One of the most obvious questions someone might have, in looking at Orchid Duet's game page is probably along the lines of "why bother making this a game?  There's no dialog choices, almost no way for the player to interact, so why make a visual novel instead of just writing fan fiction?"

Well...

Okay, actually, I don't have a good answer to that question.  Not one beyond "I wanted to!"  (And, honestly, can there be any better answer to that question?)

But another question that surely comes to mind must be "why this particular story?  Why did you want to write about Lan An and his partner, and why did you make his partner transgender?"

And this is where the answer gets more complicated.

Because, you see, I have been writing a surprisingly large amount of Mo Dao Zu Shi fanfic over the last few years.  Which is, for me, normal:  I tend to focus on something and pour most of my creativity into it.  This is generally a character or a world--the first drafts of all seven of the God Killers novels were all written in a single year because I was just that laser-focused on those characters at that time (despite that it was the same year that I was starting work on my MA!)--and it's not unusual for the character or world I'm fixated on to be someone else's.  I've come to accept that about myself, and don't see any reason to fight it:  I know that eventually Wei Wuxian MDZS will release his its hold on my soul and I'll go back to writing mostly original works, and in the meantime, why not enjoy myself?

The more I've written in the fandom, the more I've become aware of the fact that it lowkey feels like there is no government in the MDZS world beyond the cultivation clans.  (Between the lack of imperial authority stepping in to curtail the bloodshed in the Sunshot Campaign and the imperial airs Wen Ruohan was putting on, I don't feel like I'm totally wrong to look at it that way.)  And the more I've thought about it, the more I've felt that it would be fun to write a fic depicting how that became the case--how the empire went away and was replaced by the clans, setting it in the time of Lan An and Wen Mao because otherwise I would have to make up 100% of the characters.  A fic like that, however, requires the most careful preparation and research before it can be undertaken, and I haven't had the right opportunity to start that research yet.  So at the moment all I can do is jot down little ideas about who the characters would be in the fic and what might be going on to cause the change.  (I'm thinking the formation of the Burial Mounds will surely be involved...but I really don't know yet...)

Earlier this year, I reread the novel, and happened to take note of a few little things that would be useful for that future fic about the novel's distant past--the fact that Baoshan-sanren is of the same generation as Lan An and Wen Mao, the name of the Jiang Clan's founder, etc.--and one of those things I noticed was that in the official translation, Lan An's cultivation partner is described in exactly those terms:  "cultivation partner," never "wife" or even "spouse."  The official translation is very careful to be entirely gender-neutral about Lan An's partner, and according to the MDZS wiki, the original Chinese text was also entirely gender-neutral.  This strongly implies that Lan An's partner was a man--or at least that we're being encouraged to think so--and yet if Lan An had a granddaughter (as we know he did) then surely he also had at least one biological child, right?  (Well, okay, not necessarily, and yet if that was exactly the era in which the focus on bloodlines became so important to the cultivation clans, wouldn't it be weird if the man starting the clan had to adopt?)

This of course led me down a mental rabbit hole of "what do I want to do about this character whenever I am ready to write this fic" and in the end I came across the best and most obvious solution:  Lan An's cultivation partner was both male and able to bear children, because his cultivation partner was transgender.  Best of all possible worlds.

But I felt like writing their romance would take away from the drive of the fic, so I decided they would be an established couple with their children already born by the time of the fic's events.  (This also works well for anything tying in with the formation of the Burial Mounds, since it was Wen Mao's son who tried to clear the Burial Mounds, not Wen Mao personally, implying that the Burial Mounds formed after Wen Mao's heyday.)  So I set the idea aside as a mere side-detail of that future fic...

...but then I decided I really wanted to make a game for Yaoi Jam this year.  XD

*cough*

Yeah, my decision-making process in a nutshell.

Anyway, the other side of this coin--or rather the "when" addressed in the title--is that because this is essentially a prelude to a fic I've yet even to research, I still haven't decided on a firm period to set it in.  Possibly it would be during the "Sixteen Kingdoms" period (304-439 CE), which is soon after the Three Kingdoms period (yes, as in Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and a particularly chaotic time when one would expect catastrophic failure of the mundane government to lead into the accidental(?) creation of an unofficial(?) magical government in its place.  (Coincidentally, the show-runners picked the tail end of this period for the physical details when they adapted MDZS into The Untamed, perhaps to explain the very absence of imperial interference that set me on this thought experiment in the first place.)  Certainly, my future fic is unlikely to be set any earlier than the Sixteen Kingdoms period, since Buddhism only entered China around the 1st century CE, and Lan An is a former Buddhist monk.  (Which actually kind of makes Lan An's backstory anachronistic in The Untamed?  That only just occurred to me...omg, wow.)  Alternatively, I might discover that there really aren't any periods in history where it would be even vaguely plausible for the empire to collapse that fully, and thus I might have to define an entire fictional timeline for the fic, one that merely resembles actual history in a few places.  (Sort of like how none of the kingdoms in Heaven Official's Blessing are real ones.  (As far as I know...)  That kind of thing.)

Long story short, although there are references in the game's script to fighting over the imperial throne and wars in general, those references aren't (currently) in reference to any specific war, just to the kind of era I expect the setting to eventually be.

Uh...which is an odd thing to say, I acknowledge.

But game jam, yeah?  There wasn't enough time to read a 600 page book and get everything else done, too.  (Besides, I keep telling myself not to read that book yet because I'm supposed to be working on the next draft of book four of the God Killers right now...not that I've touched it in months...*whimper*)

Anyway.

I hope I've answered at least some of the questions anyone looking at this rambling post might have regarding why I decided to make this game or when it's set.

I promise the next devlog will be more focused on the game itself, and hopefully less chaotic...