novels such as:

• Vertical reorchestration (different layers are added or substracted in real time throughout the course of a piece).
• Horizontal resequencing (a piece is split into several snippets that are reorganized on the fly).
• Random sound containers (whenever a sound event is triggered it picks one of multiple random sounds within a container instead of always playing the same sound effect).

And combinations between these with more possibly to be added in the future.

While looking into whether these techniques have been used for visual novels made with Ren'Py, one of the most popular engines for western indie visual novels, the only one I stumbled upon was vertical reorchestration. One reason is of course that visual novels are less interactive, but I felt like they could still benefit of more complicated dynamic audio setups and Mycorrhiza is my way of confirming that theory. Usually these features are implemented using audio middleware such as Fmod and Wwise but Ren'Py, the engine we're using, unfortunately doesn't support them. That's also likely a reason for why there aren't many indie visual novels that make use of more complicated dynamic audio setups. I’d be really happy if Mycorrhiza could become a model for what can be done dynamic music wise in visual novels made with Ren’Py.

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Alright, that’s that for this demo-release-post. We'll likely go into more detail regrading the things mentioned here in future posts, so make sure to check back every now and again! We still have two more doors to go, possibly lots of feedback to evaluate (please leave feedback!) and still many things to adjust and fix. I’m still not 100% sure if I’ll release another demo once the second door is done or wait until all the doors are finished. There are a lot of things speaking for the former like getting more feedback before continuing on to the third door, but I’ll have to give it some more thought. Since this is a noncommercial project, releasing over half of the game in the form of a demo is definitely not too far out there.

Either way, I hope you enjoy the demo and don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments! Feel free to share it around, that would really help us out a lot! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter if you’d like to be kept up to date on the game’s progress and chat with us about your favorite horror manga! @MycorrhizaVN