Orchid Duet

The first time Xiang Li met Lan An, that jade-like youth was playing the guqin, his nimb fingers flying over the strings like a dragonfly skimming over the water, painting a picture of celestial beauty.

Who would have expected this man to befriend him, making him torn daily between the sweet happiness of having him close by and the fear of his secret being revealed...

The him that everyone sees... The him that he is really... Is it enough to be accepted in this world?

“I often don’t understand others’ hearts, but in this case... how could I not?”

“Is it not the same as mine?”

A Mo Dao Zu Shi fangame,

made for YaoiGameJam 2025!

Four hundred years before Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian first meet on the rooftops of Cloud Recesses, Lan Wangji's ancestor, Lan An, met his partner, fell in love, and started the Lan Clan. This game represents my fanciful version of those events.  (Well, the whole "starting the Lan Clan" part isn't really depicted, merely briefly discussed.  The game is just the "met and fell in love" part...)

Xiang Li is a character I came up with to fill the role of Lan An's romantic partner... While Xiang Li and Lan An are the central focus of the story, there are also other bits and pieces to depict the beginnings of the Mo Dao Zu Shi world.  (For example, they first meet at a banquet being held by Wen Mao.)  However, since it is four centuries before the main action of the novel, hopefully the story also stands on its own for those unfamiliar with MDZS!  (There are also helpful tooltips to translate terms and provide definitions for concepts that may be unfamiliar to those who have no experience with the xianxia or wuxia genres, or ancient China in general.)

The game's setting is somewhat nebulous, chronologically; this is largely because (as Mo Xiang Tong Xiu has confirmed) MDZS's setting is not based on one specific era, so figuring out the "when" of four hundred years earlier is not really possible.  There's another side to that, however, which I'll discuss in a devlog rather than gum up the main page with it.  The most important thing to consider here is that since there is no strong indication of "when" this is, I've mostly just followed the conventions of the novel (with various limitations due to the game jam VN format) rather than trying to present a cohesive picture of "400 years earlier."

• About 9k words of script (counting the captions)
• Kinetic, aka no dialog choices (think of it as a click-to-continue episode of an animated show rather than a traditional visual novel)
• One entirely skippable (and very brief!) rhythm mini-game where you can play the guqin
• Speech bubble-based dialog presentation, narration-light
• CGs, visual effects and camera staging for a cinematic experience
• Tooltips for those unfamiliar with Chinese terms and lore about the MDZS universe
• Accessibility: Dyslexic-friendly font, Image and Music captions

• Writing, programming: Pyrrhalphis
• Character art: LinXueLian 
• CGs, additional character poses, itch page, thumbnail & banquet hall background: Arghbulous
• Additional character art and UI art sampled from traditional Chinese art on Wikimedia Commons
• Backgrounds: Raketenfaust, LinXueLian, and more 
• Supplemental code by  Stella @ MakeVisualNovels, EdgesSystem, CuteShadow, and more!
• (Full credits available in the game menu) 

• Xiang Li has internalized a lot of the abuse that has been aimed at him across his lifetime; this might make some of his dialog triggering for people who have suffered similar abuse.  (Most of what he's internalized has actually been misogyny rather than transphobia, which might make it better for some people and worse for others.)
• A certain amount of general period-typical attitudes all around, in fact
• Extremely mild violence
• Ghosts and fierce corpses (which don't really do anything, but the ghosts have clear visual implications of having chosen to die)

The current build is finally 1.0!  No more placeholder art! 

Oh, one other thing to be aware of:  there are a few instances of characters pacing back and forth.  My (limited) understanding of how to use EdgeSystem's movement code left me without any way of dictating what position they stop in:  they just stop pacing when a certain line of dialog is cleared.  As a result, sometimes they stop in positions that are a little awkward for the scene moving forward.  If that happens, you might want to roll back a line and click forward again when they're in a better position.  (Or not, for laughs.  Your choice. XD )