Trouble Comes Twice

Trouble Comes Twice is an engaging bisexual romcom visual novel that immerses players in the lives of twins Hazel and Jace. Set against the backdrop of college life, the game explores themes of first love, sibling rivalry, and the challenges of navigating relationships. Players will experience a rich narrative filled with humor and drama as they guide the twins in their quest to find romance before their sibling does.The gameplay features interactive storytelling, allowing players to make choices that impact the direction of the story and the relationships formed. With its vibrant characters and relatable scenarios, Trouble Comes Twice offers a unique blend of adventure and romance, appealing to fans of visual novels and romantic comedies alike. This full version is designed for Windows, making it accessible to a wide audience.

Gameplay:

Trouble Comes Twice is a third-person action game that offers a mix of fighting, stealth, and puzzle-solving elements. The player takes control of Jack and moves him through various levels, completing objectives and defeating enemies along the way.

One of the unique aspects of this game is its dual-screen gameplay. As the name suggests, “Trouble Comes Twice,” the player must control two characters simultaneously – Jack and his wife. The two characters are displayed side by side on the screen, and the player must switch between them to solve puzzles and overcome obstacles. This feature adds an extra layer of complexity to the game, making it more challenging and engaging.

The combat system in Trouble Comes Twice is smooth and responsive, allowing players to perform a variety of combo moves and use weapons creatively to take down their enemies. However, stealth also plays a significant role in the game, and players must use it strategically to progress through some levels. With intense boss battles, thrilling chase sequences, and an intriguing storyline, Trouble Comes Twice offers an immersive and engaging gameplay experience.

Characters:

Stephanie: A shy, gentle violinist from a wealthy family. She admires Hazel a lot.

Adrian: Childhood friends with the twins, Adrian is a stoic but caring person.

Zoe: A bubbly, playful girl who moved in next door to the twins some months ago.

Cameron: A flirty guy with a "bad boy" reputation around college, Cameron loves teasing the twins every chance he gets.

Changelog:

It's been over a year now since the release of Trouble Comes Twice! We've been wanting to write this postmortem for sometime, but it's taken us a moment to find the right words haha. Anyway, we hope that this postmortem can give our players and other visual novel devs some insight into what the development process was like for us. And also, it's a chance for us to reflect on what we learned.

Coming up with Trouble Comes Twice

Foxglove Games was founded by online-turned-real life friends Melli and Clara. Entering 2020, we had already released (under another name we won't be sharing for anonymity)  another free visual novel and wanted to try making a bigger, commercial game together. While we were working on our previous projects, we had brainstormed a bunch of other ideas for fun and the one we ended up revisiting was a romcom about two spoiled twins who try to help each other get into a relationship. We felt like a slice-of-life story would be a fun, suitable challenge for our first game and the half-joke/half-idea ended up evolving into what would become Trouble Comes Twice! (The title is a joke on the Team Rocket slogan: "Prepare for trouble, and make it double!")

The original tone of Trouble Comes Twice was a lot more comedic and packed to the brim with anime tropes we enjoy. Most didn't make it into the final game, but some stayed and evolved e.g. all of the love interests are based on popular visual novel archetypes - the childhood friend, the tomboy, the shy girl, and the bad boy. Some, like Cameron and Zoe, changed a lot from their concept while Adrian and Stephanie stayed quite loyal to our original ideas of them. Cameron's character actually underwent the most changes after the initial reception to the demo, where a lot of people felt like he was too much of an ass haha. (Fortunately, he became a fan favorite when we dropped the new demo!)

The premise with the bet was something we invented to create some drama and establish a common plot thread throughout each route. Honestly, looking back, we would probably have approached the bet differently if we wrote it today and a lot of our pre-planning was... clumsy, at best. Still, it was a labor of love and I'll never forget the fun and excitement we had everyday balling ideas for the characters and coming up with their designs.

Why a bisexual romcom?

So, this was sort of a no-brainer to us. We had decided right from the start that both twins could date both the male and female love interests, and (at the time) we feel that a lot of similar games had playersexual MCs rather than established bisexual/pansexual MCs. While playersexual charas are also awesome, we wanted to write a romcom where the main cast are always queer regardless of who you end up romancing. 

At the same time, bi/pan people don't all approach romantic relationships the same way e.g. Cameron is confident and has experience dating people of all genders, while Adrian's demi and Jace still struggles a bit with his attraction towards men. We know that some of our players felt like that made certain routes less romantic than others and we hear you on that feedback and have 100% taken it into consideration for our future romance games. But anyway, that was our thought process behind Trouble Comes Twice's romance dynamics!

Preparing for Kickstarter & the actual Campaign

Our Kickstarter launched at the start of August and let me tell you, we were nowhere near as prepared as we should have been. We hadn't set up a Steam page yet, we were trailer-less, and we only had a couple of hundred followers across our socials at best. I feel that there's a lot more successful Kickstarter projects to refer to and even a lot of marketing guides and advice now, but mostly it's on us for not researching more. 

I feel like visual novel Kickstarters are getting more and more ambitious with time - which is great, we love seeing our fellow devs thriving! - but when we launched, we were extremely cautious of whether we would be able to succeed or not. Melli had just started a new job, I was still dying at uni, and so we didn't dare to invest a lot of money into the project yet. Thus, the Kickstarter demo's sprites weren't shaded and only had two expressions while the story was just eight mini stories showing off the different dynamics rather than portraying the actual premise.

The Kickstarter campaign did surprisingly well despite the lack of promotion and only having a rough alpha demo - we were even able to double our goal! - but we  wouldn't recommend what we did for other devs. You should invest time into making a good demo, spend time building an interested audience before launching your campaign, and research so you've got some kind of marketing plan. We were lucky with word-of-mouth and that other visual novel devs with larger followings helped share our game, but we should have made more effort reaching out to bloggers, streamers, and game sites. Some crowdfunding successes may seem like they ca

Comments:

First of all I love the sprites they are very cute. It throws me off though seeing the drastic art style difference between the CGs and the sprites. Both have their own charm but it's just soooo different in style. The start was quite slow I will say, and I didn't particuarly like the beginning, however it picked up and while I'm not the biggest fan of the protags it did make for some funny banter and I really grew to like Zoe and Hazel's friendship that I've seen so far from just completing Cameron's route. Very cute route btw. I love him. Hazel got better too at the end but it did kinda feel like 'uhhh what just happened' when suddenly she's used to his touchiness when she was literally just in denial over him and everything lol.I'm planning on trying the other routes next. Already starting two more lol. Plus gonna try playing as Jace to see the difference. I think it is kinda cool how they are different.

 Love this game it's a sweet simple visual novel game. And the two main leads are treated like different people with unique relationships with the LIs. It's not just a choose which gender you want. Which I thought was a nice touch. And makes it unique to see the different relationships that develop when choosing a different LI but a different MC.

I really wanted to like this game but unfortunately, it's got some problems.First of all, the routes are very linear. Not necessarily a bad thing but both endings for each character results in romance. You get to make choices but it only really affects whether your ending is sappy or mildly angsty. I played both the Hazel X Adrian endings but there isn't any difference at all until the ending.Secondly, the player character's personality is already heavily set. While this can usually work for a VN, it comes across as weird when there are story beats that felt like we should have had a choice but were automatically forced into the character acting a certain way. It was also a little weird playing a character that was constantly talking about how attractive they and all their friends and family are.Both of the above makes this feel more like a Kinetic Novel than a true visual novel. It's a story about a twin finding love and we're really just along for the ride.Then of course, there is the art. It is very pretty but the difference in styles between the "CGs" and the Sprites is significant.Overall, I can't really recommend this game unless you're looking for a cute story to read.

Final words:

Play as twins Jace and Hazel in this queer romantic-comedy visual novel.A confident flirt with a narcissistic streak, Jace has breezed through most of his life thanks to his charm and good looks but lacks ambition. On the other hand, his sister Hazel is a talented but short-tempered pianist who has few friends because of the haughty facade she uses to hide her social awkwardness.Already halfway through their college years, the twins realize neither of them have ever been in love before. Like any other not-so-rational person, they decide to turn finding love into a competition. Whoever gets into a relationship first wins!