Love & Fool's Gold - Dev Log #1

Hey everyone, and welcome to our first official Love & Fool's Gold devlog!

I figured I'd start off our devlogs by properly introducing the game, including a breakdown of its genres and narrative structure. In future devlogs, I’ll be sharing more about the actual stuff the team has been working on since the last update, as well as breaking down our branching structure, and talking about specific components of the game’s design.

So, without further ado… what IS Love & Fool's Gold?

Love & Fool’s Gold is a Wild West romance/mystery narrative game with an Eldritchian horror twist.

We deliberately try not to describe it as a “ cowboy dating sim ” - which is understandably a much catchier alternative - because I’ve personally never really felt like it was an accurate description of the game.

For starters, it’s not really about dating cowboys at all. Technically, of the three romanceable leads (a.k.a. “Partners” (get it)), Tom is the only ‘cowboy’ - Santana is a bounty hunter, and Edgar is an outlaw. But my main issue with the phrase is that ‘dating sim’ doesn’t really capture the essence of the game.

Back in March of 2024, when we first began work on the game, the intention was very much to create a ‘cowboy dating sim’. Why? One of the reasons is simply because we hadn’t seen anyone else try to do it - but the main reason comes down to what they say about making games: “ Make the game you want to play ”. Hell yeah, I wanna play a cowboy dating sim, so hell yeah, I’m gonna make one.

At the beginning, it was just Lilli (Art Director, and a close personal friend of mine) and myself working on the game. We threw around some ideas for the first couple of months before settling on three particular characters, which we have officially/unofficially coined “ The Holy Trinity ” (or, alternatively, “ The Good, The Bad, and The Sexy ”):

• Tom, the Cowboy: moustached, older, rugged, a lil chubby, and very much Lilli’s typical flavour of fictional character;

• Edgar, the Outlaw: dark, cold, mysterious, brooding, just the right amount of pathetic, and very much MY typical flavour of fictional character;

• Santana, the Bounty Hunter: edgy, capable, independent, ruthless, and absolutely a 1:1 overlap in our typical flavour of fictional character.

However, the more we worked on the story and these characters, the darker the game became. Suddenly, it no longer felt appropriate to refer to the game as a light-hearted ‘ dating sim ’ where romancing the characters was the primary goal. Instead, it was a story of mystery, murder, love, loss, grief, corruption, betrayal, and redemption. And horror. And probably some other things, too.

So, when we decided it was time to leave the narrow confines of the ‘ dating sim ’ genre behind, things became a LOT more fun. We could tell a story we really cared about, with characters that felt real, like they were more than just some pretty 2D drawings on a screen. ‘ Romance ’ was now a component of the game that we could weave into the story and the partners’ character arcs, which in turn made it a lot easier to write these things authentically.

With that said, developing a game with multiple genres has its drawbacks.

For a start, How do you balance all the genres appropriately, especially without misleading the audience?

We’re fortunate enough that this worry has (thus far) never been a particular problem for the game. In fact, it turns out these genres actually work pretty well together - the same people who wanna romance cowboys also want a game where they get to investigate Eldritchian horrors! I guess that’s the benefit of making the game you want to play - you yourself are the target audience, which makes it easy to predict what might work well for everyone else.

It also helps that this clusterfuck of genres we’re working with - Western, romance, mystery, narrative, horror - are pretty evenly balanced.

The ‘ Western ’ genre is pretty obvious - it’s a game set in the Wild West era (1871, to be precise). There are certain expectations when it comes to delivering an appealing Western game or story to an audience of Western fans - for example, there are certain tropes that players will be hoping for. This may include, but is not limited to: drunken brawls, shootouts, train heists, goldrushes, poker games, saloons, stagecoach robberies, bounty hunters, outlaws, sheriffs, duals at high noon, corrupt lawmen, campfires.

But while it’s important to be aware of audience expectations, if you’re creating an original story, you don’t want to be too formulaic in your storytelling or it’ll just sound contrived and predictable. So, to conclude: expect some of these tropes, but not all of them.

Next is ‘ romance ’. While we, as creators, would very much like to romance the Holy Trinity ourselves, we realise that some people come for the story instead. We are firm believers that you should be able to make a meaningful connection with a character without necessarily exploring a romantic relationship with them. For that reason, we’ve deliberately written the story so that the partner’s good endings can be achieved without necessarily pursuing a romantic relationship with them. (This is another reason why calling it a ‘dating sim’ isn’t strictly accurate.) With that said, the romance element is still a big part of the game’s design, so we would definitely encourage you to pursue the romantic pathways if you feel so inclined!

Then, we have ‘ mystery ’. Personally, and this might be a little strange of me to admit, but I feel like the mystery genre lends itself very well to romance. Romance has always felt like a bit of a mystery to me. (That’s a joke, but not really.) There’s definitely something about meeting someone new, and getting to know them both as a person and as a potential partner (romantic or otherwise), that feels like a bit of an… investigation. No? Just me?

The next genre is ‘ narrative ’. You may have noticed that I’ve gotten this far into the devlog without using the term ‘visual novel’, which may be a bold choice for a developer who is effectively making a visual novel game. Again, just like our reluctance to use the genre ‘dating sim’, this is deliberate. We don’t want the game to feel like a traditional visual novel. This mostly due to visual novels feeling like too restrictive of a genre for me. And - this may sound sacrilegious, and perhaps a little pretentious, so I hope you’ll forgive me - I’ve always preferred playing classic ‘narrative’ games to visual novels. I often find myself unable to feel fully immersed in a VN the way I feel in a narrative game, so I’m doing everything I can to deconstruct the VN genre and build this game up as something fresh, and I also believe it’s the best way to tell this story. (I’ll talk more about this some other time, but in my eyes, the distinction between ‘narrative’ and ‘VN’ primarily involves a combination of UX, immersive sound design, cinematics, and technical features.) In doing so, we hope that players who would normally turn away from VNs might be willing to give our game a try - and I know there are a few people in our Steam discussion forum who have expressed this exact sentiment. (Thank you for taking a chance on us!)

Finally, we have ‘ horror ’. Specifically, ‘Eldritchian horror’. To the horror layman, this might sound like quite a niche way to describe horror in a game, but again, it seems to work well with what we’ve already got going on (and particularly for a Wild West setting). Other terms we have occasionally used interchangeably are ‘gothic horror’, or even ‘folk horror’. Without giving away too much by way of spoilers for the rest of the game, by ‘Eldritchian horror’, we mean something eerie, unearthly, disturbing. And we tried to add our own spin on this too.

That’s it for this devlog, thanks for sticking with me!! I look forward to updating you all next time, where I’ll talk about our narrative’s branching, and show you some behind-the-scenes of what we’ve been working on. I’ll give you a sneak peek of some behind-the-scenes WIPs below in the meantime. We’re a small team, and we’re all working hard to make Love & Fool’s Gold the best game it can be, and we’re so grateful for all the support. Till next time!

Beware The Elk,

• Anna (Alu)