Mancer - Conception
Click here to start playing the Mancer Visual Novel!
Just recently released the Mancer Visual Novel, created in collaboration with my friend D who does most of the writing! This post is a detailed breakdown of how Mancer came to be.
ORIGIN
Mancer is the culmination of many different ideas finally reaching a concrete form. For several years now, I’ve been wanting to dive into making an original magic academy setting. I also wanted to make a story focused more on yuri and had a more sexy dark fantasy vibe — at the time I was only working on Remnants (a fan work) and Voyager (pretty all-ages and more sci-fi fantasy)
A lot of my working ideas at the time was basically:
1 - Making a RWBY-adjacent story
Making something inspired by RWBY — Voyager was inspired by RWBY’s sci-fi fantasy fusion setting; I wanted this one to instead be more informed by its story beats, academy setting and character archetypes.
2 - Making a Magic School Setting
The other was making a Hogwarts-esque story about a magic school, but with my own ideas for worldbuilding. I wanted to explore the idea of a fantasy world powered by the corpses of dead gods: harvesting their bones to make into wands and their skin into clothes. A lot of anime magic school ideas I came across often had an all-ages, Ghibli-esque flavour to them: very Kiki’s Delivery Service or early Harry Potter. I wanted to make something with a slight element of grime and gore to it, with a slightly older cast and combined with my own hyperfixations about mythology. My primary inspirations for its vibe were Hades and Shadow & Bone.
3 - Making a yuri Shonen
I was also stewing on the idea of making a “yuri shonen”. I’m a fan of battle manga: their immersive worlds, large casts with distinct designs and fighting styles, and cool power systems. I’m also a fan of yuri: a girl protagonist in a cast of mostly girls kissing girls. But I found very few examples that combined the two in a specific combination I wanted. Either the genre wasn’t to my taste, the yuri relationships weren’t the main focus of the story, the yuri was more romance-focused and didn’t have much emphasis on battles or lore, etc.
I wanted to combine all these three distinct motivations I had into a single story. I documented a lot of this brainstorming at different times:
For the magic school idea, I was brainstorming them on YouTube streams at the time, and eventually Project: WAND. I recommend watching them if you’re interested in watching brainstorming sessions about this world.
For the yuri shonen, I expressed my thoughts through thinkpiece videos like Untitled Yuri Project or by editing MVs like Blood and Yuri.
I experimented with these ideas first with Deathless Lily (NSFW), a series of short comics with a bunch of OCs focusing on the yuri dynamics, and Our Spell Is Steel, a tabletop project focusing more on building the dark fantasy world. I was also working with my friend D on the Project WAND (NSFW) visual novels, using most of the OCs from Deathless Lily and making fairly short adult games about them.
With the experience learned from these different projects, I managed to finally muster up Mancer, along with help from D to actually tackle the task of making and developing something as fairly complex as a visual novel.
And that’s the journey leading up to Mancer’s creation! The next post will actually be talking about Mancer itself: its premise and basic details about its world.
