Good Children Say Grace · published
I have something exciting to report... 10 days after release, Good Children Say Grace has passed 100 sales! That’s about 90 more than I thought I would get. Everything this game earns goes into our next one, Evi Alba. Here’s a sneak peek: in-development screenshots, still far from where I want them to be.
This is a good example of how I handle the creative process. I keep iterating, improving post-processing, color schemes and designs, until I am satisfied with the outcome. If you can’t guess from the screenshot... our next game will feature a female protagonist called Evi Alba.
In this game, I want to explore our relationships with our bodies, identity, the culture of idolizing someone, parasocial relationships, and how what others see in a person conflicts with what that person sees in themselves. More about the new game at the end of this post!
Back to Good Children Say Grace
Before the reflections: if our game connected with you in any way, consider leaving an honest Steam review. For a tiny team like ours, every single one makes a difference. We see them, read them, and learn how you really felt.
Coming up with a game
A friend recently asked me how I came up with the name of the game. I checked my notebooks, my Google Docs, my memory. Nothing. Maybe I overheard it at a funeral or imagined it in a dream. I’ll never know.
Development started around September 2025, after I replayed Mouthwashing and the Pathologic games. I wondered if I could combine those narrative styles into a branching game built like a visual novel. I’ve finished at least 200 VNs, so that part came naturally. I absolutely love this genre. And no, I don’t think they’re just interactive books, they’re much more than that. I will always defend that opinion.
My first prototype was a pitch to Lucid Rain Studios, an attempt at something within their INFERIUS universe. It was called Solomon, it took place in the underworld, and it was my first attempt at a technical pipeline in Unreal Engine. As you can see, the pivot is pretty massive. The team was focused on their flagship game, so I took the prototype and kept going.
The earliest screenshot I could find:
It took about a year. Half of it went into the concept, the pipeline and the writing: 30k words, about the size of a small novel. The other half went into evolving the art style until it looked like this.
Needless to say, it was a long journey that pushed my creative and technical abilities to their limits.
About story and writing style
Why is the game the way it is? Well, it is what it is, isn’t it?
On a real note, underneath all the fractures it’s a simple story: Amelia’s addiction, and Martin’s grief over the death of his first love. The branching let us talk through themes instead of “person X went to location Y and said Z.”
Drink, or jump from the window, and you wake up in a hospital, which is really about how we see rehabilitation. People who won’t face their addiction often just find new distractions. In our game, those are the amusement park (entertainment) and the church (new beliefs). I try to use simple objects to represent the mind of a person.
We are still developing our voice, but the way we represent our ideas is very close to how we think about them, which is an achievement in itself.
The egg people started as a budget problem: I couldn’t make enough 3D models of humans. Eggs are fragile, and they all look the same. We react to stress in very different ways, but I believe the raw emotion underneath, the thing that unsettles you, is the same in everyone. Whether they can perceive it or not.
TV MAN is me (spoiler, not really). He mostly repeats what people told me while I was grieving. You can’t avoid learning your parents’ beliefs, and in the same way, I picked up the beliefs of whoever stood next to me when I was vulnerable. Now TV MAN, like a parent, says the indifferent things I never wanted to hear.
As I’ve said many times, I was extremely inspired by Oyasumi Punpun, The Summer Hikaru Died, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, and even Goodbye, Eri, which I don’t think I’ve mentioned before. I pick a few works as a baseline, then try to grow something of my own. Usually that means a whole day hiking in the mountains or on a bicycle, no notes, just thinking about how to say something in a way that’s... cool. Sometimes I come back with an idea. More often, I come back with nothing but the outline of one, which I can then grow. Just like a child.
I will conclude my convoluted story tirade here.
Being a solo developer
I love it.
If I’m being honest, I don’t like working with other people or sharing my creative process. Milha is one of the few people in this world I can build ideas and stories with, because we’re on the same wavelength. The one partnership I dream about is with a mangaka. Long term, I want to merge first-person exploration with manga storytelling even deeper. I can do many things, but drawing isn’t one of them.
The plan for the studio: games for USD 6 to 10, up to 3 hours long, telling emotional, self-contained branching stories. This vision comes mostly from my personal interests. I believe choice-driven games give players an incredible amount of agency, which lets them connect with the story even deeper.
Dealing with publishers
Once I had a demo I liked and a Steam page, I went to horror publishers with a pitch deck, videos, a burn chart of expenses, all the normal document stuff.
I failed, miserably. No one wanted to touch this game. Dozens of messages: I’m wasting my time, it’s too convoluted, no one will understand it, my art style is boring. I heard it so much that it doesn’t affect me anymore.
Milha and I started this to express ourselves, not to soften the message for a potential publisher deal, so I self-funded the game. There’s no magic to it: I spent less than I earned and worked nights. If a publisher who understands our vision ever shows up, great. Until then, I’m assuming we’ll never get publisher funding, and each game will pay for the next one, so we keep full creative control.
I also hold an award for being rejected by almost all Japanese publishers! We got to late-stage talks with one of them, and they told us mainstream Japanese players would never play a game like ours.
Main lesson: take the useful feedback, disregard the noise, keep working.
Evi Alba: my new game
Good Children Say Grace was about fractured grief. Evi Alba is about self-discovery, celebrity culture and dissociation from reality.
Evi escapes her overly controlling parents in an Eastern European military bloc and starts a new life as an underground idol in Japan. She sees everything from two perspectives: in the colours of the life she left, and in the colours other people see her in. Both use the art style from Good Children Say Grace, one dominant colour with supporting colours around it.
Same as before: story-rich horror, up to 3 hours, lots of branching. The art style will evolve significantly.
That’s all for this update. If I find problems in Good Children Say Grace, I’ll keep updating it, but our main focus now is growing its sales: short-form content, X events, festivals, pretty much anything we can find.
I really don’t want to sound like a corporate ghoul, but if you want to support us, the best way is to buy the game and leave an honest review. For context: if half of the people who bought the game left a review, we’d be at 50, more than many games with million-dollar budgets. The market is that competitive.
I will keep making the second game either way, but you can really make a difference.
Thank you so much.
Denis