Written by: Polly and John
Character Designs & Art by: Carmichael Micaalus
Music by: Garden
Photography by: PaunchoSmith
Trailer Voice Over: Holly Hampson

Polly's Thoughts:
What amazing luck that we were able to actually release this game exactly two years after the first one while the story also details a two-year long span of time.

Anyway...

The idea for Afterward came easily. I woke up with the word in my head one morning and immediately attached it to Her Lullaby, and very quickly my brain sketched out the base idea of what this story is:

What happens after the "happy ending?"

I'd not seen a lot of stories do what I felt like I wanted to do with Afterward and I was immediately very excited to let my brain play with the idea.

I was also nervous to bring this idea to John because I wasn't sure how making a sequel to a story like Her Lullaby, but without all the violence and psychological horror elements, would work. Just a story mostly about people talking and having inner-monologues. Truthfully, I wasn't even sure I had the chops to do it! I wasn't sure how it fit in with how he viewed sequels period. To my surprise though, John was completely on board and the development process began.

While everything about Her Lullaby felt effortless and breezy, Afterward took a *lot* more work. Not really from the technical side of things, but from how we wanted to approach storytelling.

In the beginning before anything had even been written, ideas came fast, but I feel like we were overcomplicating things and worrying about how to connect these two stories together realistically. Was there going to be some point that Sal and Tocco had to talk to the police? What about Sal's medical insurance? All this stuff was in very early outline drafts for this story before we found our footing and pared it down to the essentials.

Yeah, we planned the hell out of this story. NOTHING about making Afterward was easy. Her Lullaby took a brisk three months to put together start to finish, whereas Afterward took sixteen months of on-and-off development for us to see the release date.

The thing that remained consistent between both projects was our chemistry. We still *had it* for the most part, it just took a bit more wrangling to get it all working together this time. The parts that we needed to write individually felt almost inevitable. I knew that I wanted to write the big return to the warehouse scene and when the time came it was only natural for John to write the diner scene. It took a bit more to get where we were going with this one, but it was definitely worth it in the end.

Something I latched onto very early in while drafting the game was that for some reason I wanted as much of the game to be the inverse of Her Lullaby as possible. It's something that only I cared about, and it's something that happened by accident a whole lot, but it's something I really like about how this game turned out.

Some ways Afterward is the inverse of Her Lullaby include:

-Afterward is one word, Her Lullaby is two.
-Afterward's green accent color is Her Lullaby's purple accent color inverted.
-Afterward takes place from Tocco's perspective, Her Lullaby was mostly Sal.
-Afterward features no choices, Her Lullaby features many.
-John wrote the "endgame" chapter of Afterward, I wrote the Endgame chapter of Her Lullaby.
-Afterward's trailer has voiceover, Her Lullaby's does not.
-Afterward's logo is rounded and clean, Her Lullaby's logo is erratic and scratchy.
-Afterward's title screen features music and is clean, Her Lullaby's is scratched up and silent.
-Afterward's credit roll is silent save for a sound effect, while Her Lullaby's credit roll features the main theme.

There's probably more I'm forgetting, but it's something I leaned into a lot. The game taking 5x as long to complete certainly wasn't planned, but it lines up too, if ya think about it!

While initially the idea for the story was to feature no violence, in the end I think the violence Afterward does feature can feel just as visceral at times. It's the feelings of a relationship being torn apart slowly and painfully. When "I don't want you in my life any more" and trying to avoid hearing that at all costs is more painful than any knife into sinew.

Moments when we brought back familiar sound effects from the violence of the first game, like a bullet casing hitting the ground, reversing the gunshot sound from the previous game, and the death-distortion-hell sound effect all act as critical exclamation points to this story's more understated violence. I'm happy we were able to make that work, and I think John's steering of those parts of the story made it all the better.

My only real game maker'ey development story with this one was that I very specifically remember implementing the entirety of Tocco's years-long text message breakdown on Christmas Eve 2018. We didn't have some cool, easy to use code we used to cycle in new messages or anything. There's probably a lot of very clever ways to do that, but we hadn't really figured out one and didn't really stop to try.

Every single text message is literally a new graphic of the phone with new messages appearing and old ones being pushed up. I meticulously created each one in PhotoShop and implemented them one-by-one, along with proper sound effects, to ensure there were none skipped or any inconsistencies in the flow of messages.

YESSIR...81 damn images. Seriously, there was very likely a much easier way we could have done this, but in the heat of just diving in and getting things done, we didn't really think it over much. I also have an affinity for being able to churn through very tedious work and it not bother me all that much, which is probably something that benefits me as a game developer in some way?

Since I can't think of anywhere else in this write up to put it, all of the background images for Tocco's apartment were taken by Pauncho Smith in his own residence. There's definitely some fun little things you can see laying around that maybe add a little levity to things. For a while, all the backgrounds taking place in present day at Tocco's apartment had a sort of bloom effect on top of them. I'd wanted this to kind of help with expressing her state of mind at the time, or rather how her existence was seemingly clouded over and washed out, but it stopped looking good pretty early on, and later into the project I removed the effect and went with only light edits here and there on the photos.

Anyway...

Afterward is powerful. To me, I think it hits harder than Her Lullaby in a lot of ways because it's so grounded and mostly quiet. (We once again have Garden's amazing tunes here to thank for that.)

The reactions to this story from people that talked to me afterward (haw-haw) have been all over the map, and I absolutely love that. I think we wrote this story without casting judgement on either character, so it's easy to see the difference in folks' reaction to this one and Her Lullaby. Some sympathized with Tocco and resented Sal's choices, others sided with Sal, and some were just mad we took their "happy ending" away. Again, all valid.

Afterward is a story I look at even now, years after its release, and almost feel too intimidated to ever write another VN. I don't really think it's meaningfully prevented me from doing so, I'm just someone that waits for the right story to find me, and until it does, I'm happy with both Her Lullaby and Afterward being the representation for what I'm good at writing-wise.


John's Notes:
Polly is being generous with her description above. I really whiffed it on a few fronts here, not in ways reflected in the final game, but in basic collab etiquette. At one point I took a full six months to get a five or six thousand word chunk back to Polly, and when I did I'd mucked everything up! I'd over-edited Polly's sections to the point of stripping out their personality, and my initial draft of the epilogue was way too twee and "wrapping everything up in a tidy bow".

But we talked it through. Polly rightly laid out her issues, and we pulled everything together into a package we're both pleased with. This still feels like the most "literary" longform thing I've worked on -- instead of a big action climax, it's all quiet sad character work. I think we did a good job threading the needle here and complicating Her Lullaby's mostly warm and neat catharsis.


Garden's Notes:
Polly probably approached me sometime in mid-to-late 2018 to tell me that a sequel to Her Lullaby was in the works. This time I was given an actual early build of the game with all of the text (But no sprites) to work from, so rather than flying blind and striking gold, this time the composition and recording process was a lot more traditional.

It was clear the vibe was different this time. My initial feeling was that this game felt like having a hangover. As a consequence the music is very distinct in tone and approach from the first game. Everything is a lot more spare in terms of both the arrangement and the production. A lot of it just a single monophonic clean guitar part with some 808 style drums running in the background. The atmospheric synth pads do come in from time to time, especially for the warehouse return and eventually the diner.

Rather than Polly and John having to worry about splitting up a monster 12 minute long song into workable bits, this time I went for a more typical video game approach of having different tracks for different scenes that could be looped over and over as necessary, though I did split some of those loops into into even smaller bits.

Like Her Lullaby, this was made in Ableton Live, my old nemesis. Like before, it’s just one big project file w/ individual parts and loops arranged together and bounced out into individual tracks as needed. So rather than making say, “apartment 1” as a separate file, it’s all just in the one place. For some reason that made sense to me at the time. I would probably do that differently if I make another game soundtrack in the future.

The biggest scene of course is the diner, which was called for a change in both tone and approach. Rather than the sparse, somber kind of clean guitar compositions that I was using for most of the rest of the game, the cafe music is something that I wanted to gradually build in intensity until the critical moments hit where you learn what exactly Sal has to say to Tocco in the aftermath of it all. That’s where the big loud Electric Wizard fuzz tones come back into the picture, a sort of spiritual tie back to the music of the first game.

I remember intending the 808 drum machine sounds that I used to be placeholders, just something to get the ideas going and give me some rhythm for the guitar parts I was writing. I don’t know if it was Polly or one of the beta testers who suggested that it actually suited the game well, so I left them in as. I think it was the right call to leave that. Especially because otherwise there’s almost no low end to this soundtrack.

Unlike Her Lullaby, which has some obsolete software greyed out in its project file, this file exists just as I left it. I’m not sure how I recorded the guitars for this one because there’s no evidence of any software plugins in the file. I’m guessing I was probably using my Kemper Profiler, a gadget that I was really in love with for a time but eventually got sick of for various reasons. One of the synth parts in the diner track was made by running a guitar through a synthesizer pedal called a Meris Enzo. There’s only one instance of bass guitar. Probably the only thing I would change about this one is to add more bass guitar! Though, it probably could use some additional layering of the guitar parts to give it more of a stereo image (Seriously, this whole thing is almost entirely mono). I was foolish in other ways this time because none of the guitar or bass bits have an unprocessed DI track copy, so the sounds I have are “committed to tape” forever.

I seem to recall Afterward coming together music wise much faster than Her Lullaby did, even though Polly and John’s side of the equation took much longer than the first game. For some reason I don’t seem have any chat logs from that time period so I could be wrong. I’m not sure if that was a consequence of having a more minimalist approach this time around, or just that having the actual game in front of me to compose to made it more apparent what was necessary. Similar to Her Lullaby, you could credibly call this soundtrack completely unmixed. On top of having fewer over all source sounds, there’s even less EQ moves here and just a little compression to make the volume more consistent.

Like I said in my more longwinded write up for the first game, as far as the music I’ve made in my life goes, these soundtracks are the projects I’m most proud of by a country mile.

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