Tainted Love

Platform: Ren.py

Developmental Timeline: April 2025 (1 month)

Role: Sole designer, artist, and programmer

Tainted Love is a multi-ending, short story visual novel where you try to survive your date with a mysterious girl in her eerie house, with each path revealing more insight into her abnormal world.

Play Game Here

example of unconventional dialogue being used to build atmosphere and character voice.

Project Description

Intent

The intent with Tainted Love was to create an unsettling and uncomfortable emotional state in the player through the intersection of artistic direction, sonic direction, and the character voice of Elizabeth.

For art, I used highly edited photographs and mixed photography to create an uncanny feeling of realness
For dialogue, I used a character voice that is filled with unconventional conversational sentence structure in order to make the player feel unfamiliar with Elizabeth.

Multiple Endings

There are 5 possible endings to Tainted Love, each unlocking a poem left on a grave in the title screen that furthers the story. The player’s choices lead them down an interconnecting path of decisions that lead them to these five possible endings.

Game Writing For Theme

The core theme of the game is playing around with this idea of implication, and how it can be paired with the fear of the unknown to create fear in the player. Throughout the game, Elizabeth drops implications of the danger the house creates, what she plans to do, and what she has been through. These moments create questions that only feel half answered, leaving the rest up to the player's assumption which, when paired with the atmospheric design, creates a level of unique fear in each player.

This is one of the unlockable endings. All endings in this game come in the form of a poem that can be found on the main menu after unlocking them.

Documentation

There wasn't much documentation that needed to happen because of the small scope of the game, but the one piece of documentation I did do was very necessary. Before I started coding, writing, and photographing the game, I came up with a massive plot map of all possible directions the player could go in. This helped a lot with the short time frame, as I only had two weeks to make the whole game, and two weeks to polish it.

Out side of preperation, I also tested the game with various different kinds of people in order to see if the emotional intent was being met.

What I Learned From This Project

Process

The process I went with was incredibly well structured for the time frame I had. I ended up cutting down some of the work load by using photography instead of attempting to draw everything. The photography ended up helping with the atmosphere and emotional intent I was going for. I learned that it is ok to not do things conventionally and to adapt to what works best for the time frame and project.

Programming In Ren.py

During the production of this game, I learned a lot about how programming works on the main menu screen of Ren.py. I had worked in the engine before, so I knew how to make it run, but I really wanted the player to be able to "unlock" something with each ending that they could just go to without having to play the whole route again, so I learned how to change the main menu screen based on the gameplay, which was an interaction between script.py and screen.py.

Human Condition

A lot of my research for this project had to do with the human response to fear. I knew I wanted the player to feel on edge, but not necessarily scared. Hitting that middle spot of "uncomfortably eerie" required a lot of research into the human psyche. Creating that atmosphere through the intersection of art, sound, and dialogue meant I needed to study how it had been achieved in works across all mediums as well. There was a lot of research in preperation for this product, but I feel as though I have a better understanding of fear now.