PANIC at Multiverse High!
Release Date: Aug 17, 2016
Developer: DoubleBear Productions
Platform: PC/Phone
Genre: Indie Visual Novel
Engine: Ren’Py
Role: Additional Writing
After Dead State: Reanimated was finished, DoubleBear Productions started playing around with some new game ideas. One of these was called PANIC in the Multiverse! - a JRPG/tug-of-war style hybrid with a Saturday morning cartoon feel. It featured a dimension-shifting base full of weird characters from all over the Multiverse. Unfortunately, due to Bloodlines 2 being picked up and a lack of funding, PANIC never made it past the prototype stage.
BUT Annie VanderMeer was able to salvage the character art and apply it to a visual novel/high school sim parody called PANIC at Multiverse High!
As I was working on a few projects at this point, I was only able to contribute a few weeks of work on this one - mostly character concepts developed for PANIC and writing a few of the characters, including the Study Hall and Magic Club storylines. This was a fun side project for me because I all I had to do was be silly, which frankly I don’t get to do enough in my games.
Kablam-O was a mech driven by a boy and his younger sister, heavily inspired by the Dreamcast game Bangai-O.
The game reacted to your choices in that the more you “hung out” with a certain member of your club, the closer friends you would become, which would unlock extra chances to interact with them. This meant there was a lot of extra dialogue that needed to be written for every character in the game to support the “best friend” path.
Getting to know someone better meant calling them on the phone on days when you weren’t at school. Click was from a universe where crows became the dominant lifeform.
Two of my favorite characters in this game were Rabbit and MagiGator. Rabbit was a larcenous pooka incapable of telling the truth and MagiGator is an alligator in a wizard hat whose only trick is to transmute living things into chickens, which he then eats. MagiGator’s dialogue pushed the limits of conveying complex relationships using only silence, hisses, and chomps.
The MagiGator. Can you tell I grew up in Florida? Please don’t tell anyone.
The game was written in Word as scenes and then transferred into RenPy script when it was final. It was pretty low-tech, but very easy to do quick drafts.
