Twilight’s leading lady Bella is a pretty lucky girl, all things considered. She’s in a small, secluded town where only a few hundred people live, and two of the hottest guys on the planet are in love with her. It’s a nice escapist fantasy, but how different would things be if Edward was really a velociraptor? That’s the question that upcoming indie game Raptor Boyfriend, developed by Rocket Adrift, seeks to answer. I spoke to the studio’s three members Pat Smith, Titus McNally, and Lindsay Rollins about how the game came together.
“The thought of a raptor was a really stupid joke that we had as we were trying to reimagine Twilight,” McNally says. “But with actual monsters, because the vampire and the werewolf are just these hot boys, and the vampire coding isn’t really that big a deal. But what if it was actually a dinosaur?”
It makes sense that the joke originated as a parody, since it was conceived as a webtoon for YouTube, rather than a fully fledged game. “We used to do animated short shows on YouTube, and the initial idea was for Raptor Boyfriend to be one of those,” Smith tells me. “But we felt at the time it was gonna be too ambitious for it to be animated, just be something that we couldn’t really take on. And we also thought that it wouldn’t work with YouTube’s formula of relative concepts, like Star Wars or something like that. That’s the kind of stuff that does well on YouTube. Then once we burnt out of doing animated stuff on YouTube, we decided that we wanted to do some video games. And the first kind of concept that came to mind once we wanted to get into that was Raptor Boyfriend, because it made perfect sense for us.”
The central characters in Raptor Boyfriend are Stella, Robert, and Taylor - just in case the Twilight influence wasn’t quite obvious enough. Unlike Twilight though, there’s also a queer option in Raptor Boyfriend, which I expect Kristen Stewart would probably approve of. “The process of actually designing the characters was that we always knew Robert was going to be a raptor,” Rollins says. “And we always knew Taylor was going to be a Bigfoot, because they were kind of the monster stand-ins for the vampire and the werewolf. But Day [the femme love interest, and a fae] originally was going to just be Stella’s best friend. And we were really happy with that initial idea. But eventually we were like, ‘well, why? Why wouldn’t they just also be a cryptid? Or like a kind of a monster character?’ So we came up with the idea for her to be a fairy, kind of late in the game, after we had started writing it.” Rejected versions included a cheerleading catgirl, which will unfortunately never see the light of Day - geddit?
While the game’s core concept takes from Twilight, the game itself is not all that influenced by the teen vampire romp at all. McNally says Doki Doki Literature Club and VA-11 Hall-A were inspirations as far as visual novel game making goes, but don’t expect to see much trace of them in the game itself. Instead, the influences are more televisual. “I think definitely a lot of teen dramas like My So Called Life, a lot of ‘90s teen dramas,” Smith says, while Rollins adds that Ready Or Not, Canada’s answer to My So Called Life, was also in the mix. “As far as video games go, the Life is Strange series and Night in the Woods as well. We also took some inspiration from Daria as well. The way that the game is presented is hopefully reminiscent of a cartoon, in the way that the camera changes to who’s talking and stuff like that. We wanted it to stand out a little bit from other visual novels in the design.”
Part of the way Raptor Boyfriend pulls this off is in its choice based mechanics. Smith and Rollins say they wanted to avoid choices needing to be overanalysed, metagaming, or players picking an option only for the description to not quite match the action - we’ve all been there, selecting what we think is a polite refusal only for the character to blurt out something rude. In Raptor Boyfriend, instead of dialogue choices, you’ll give Stella directions. ‘Be cool’, ‘tell a joke’, or ‘play hard to get’ will be the sorts of options provided to you.
Of course, because Stella is an awkward teen, just because she tries to be cool doesn’t mean that will actually happen. “When we were planning to make a visual novel, we paid a lot for research, and we just kind of found bad endings were just like a huge bummer,” Smith says. “That’s not to say that punishing the player is bad or whatever. But visual novels, because they’re trying to simulate a romantic relationship, it becomes difficult to not encourage bad behaviour, or maybe toxic behaviour and people. For instance, if you just try to tell somebody every time what they want to hear, instead of just being a little bit more honest with what you’re going through, it could lead into a bad relationship as well. So wanted to try and make a game where it’s still gamifying romance, but instead the choices are more ‘who do you want to spend your time with?’ and all the role playing stuff of like, how you behave is more how you feel like, how you feel Stella should be your version of Stella should be.”
