Written by: Polly and John
Character Designs & Art by: Carmichael Micaalus
Music by: Garden
Ending Artwork by: Andrea Ritsu
Code Assistance: Eleanor

Her Lullaby Spoilercast and Postmortem
(A 3-hour podcast with Polly, John, Carmichael, Garden, and Andrea)

Polly's Notes:
Years later and this one's never once lost its luster to me. It had long been a dream of mine to write my own visual novel someday, which was largely sparked after I read the first Narcissu game back in 2006/2007'ish.

It was a short and bittersweet two-hour story put together largely by one person. Of course I'd had dreams and aspirations of writing a long, sprawling Higurashi-like, but what Narcissu did was show me that you could have just as much impact with a fraction of the hard work and run-time, and that's largely what inspired how Her Lullaby was shaped.

I know I've told the story a hundred times by now, but Her Lullaby was literally created from nothing. I opened Ren'Py and just started writing something. The opening scenes with Sal (who actually wasn't named by John for another build or two) and Tocco up through the first bad ending was done by me as sort of a writing exercise to just get something on screen.

There was only one background (though a couple of distorted versions of it are in there too), no sounds, two strangers waking up in the same place with a headache, a knife, and some violence that happened depending on a few basic choices.

The selection of that damn basement background will haunt me forever. In my rush to just get something on screen, I went with whatever ol' dingy dark basement'ish looking image I could find and lo and behold it was actually from another game. I did not know this until after the game was out. Nobody in testing recognized it, nor did me and John. So, it ended up just sticking, even though the next game, because it'd have been weird to try and change it then.

I keep threatening to one day do a remaster of this game that literally only addresses this issue by commissioning a real photograph of a dingy basement or having an artist put something together.

TANGENT ASIDE, I wasn't sure what I wanted the story to be from the point that I stopped at, so I threw what I had to John and asked him to look it over and, if he wanted, add to it. And that's how it all started.

The file we were passing back and forth at this point had a working title of "The Kill."

This is the genuine article. Built from the first Ren'Py project I sent John on November 28th, 2016. It contains the beginning of the story, which remained fairly untouched throughout the game's development, and the Dead|End. There was also a hook to proceed beyond the bad ending that I wanted to see John take a...stab (*HYUCK HYUCK*) at following up on.

The next three months (which was nearly the entirety of this game's dev cycle) would be a loop of each of us taking a few days to a week to improvise and write the next part of the story. When we started receiving character assets from Carmichael and music from Garden, things started to solidify even more.

The excitement for what we were making reached a fever pitch and never really cooled down. The writing chemistry me and John had during this project (and the next) was just intoxicating. It felt like we were always writing our parts to inspire the other, and even though I think John and I have different writing voices, it still feels like a cohesive thing. You can probably very clearly tell who wrote what, but I feel like it never gets disjointed or loses the consistency in its tone.

I think the only time we really had to stop and think about the story was how we were going to put a pin on the whole thing after the climax and our characters had done what they needed to. A couple ideas were pretty silly, but in the end, John had an idea that basically solidified this game for me as an all-timer. The closing moments perfectly encapsulate everything I'd grown to want to do thematically with this project once it'd started gaining form, and as a bonus, it brings the entire thing full circle by merely being some text boxes on a black background. I don't know if that last bit was John's intent, but it was a perfect little bow on a project that was only lacking that little bit of extra flair at the end.

The most important part of making this game for me was that it was the first time I ever made a piece of art by channelling the negative feelings and emotions I was going through at the time. A lot of depression, uncertainty, and anger needed to get out, and this game was the outlet for those feelings in many ways, and I've often cited Garden's amazingly dense soundtrack as perfeclty capturing what the inside of my head sounded like at the time.

Amazing how writing a little over the top violence can be cathartic!

While it is a very violent and unsettling story, it's also one with an emotional core which I think tastefully uses its violence as an exclamation point for how we may not always come out on the other side of things without something to show for it. And how you use that is up to you (which will be explored in the sequel title, Afterward).

I feel like this is a game whose development cycle happened in a way that these things just aren't supposed to. Absolutely nothing was planned, nearly start to finish, and though we were a decently-sized team putting together a pretty big thing for the first time, there wasn't really any sort of project management or wrangling. Nothing ever felt like it was gonna fall apart at any moment like I hear so often in stories about, "We're completely inexperienced, but let's make this very big thing!"

It honestly just feels like a perfect storm of ideas and ability to produce results hit everyone at once and this was the result.

Not a lot of other "in-production" unfinished build stuff exists for this game, but it did have a very doofy title and logo throughout about 80% of the game's production.

We were wracked for a while thinking of a title for the game, and I think for some reason I wanted to avoid calling the game anything with "Lullaby" subconsciously. When After5 finished testing what was a near-final build though, he basically said that was the only thing he'd call it, so it stuck.


John's Notes:
Her Lullaby was the first large-scale prose project I'd worked on and helped see to the end. I love writing, and these days I see myself as much as a writer as I do a game designer. Having a blast getting this game together with Polly, Garden, and Carmy is what blew open those doors for me.

There are a lot of little direction details here I'm proud of, but I especially love the choices in the finale and epilogue. Something I've avoided in my games is getting "meta" -- I think that handling that stuff poorly can get embarrassing real quick. But the "meta" stuff in Her Lullaby is all grounded in the logic of the world and characters. It works in service of the catharsis, instead of being an end unto itself. That's a delicate balance, and it's cool we struck a note I'm still happy with almost a decade later.


Garden's Notes:
I should probably listen to the behind the scenes podcasts we did on these games before writing this but I can’t stand the sound of my own voice. While I will revisit music I’ve made from time to time, I doubt I’ve ever listened back to any podcast or livestream I’ve ever been on. I remember vaguely what I talked about, though I’ll probably get some stuff wrong here now because it’s been years.

This would’ve been in late 2016. Polly had reached out to me asking if I’d be interested in doing music for a thing she was working on and I was on board right away. I’m pretty sure I knew it was going to be a visual novel from the onset but that was about it. She wanted me to make the music based on some general prompts without actually telling me anything about the context of what it going to be attached to. My best memory of the prompts was essentially that she wanted one type of music that was more chilled out, kind of somber but with something unsettling about it that could transition rapidly and suddenly into something chaotic, harsh, and noisy.

I’m rather fond of ambient and drone music so went in with that kind of mindset. I did two different example tracks. I think they each lasted about 30 seconds at that point. Just something to make sure I was on the right track with what Polly had in mind before I got in too deep. I remember she was pretty happy with what I put together at that stage. I think this is when the extra direction of making the music as one kind of long main track that Polly and John could splice into gameplay appropriate loops as needed. Remember that for my Afterwards notes, that’ll be a major difference.

So I set about doing it. Those original demo tracks are in fact present in the final material, though they are buried under a lot more distortion.

I made all of this in Ableton Live. Ableton is a program I have a major love-hate relationship with and I’ve presently given up on it , but I haven’t uninstalled it. The soundtrack for these games is in fact the only reason I’ve kept Ableton on my computer.

Let’s tell a story about digital recording and file preservation. A couple of months ago from time of writing (may 2025) and before I knew Polly was going to be doing these archive sites, I actually had a minor panic attack regarding the project files for both Her Lullaby and Afterward. I thought I had lost these to the digital void forever because I’ve moved through several computers since doing them. I could’ve sworn I put them on a cloud drive at some point or another but I didn’t. Luckily, I had several Time Machine backups on a physical drive from the computer I was using at the time and with a few hours of effort was able to restore the project files to a usable state. I’m not always great about data preservation but hey, thanks past self for making sure this stuff is still around.

Now, Her Lullaby’s soundtrack file doesn’t exist exactly as it did when I made it. All of the recorded audio and the midi files are intact, as are the synth patches, but I lost some of the plugin data (and some of the plugins I was using are no longer functional). Maybe that’s a good excuse for a remastered audio release of the game? Something to talk to Polly about later I suppose.

The point of that anecdote is that digital preservation/archiving is difficult shit and you have to stay on top of it. Stuff rots in ways you don’t expect. Saving the record of human history has always been a big uphill battle. For every film reel from World War 1 that survived in a watchable state for over 100 years, countless millions of yards of film went up in actual smoke. Sometimes, old 2” master audio tape plays as good as it ever did. But other times, whether through poor storage practices or simply a spool of tape that came from a bad batch to start with, the tape is falling apart in the dark and the window for digitizing it is shrinking.

All of those potential issues are even more extreme in the digital world. If a tape reel went sticky on you, you can bake it and buy yourself enough time to digitize it. If your old hard drive simply can’t be read, you’re fucked. If your cloud service goes out of business and you didn’t think to grab everything off of it before it goes dark, you’re fucked.

All this to say, backup your shit in a redundant fashion. One cloud back up is fine I guess, but you seriously should have a copy of anything that’s important to you on at least two physical drives, and you need to be checking on that stuff once in a while to make sure that it’s even retrievable. Hard drives fail, companies die, and if you don’t put in a little effort your stuff is going to be lost sooner or later. I did more or less the bare minimum of preservation on this project and that’s the only reason it still exists in a working state.

I can tell you that there’s no samples, in the sense that I didn’t pull anything from a prerecorded source. Pretty much everything you hear is either an electric guitar or a synthesizer/drum sound that came standard with Ableton.

I separated the Ableton project file into two groups of tracks, the loud stuff and the quiet stuff. I built up layer upon layer of the dreary ethereal ambient synth stuff, sort of one loop at a time and arranged it piece by piece. There’s a few guitar parts that poke through the soup of ambient stuff (and one that you can’t really hear very well).

The loud parts are actually more sparse in terms of how many different voices are going on, but of course much louder and considerably more distorted. The signature feature of the noisier passage is an 8 string guitar played through an old Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz distortion unit. You probably know the sound best from the album Dopethrone by Electric Wizard. It’s a blisteringly over the top sputtery sound that is the enemy of melody and note clarity. There are of course synth sounds adding to the din with occasional flourishes of something that might be confused with melody. There’s an utterly simplistic single tone drum beat which gives a sense of rhythm.

The actual lullaby wasn’t my doing, that’s all Polly. The super harsh and sudden static noises that accompany some of the sprite changes are also not me, I don’t who was responsible for that.

The end credits are a reprise of the lullaby but this time it’s me playing it on guitar instead of the version polly put together.

I finished the song with very minimal processing other than what goes into the actual source sounds. Very little EQ or compression, mostly just volume balancing and lots of distortion and echo. I think the lo-fi (amateur/lazy) approach lended itself to the atmosphere.

Polly was Super Excited when I sent off the final version and I knew whatever this thing was it was gonna be cool.

Overall, I’m not sure which of these two soundtracks is my favorite but collectively, they’re still the things I’m most proud of. I was so giddy when I finally played the game and saw just how well everything came together.