Hello! It’s been a little over a year since The Seaside Inn was first released. I started working on it in April 2022, though I had the idea for a story similar a few years before. It was originally a novel about a young woman navigating the fallout of a breakup and finding herself while working at her aunt’s bed and breakfast in a small town—while of course, falling in love with both someone in town and a mermaid visitor. While I had plenty of ideas for the novel, it just wasn’t fitting the way I wanted it to, and when I got the urge to make another game I took elements from there and spun it into something new.

For this, what I wanted for the player was lots of opportunity for what I called “Soft choices” which were things not relevant to the plot but could allow the player to choose simple, little things and fill out their character. This culminated in over 80 choices over the whole game (44,000 words). That’s about 550 words between each choice! It’s a simple thing that I enjoy in games and wanted to bring that into mine, but that also led to a lot of testing over and over again, and I don’t think it’s something that I will do again because when overdone, I feel like it interrupted the flow of the story at times.

I also had a—what should have been an obvious thing in hindsight—realization about the UI! The original game had the choices as white, which meant you had to hover over them to see the words before you chose them. This is very annoying to do so! But I had no idea because of course, I already knew what all of the options were. But seeing @Jestana streaming gave me a great chance to see it in action and make a quick fix for it. You can find her YouTube Channel here where the VODs of past streams are kept (including a few of my other games!), please go check her out! 

I think a lot of my games seem to come from season + location. This one was centered on summer and the town.

I think that with this game it is full of nostalgia for me. A lot of Cauwick Bay is inspired a lot by a small town my grandparents had a cottage in by a lake, and while I haven’t been back there in years, part of this game was wondering what it would be like to return. For the backgrounds, I used a lot of references for small towns in British Columbia, where the game is set. For non-Canadians, that’s on our west coast!

Taylor was made with the idea in mind of “There was a kid that you played with for one afternoon at a park or a pool and you were best friends for like three hours before you had to go home for dinner” and then what would it be like to meet them again. He was able to take on a life of his own as I was planning the game, and he went through a few design iterations with him—he was originally going to have dyed blond hair but I thought he looked better with a more natural black. I think he was originally a surfer as well, but I liked the idea of him working at a little gift shop because I love going to gift shops, the tackier the better! And him being scared of water was honestly just funny to me, especially if he ends up with a mermaid girlfriend haha.

And speaking of mermaid girlfriends! Melani exists because Aquamarine(2006) was my favourite movie growing up. I had a huge mermaid phase (and I’m still in it apparently!), I had books and read tons of novels about them, I used to draw mermaids. They were just my favourite fantasy creatures and I love telling stories about them. One regret I have is not having more scenes of her in the water, but in truth, a lot of her story was not really about her being a mermaid—it was about her choosing a life for herself, which was what I wanted the theme of the game to be. Of young adulthood and coming to a crossroads in your life where you have to make hard decisions about your future, and both Melani, Taylor and the Main Character decide that by the end of the game.

The poly route I decided very early on, and that came in place of originally a third love interest—who was repurposed as the musician who comes in for the festival! Having both of their solo routes, and the poly route was interesting to come up with unique scenes for them and balance between the poly route and the ‘friendship’ route. There is a lot of overlap, more so than I wish there had been in retrospect. It’s something I would like to include in games more in the future, but for here I really felt it fit the characters, and their relationship was always designed for our two leads to be close friends and have good chemistry no matter who was with who.

There are different versions of the endings, boiling down to what choice Taylor or Melani makes for their future, and whether the MC joins them on that journey. I wish I had put either more emphasis on the choice the player makes, or done a “best two out of three” for the final answer, as it happens past the midpoint of the game but not really close enough to the end for easy replayability. But I am satisfied with the endings and what they choose, either to explore adventure and freedom, or to follow a more ‘dutiful’ path—for Melani to return to her family, or for Taylor to enroll in university. Honestly, some of my favourite endings are the ones that are bittersweet and tinged with sadness, there’s just something about summer love coming to an end that gets me every time haha.

I think my thoughts a year on are still happy with what I made, a little summer story about friends. There is a coming-of-age element, but more so coming of age in your 20s rather than in your teens, which is where I am currently. This one especially was made for me, full of things and tropes and characters that I love. And I hope it resonates with other people as well, that they can get enjoyment out of this story too. I learned a lot from this game, its technical aspects (it’s way too small—I should have made the assets bigger, for example!) a lot of the coding, the pacing of my work, and all the elements needed to make a game. It’s funny—I say I made this for myself, but I haven’t played it probably since it was released, mostly because it’s hard for me to just sit back and enjoy. I’m always critiquing and looking for things from my own work. Maybe a year on, I can just take it in again and relax—and play this game that I worked very hard on.

Thank you so much for reading, and playing if you have!