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Twofold 1st Anniversary
🕑 Added 2024-10-27 19:17:15 +0000 UTCToday marks the 1 year anniversary of Twofold's release! A year ago today, Twofold released on Steam and itchio after over a decade of development. We've got some goodies for you, some announcements, and some words from some of the developers, so let's get started.
First off, Twofold is coming to the Nintendo Switch in the upcoming months! We're working with a publisher to port the game and hope to share more information soon.
To celebrate, Theo illustrated this new artwork featuring Olive, Millie, and Caprice. Someone, please help Olive......
The clean version and avatar versions for this artwork are attached at the bottom of the post, so feel free to use them as wallpapers/avatars!
Next, we have some comments from the people that worked on Twofold.
(note: these contain some spoilers for Twofold!)
caps:
I was so excited to write a postmortem once Twofold was out in the world. I had a list a mile long of things that I wish we had time to change or add or remove and to reflect on the development as a whole and people's initial reactions to the end result.
One year later, I'm sitting here trying to figure out why it's as hard as it is to sit down and put my thoughts to paper.
There's this notion, I guess, that everything heals with time. In some respects, I think that's true; over the past year, the rough edges I saw in Twofold have been sanded down in my mind and I look at the project now proud of every inch of it with very very very little remaining in the way I'd still like to touch up or revise. Twofold's relationship with time is a complicated one, however… after eleven years of development, how could it not be?
In Josh's Please Be Happy postmortem last year, he brought up the idea that a developer's life is broken up in eras based on what game they had been working on during that span of time. That doesn't really work with Twofold though, at least not with me — creating that mental divide is all but impossible given just how much of my life it occupied. It's a project that I think is ingrained in my soul, something that will never fully be in the rear view window as we keep moving ahead. I've made (and lost) so many friends over the course of its development. Several monumental life events happened, both good and bad. And for nearly each and every one, I can tell you exactly what I was doing with Twofold at the time.
It's a tired story by now with how much I've repeated it here and there since release, but one of the darkest periods of my life happened early on in Twofold's development. It was around that time when I stopped just trying to manage people and work on the game's UI and moved onto actively taking hold of the story and its direction. Twofold already had a year or two under it by then though, and I didn't want to just use the characters I'd already grown attached to to vent and cry about my situation.
Twofold's age forced me to sit down and think about how to best process grief, both from a personal as well as a creative standpoint. The answer I came up with was I wanted to make a story that I think would have helped me if I had the chance to read it myself. That's something that's stuck with me even after Twofold wrapped, and why the world of Twofold is idealistic even in spots where things should realistically be a bit more rough. To that end, I'm so happy that Twofold hung on long enough for me to cross paths with Theo who fully understood the vision and intent instantly and was so willing to throw everything and more they had behind it. Twofold wouldn't have happened without them. Nor Papaya (who saved my sanity ten times over in the final sprint), nor Élan, nor long-time devs such as James and Acotan.
Given its age, it's impossible for Twofold to not have some bad memories tied to it. But a year post-launch, all that sticks in my mind is how proud of how far it's come, how much more it accomplished than I could have ever dreamed (Full voice acting? An artbook?? Physical release??? CONSOLE VERSION????), how much I love our characters and could keep working with them forever, and how grateful I am to everyone who made it possible.
Theo:
🫒 This post contains spoilers for Twofold! Please take caution while reading. 🫒
One year ago, we released Twofold!
I’ve been trying to think of what to say for this, but I think I’ll just sum it up with this: Thank you.
I can’t overstate how much this game and those characters mean to me. Even now, caps and I regularly find ourselves talking about them, their futures, their favorite foods, and what their lives would be like years after the main story. While I joined the development team in 2020 and only knew them for a fraction of the time as the original team, I fell in love with the concept and I was so happy I could be there to help bring it to life.
Most of my work was completed the year-of Twofold's release. In January of 2023, the original script writers for both Caprice and Millie had other things going on and the voice acting was slated to begin sometime in March (I believe). To begin with, we took some time to go through the entire script and write notes for ourselves on what we needed to do for it. While Caprice's route definitely had its fair share of edits needed, something we've alluded to a lot is Millie's path needing so many changes we eventually ended up rewriting it. Without much option, caps and I became writers on Twofold. We worked together so closely on everything that it's hard to remember sometimes who did what, but I think that worked out in its favor. When one of us would write, the other would edit, and together we eventually reached the place we wanted Twofold to be in.
A lot of Act 1 for both paths was already recorded, so we had to try our best to preserve as much of it as possible. While almost all of Act 1 has been reframed for Millie in some way (adding the fake dating, recontextualizing Tanya's statement of Olive falling in love, and how the writing club failed to show up to her), we actually ended up being able to save almost all the original dialogue! Millie getting glasses was also a late-game change to the story. By keeping Act 1 intact, that meant keeping the line where Millie states that contacts give her a headache, but she kept them for appearances. This line really stuck with me, and I desperately wanted to allow Millie to be less concerned with how others perceived her and to start living in a way that was right for her. So I wrote her in glasses for a scene and drew the CG before even asking if we had time to add glasses for her sprite… I'm glad we did. While Millie had a total rework of Act 2 and 3, the biggest changes for Caprice were mostly centered in Act 3. While Caprice eventually goes off to hide at her childhood home, the original script had her leaving much earlier, meaning Olive's attempts at cheering her up never happened. I'm really glad we ended up adjusting that, because Olive's later phone call to their mom paralleling the intro to the story was one of my favorite things in the story. The fact that they didn't cry back then when their future was going up in flames, but DID cry later because their girlfriend was hurting feels so incredibly… Olive.
Anyway… we got all of the script changes done and then I had to dive entirely into programming in the UI both visually and functionally, doing the CGs, and then doing it all over again for PC.
Something that instantly grabbed me about Twofold’s conflict was the idea of personal needs. Often, a lot of character drama stems from places of insecurity, miscommunication, or mistakes. In Twofold, every one of those elements is present, but they’re not the reason why the story begins. The story begins years and years before we first see Olive: back when Millie is just a little girl with a sick mom and loving dad. Her love for her family, which included Caprice and Charlie, was everything to her.
I think it’s really hard to pull off a story like that. Twofold definitely has its own bumps in the road with dealing with it, too. Right before release, there was a part of me that wondered if we could pull the story apart and rebuild it, if there were scenes that we could have written better, if there were CGs I could redraw and make stronger. When it released, too, I had those ideas in the back of my mind as I watched VTubers for the very first time as they played through Twofold just to see what people thought about it (talk about self-centered, I know!). But visual novels have a slow burn appeal: it takes people awhile to read it, of course. And over the coming weeks, as love began to pour in, as reviews came in saying the game made them cry, as I watched with my own eyes as people fell in love with the characters just like I did, those feelings went away. I’m so, so proud of what we’ve done.
I only ever wanted to do right by Twofold. When you can love a story you’re working on and push yourself to make it better because you want others to see that, I think you can create something really special. As a creator, I was so incredibly lucky to not be alone in these feelings. It’s easy to fall into a routine of development that makes it feel impersonal and draining, especially on longer titles. I am so happy I got to work with people who inspired each other to do more, to do better, to have more fun. That I could see caps love this world even after years and years of troubled development, that I could see each Syon plan dozens of VO sessions as the incredible cast brought the characters to life, that I could see papaya breathe humor and realism and heartbreak into the scenes, that I could make an OST cover for James who made sure every music track called to both the script and the characters themselves… There’s so many more, too. So many people brought their distinct voice and skills to the project, that rough edges or no, it’s impossible to not love.
Thank you to everyone who helped us. Thank you to the director and my bestest friend caps for trusting in my voice, too. Thank you to everyone who played, who shared it, who kept them in your hearts. I’ve said it many times before, but Twofold inspired me to create art again. I hope both now and more years to come, Twofold can inspire you all in some way, too!
papaya:
This is papaya, one of the scripters for Twofold and a sad fool who really likes Millie.
Did you know that, within the ten long years of Twofold's development cycle, I was on the team for only the final year? And that I nearly missed Theo's DM where they offered the job because Twitter doesn't notify you about message requests? And that Caps nearly did everything all alone because I hadn't responded?
Well, I did end up managing to get in contact with Theo, of course. I wouldn't be here talking to everyone otherwise!
Twofold was a unique experience because I have never been brought on a team to do scripting, much less paid money to do it. When I was thrown into the metaphorical Discord office room like a sad wet cat I wasn't even offering scripting services. I actually have no idea why I was sought out because I never asked (I'll probably get told why after I send this for posting), but I do think it may have something to do with the then-latest release from my own team, which had images moving around on the screen very much.
Unlike with working on my own titles, however, I could not just freely script Twofold however I liked. At the point it was at, Twofold already had its entire common act scripted. There was an existing visual style I had to adhere to, from the way all animations were eased in and slow to how Twofold very deliberately tries to look like a paper puppet show (much more than a visual novel usually does). I also had to learn how to use Ren'Py's camera. I also had to do one scene a week to meet the deadline. There was no time to read everything in the story. I read the prologue to understand what I was working with and then I moved.
My assigned scenes were majority Millie. The setup went like so: when the sprite and background assets for a scene I was going to get were available, they would be added to my list. Per the agreement, I completed one scene a week. Every week. At one point, I caught the flu. I still finished my scene. I was also given additional time to do the Christmas scene (the longest scene in the game due to route variants). I completed it in a week and a half.
To be honest, it was such a whirlwind of activity that I can't remember a lot of technical things to tell you outside of complaining about how strangely Ren'Py's 3D camera behaves sometimes. That gave everyone a headache; it's why rollback is disabled automatically. We probably could've done some things better in regards to that (and I did find a solution to one of its most annoying issues for A Tithe in Blood), but we didn't have the time because Twofold needed to get out the door.
But I will say this.
I got so unbelievably attached to Millie.
It's not because I felt like she was my baby or anything because I got assigned a lot of her scenes. It's a more deeper emotional attachment from being able to relate to her. Losing a parent when you're still young is a very painful thing to go through. I know this very well. You must remember that I had no time to read the script in its entirety, and it wasn't like I was handed a full story summary for mandatory reading, so I would be given scenes with little context. I was shocked when it turned out that the source of Caprice and Millie's conflict was the complicated situation that is a parent remarrying after the death of their spouse.
So, I used Millie as a personal squeaky toy. When she grieved, I grieved with her. This may be a little blasphemous, but I also felt biased towards her, and when I was particularly emotional about what was going on I thought she was in the right and everyone else was wrong even though I knew better. This was channeled into the chosen animations, sound cues, music, even pauses. I think the strongest examples of this happening were in the scene where she revealed her "train set" to Olive and the scene where she shouted that she still loved and cared about Caprice.
Maybe this is why I was able to go so quickly with scripting, or maybe not. I was also being paid, so delivering scenes on time was paramount (lol). Needless to say, I finished everything I was assigned on time, and then after that was scripting in some CGs that had been completed (which took a bit because I was a little lost about where each CG was until Caps realized I wouldn't know this and pointed me in the right direction. I think I had been so frazzled about other obligations that asking myself left my mind.). And now, Twofold is out, and you can play it for yourself and see everything that we did.
I'm glad so many people love Twofold and I hope many more do. It is truly a title filled with a lot of heart and compassion. I played the whole thing the day of release and cried a whole lot, especially when it came to Perfect Circle—I had no idea PC was happening. Caps and Theo kept it a secret from me!!! The assets weren't in the files at all when I was actively looking at them to do my part!!! I was so angry (lightheartedly).
Happy first birthday, Twofold! Just 20 more years and you can drink (responsibly)!
Lastly, Twofold is currently on sale on itchio and the leftover merch for Twofold is on sale on our webstore!
Comments
Rally
This is such a touching story and it is wonderful to read the developers own takes the story. I love TwoFold and it is definitely in my top five. I look forward to any other projects the developers work on.
