So I'm not going to go on and on about the reasons behind this game too much, because it really comes down to my love of old-school shoujo manga, my personal love of fancy, haughty girls with their silly OHOHOHO laughs, and my desire to recreate a lot of the old school shoujo effects in ATL.  Sometimes that's all you need!

Anyway, about a week ago I started preemptively gathering visual references and inspiration, and today I started writing the pitch doc in earnest.
Despite my love of the old shoujo style, in America the (legal) availability of a lot of '70s manga is nearly nonexistant. We are only JUST NOW getting printed editions of Rose of Versailles, when it's been an influence on other manga and anime for literal DECADES. (It's quite silly and honestly, heartbreaking, that so many stories will never be available here because they simply are "too old to make money.") As such, my actual pool of reference for what captures the essence of '70's shoujo manga' style is actually pretty small, so please forgive me, lol. 

While I mention in the pitch document that I want players to feel like they're finding an old manga series they've never heard of, I also happen to have an absolute FASCINATION with the GUI for older anime-based games and visual novels, so I took it upon myself to look up the UI from- what else- the Revolutionary Girl Utena Amiga game for inspiration.

Something that's absolutely BRILLIANT here that I've noticed is what seems to be an "affection meter" built into the UI for the romancable characters; the rose for Saionji (bottom left, green hair) is tightly closed, and later in this scene, he fights Juri (orange hair, top right) who was the chosen romance for the person playing this fan translation of the game. (As you can see, Juri's rose is fully bloomed.) Other important characters like Anthy (speaking in the middle left screencap) has a special name box as an indication of her importance as the "Rose Bride."
Not shown is that when other characters who are not duelists are speaking, they have a different namebox decoration than roses, indicating they are "non-romancable." On the top left, you can also see the text box display for when the player character. I found it extremely interesting that they used blue text for all of their dialogue! I super recommend watching a few of the gameplay videos linked above, because the transitions and little UI animations are really neat.

I'm planning to play around with UI for this game and see what I can get to work the best; If i can't get the speech bubbles to feel good, something like this is likely to take its place.

That's all for now. 

-Mia