Inspired by my love for visual novels, mainly the Doki Doki Literature Club, the Danganronpa series, and Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk, I wished to make a visual novel of my own, emphasizing suspense. Particularly interesting to me was Milk Inside a Bag of Milk Inside a Bag of Milk’s highlighting of Schizophrenia, essentially placing the player as the main character’s inner thoughts. Accordingly, I was inspired to create a visual novel that turns a prevalent issue in society against the player, playing with their minds in the process.

I wanted to put my thoughts into a game drive my players into a corner of why they do what they do at all. As such, I created Cross the Street.

Design-wise, I created both the script and organized the game myself. The code was made by a combination of my learning slight skills in editing pre-existing RenPy code and using GPT for more complex endeavors (i.e., an Eliza-like script). With little background in drawing and music creation, I used ChatGPT to generate all the images used in the game (later converted and scaled by other software) and used Pixaby for royalty-free music and sound effects.

I hope the various color schemes, bleak pixelated backgrounds, and depressing sounds evoke a sense of despair in my players. Why should you care if you eventually die? I want my players to feel the futility of life. I believe that there is something more powerful to be said in stories that people can relate to: those that reflect the more common futility of daily life. And while this visual novel is not optimistic, it also lets the players know they are not alone. While it doesn’t make things much better, it does comfort the vast community of others who go through the same issues, knowing that the difficulties in their lives are not isolated.