We Three Kings

We Three Kings was a visual novel I created as a Christmas present for my family when I was a kid. I'm not fully sure of how old I was when I made it, either 10, 11, or 12. All I know is that I was in America, either visiting from Skopje/Forst, or after we moved full-time.

I started creating it on the first day of December that year, and was intending to finish right before the big 25th, but the writing was taking too long! I ended up having to present my family with a 75% finished game, before continuing development into the new year. :(

Although I (sadly) lost it with the death of one of my ex-laptops, I have written all I can remember below, to preserve the memories!

Writing

Because my whole family and I were conservative Christians at the time, I was forced to make something based on the story of Jesus' birth. So the game's plot ended up being about the wise men who traveled to give Jesus gifts.

While I'm pretty sure I was originally trying to make the writing "serious" and "historical", I was just a kid! So the game's writing ended up being in a cartoonish and irreverent comedy style that made my parents a bit uneasy. :D

The game opened by introducing the three kings/wise men/whatever, who I wrote as a bumbling comedic trio that lived in a palace together until seeing the star over Bethlehem. To name them, I went to their Wikipedia page and named them in reference to their Western Christian church saint names: Melchior(which I shortened to Melchi for some reason), Caspar, and Balthazar.

The story was divided into 4 sections: Field, Fountain, Moor, and Mountain. This, like the game's title, was in reference to the We Three Kings hymn. To progress through them, you had to trial-and-error your way through various dialog choices, some of which would lead to one of the kings dying in a comedic way, which would then force you to restart.

I don't remember many of these endings nowadays, other than the one where Melchi gets trampled to death by a camel. And the incredibly annoying dialog-prompt maze that is the "Mountain" section, created because at the time I was under the delusion that the final stretches of a game were supposed to be "challenging" and "a real bossfight".

The "Field" and "Fountain" sections were divided from the "Moor" and "Mountain" sections by a scene where the 3 kings stop at King Herod's palace in Jerusalem to ask where the new king of the Jews was born. I can't tell you much about this scene because my younger self's King Herod rendition just spouted off the same "HURR DURR I WANT TO KILL BABIES" dialogue that he did in our family's children's bible, with nothing new or orignal of my own added in.

This is also why I can't tell you much about the game's ending, where they finally reach Mary, Joseph, and lil' Jesus. The dialogue there is also unchanged from what my parents read to me before bed when I was little.

In fact, the biggest issue with this game's writing isn't how rushed the game's latter half is due to my Christmas time constraint. It's that it abruptly switches from a comedy into a straightforward bible retelling whenever another character besides the three kings is present. I for one think there could be so many interesting and darkly comedic ways to use a guy like King Herod in this story, and meeting Jesus should really have been the start of some serious self-reflection and personal growth for this game's insufferable main characters.

Visual

The game's artwork consisted of some .pngs I hastily scribbled up in GIMP. I used the sprite sizes of Ren'Py's sample project "The Question" as a reference for the sizes of my own sprites.

Most visual novel characters are drawn in an anime-esque style, and "The Question" is no exception. However, my characters were drawn more like Garfield characters, as my kiddie self's main idea of what a "cartoonish style" looked like was a Garfield book.

The 3 kings were drawn with very different proportions from one another, to make them visually distinct. Melchi was short, round, and had a big mustache. Caspar was basically just Jon Arbuckle with long flowing hair and a robe. Balthazar was big and blocky. These character designs are actually this game's highlight for me, as I can still recall them in vivid detail despite the passage of time!

However, the other characters' designs were much less memorable. This was because I just copied the illustrations from a children's bible to design them, all easily overshadowed by the Garfified Individuals they were up against.

Code

I'm going to end this postmortem with one final detail: I wrote all of this game's code, all of it's text, in Notepad. It was a transitional era for me as a programmer, moving from Scratch to Javascript, so I wasn't too familiar with "real coding" and didn't have a text editor installed.