Nekodeito Origins

Hey, welcome to the devlog for NoGooD. I'm a one man show right now, and I'm making a dating sim with an original catgirl character. I thought it might be interesting to start by talking about how I came to do all this.

On August 30, 2018, I was stuck on an eleven hour train journey with a chest infection and a fever. I was shivering and sweating at the same time and my phone battery had long gone dead. Sleep was pretty impossible with the carriage rocking around so I started having these fevered thoughts and imaginings the whole journey as my head was braced up against the window. Among them were a whole load of ideas for stories, and turning these stories into games of different kinds, because everyone thinks they have a great idea for a game. I got home and stayed in bed for eight days straight, dying.

On the ninth day I felt a bit better so I started writing. I went through phases of writing a couple of hundred words, and then scrapping the idea and moving onto a new one. I was chasing higher concept ideas that would have involved a lot of characters and scenes ultimately have been too expensive to implement well on a limited budget with no experience and no connections. I had a couple of ideas I thought were good but then I reread them the next day and they were terrible. There was a lot of sitting in front of a blank word document. It was all becoming frustrating. I just couldn't come up with something viable.

I then opened up a mobile game, and a character on the homescreen affectionately greets me, calling me her 'darling'.

It was a very comforting feeling. A very simple feeling, but a very warm one, to have someone who's happy to see you no matter what. I went down a gear and wrote about a simpler premise. I started to quite like my script and found I felt good writing a comfy romance. The working title was Nekodeito – Cat Date – because it was a dating sim where you went on dates with a catgirl.

Now it's January and the name has stuck. Nekodeito is a story about sharing simple moments together, bonding, and falling in love. It's about giving your heart to someone and having that affection returned in spades. And I hope that everyone will fall in love when it comes out.