I am not a game developer. But it still been a constant desire for me to develop a game that gave me the same feeling façade did when I first saw about it. It's a weird nostalgic feeling, that's present with a weird/awkard situation that the game is based off - with a simplist but a proper visual that meets it's proposal. I'm a musician and I like to risk on learning and “artting” with other things too, and game development seem to include almost everything I love to work with.

Maybe the first step is to learning which Engine they used to develop the game, download an older version of it (if possible), etc…

If you have anything that could help/or want to help directly just say, i'm waiting.

PS: never used this site before so let me know if i put that in like the wrong forum or channel or some shi

Really a good question.

Imagine you go into the room, there's a bunch of kids. They're popping the eyes out of a plastic dinosaur toy, and replace with a laser pointer. ‘Yeah, looks cool! Warp it in tinfoil, so it looks like robot skin. And replace He-Man with Sheena riding it - she looks hot!’ - ‘Ok, but i’ll paint one of her arms black, the other yellow, so she's properly varied. And i'll hold the hairspray beneath the dino mouth and the lighter, so it looks like spitting fire! Prepare the iPhone - ready to take a photo?' - ‘Yes, looks awesome!’
And you pull out a Van Gogh print and show it to them. ‘Hey kids, can you tell me how to paint this myself?’ The kids stare at the painting. Their jaws drop slowly, their gaze freezes. Clueless and shocked, not even noticing their hands start catching fire. No response.

That's what you've just done :D

I'm joking, a little bit. But whenever i come across this game, i think i know nothing about games. I do not even dare to play it. I'm afraid to conclude all my work on silly games is useless, and i better stop - to work on something meaningful instead. : )

Without playing this quite often, i can not tell how much AI is involved. How much dynamic, interactive fiction there is inside. I know that's something we can not do yet. Even if current AI chatbots became really good and allow deep conversations, that's technology which did not made it into conventional games yet, for good reasons.
I'm even puzzled by the graphics. Some amateurish artstyle, but visual language is strong, and emotional expression is on par if not better than million dollar AAA productions, which only get there using capturing real actors at huge costs. But such capturing tech gives static content, which they can use only in cutscenes and are not even playable.
Probably they modeled a set of key expressions, and the game interpolates them given the parameters of a simulation of emotional state. But no clue.

The technology of the game is so unconventional, it's pretty sure they don't use some off the shelf engine you could download. Maybe i'm fooled, and the game is indeed much more simple than i think. I don't know.
You would need to search for the devoloper(s) and if they gave any materials about the development process. Maybe they gave some talk, or wrote about it in some blog.

However, game development is hard. Art is just one aspect of it. There is also the tech side it is primarily based on. Do you have any experience on programming or some scripting at least?
If not, you probably aim much too high.

I would point you towards visual novels. There exist frameworks / engines, which are relatively easy to use. Most known one is probably Ren'Py, using Python as programming language which is easy to learn, and also is frequently used by the machine learning community. Visual novels allow branching stories, where you lay out everything which might happen in form of a tree. As the player makes decisions, he takes one branch or another. Such games exist also without any visuals but just text, so no need to create content requiring it's own skills at mastering related tools from Photoshop up to Blender.
To make a game without former experience, you should start small, with low expectations.
Usually we start with games like Pong or PacMan, and getting there might take you months already. An easy to use engine for that would be GameMaker. Others don't use engines and do all programming on their own. Regardless, you need the ability to express everything in terms of math and logic. If it's a 3D game the math is already quite complex on it's own. Took me years to get this.

In general i think games are not art. Because they have a function. And there's a lot of complexity beneath that function, even if the end result feels simple.
As a musician, you could join a team and care about that. You would get an impression of the development process while contributing yourself, and eventually extend your abilities with time. On sites like this people can offer / request this to form small teams, often on a hobby and non profit basis at first.
But the kind of games they create usually are more about dragons, dinosaurs, guns and swords of course ; )

@JoeJ Yeah, I totally forgot to mention - the reason why i felt a little more safer to try and dig into developing a game is because i'm building a programming background for a year now. Not much experience, but I think trying might be the way of learning it, without going too far, of course. This programming experience i've developing came from a course that is integrated by the school i'm in. I'm mostly learning a lot about the basics of programming languages, databases, etc… Tho i'm also studying on my own, i've been trying to dedicate a lot of my time to this, and I avoided to turn it into just a hobby, since I want to work with it for the rest of my life, if possible.

I already installed Gamemaker on my PC some months ago, and I've been messing around with it too - the language I've been dedicating the most to learn, is coincidentally, the one you've cited, Python. I mean not so coincidentally since it's a language that has been highlighted recently - I've always been fascineted about it, and it's capacity, being easy and understanable, even for somebody who doesn't know nothing related.

About the game: It indeed is amazing - Earlier I looked through the games' files, I can just confirm to myself how much you gotta devote yourself to do it, i shit ton of voices and expressions files, everything that makes the game flow a little better and natural (talking only about the files, there's the work of programming it too). Maybe, from the fact that the game is not new, i might had think: “you know what, if two dudes made dis in 2003 or something than it shouldn't be so hard to at least try to experiment with it.” I think putting the "indie" label to him also tricked me a little, but yeah, I like to dream about things being that easy lol.

I do consider getting into visual novel side, and really i think that's the most realistic way this project is going torwards - I think i'm discarting the idea of making it too visual for the moment, with a story that progress in simple text, easy interface, y'know? I don't plan on promoting it either, maybe showing it to my close friends, having fun, letting them help it with the story different progressing, idk just don't take it too serious. Maybe if someday, some distant day i finish it, i will show it here (?)

lastly, i do appreciate the suggestion of me getting into a team, i am considering this suggestion, and surely will try it.

Appreciate your detailed response, thx.

I see you have background and also the right attitude towards the project.
The first step i'd take is research about natural language text parsers, which i personally know nothing about.
Considering the age of the game, it's maybe not based on full blown machine learning, but something similar to earlier chatbots, like the Eliza program.
The very good ML chatbot i had tried once was ‘Mizuki’ iirc. It's somehow difficult to find now, but i saw there are github projects, even chatbot builders respecting some given properties. Maybe this could be set up so it follows the kind of story and environment we give to it. I expect that's rather difficult and lacks control, but i don't know.

Maybe a better reply comes up in the future.

ingenchicken said:
I think i'm discarting the idea of making it too visual for the moment, with a story that progress in simple text, easy interface, y'know?

This convinced me about your ‘right attitude’. A typical beginner mistake would be to waste time on art without having a working prototype of gameplay first.

Good luck, and keep asking for help.
Nice to see some people have real progress in mind, while others waste billions on nothing burgers like Metaverse or NFT.
I share the goal to tell love stories in games. What else could proof we finally start to grow up? : )