I think it's only befitting that our first devlog for Let's Misbehave! (LM!) is about how this game came to be—it's a bit of a doozy, to be honest!

Little known fact: LM! was originally meant to be an interactive fic. I was intimidated about the number of custom assets a project like this would need but a couple of extremely kind and encouraging friends egged me on to make bad decisions this into a visual novel—and I couldn't be more proud of what we're creating! Even before that, though, let's roll back and see how LM! was conceptualized.

In short: one (1) university course, one (1) lifelong obsession with Ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs, one (1) internship and one (1) Countess.

Where do we begin?

It's fair to say that I love the aesthetic of the Roaring Twenties: so much of my childhood was spent obsessing over Egypotology and the desire to see Ancient Egyptian tomb reliefs myself. Growing up as a very genderconfused teenager who was extremely uncomfortable in her own gender identity, the spirit of the flapper woman was inspiring: the narrative was not static, it had been changed. I could do it again. By the time we got to reading The Great Gatsby in school, I figured that I really liked the pop culture of the 1920s. Shoutout to Robert Redford playing Jay Gatsby—that helped too.

I carried this interest deep into my university years but it was a course I took on the history of American media that allowed me to learn so much about the era; the good and the bad. My professor was an extremely competent and passionate Australian man who had a uniquely nuanced view of American history. As we spent more time learning about the cultural shift of mass media post-WWI, the rise of Hollywood (and its scandals) during the Silent era and the Pre-Code film industry, I found myself absolutely enthralled with this era of history. Some things were an age apart, other things felt shockingly 'modern'. Hook, line and sinker, I fell for this era.

I happened to also be doing an internship at that time, where I would go to work everyday in a building inaugurated in 1924 fashioned much like the famed "Cathedrals of Commerce". Art Deco became something I found myself incorporating into every aspect of my life, and it still remains a style that influences everything I create. 

Fast forward a couple of years later, and I come across the biography of a particularly interesting individual: Dorothy di Frasso. The American heiress Dorothy Taylor was married to a British aviator whom she got divorced from in 1916. The same year, she inherited a fortune of $12 million which in modern equivalence turns out to be a staggering $250 million! Dorothy marries an Italian count next but they never really spend time together and by the time the 1930s roll around, the now Countess di Frasso lives in Hollywood, and somehow manages to have affairs with both actor Gary Cooper and later with the East Coast Syndicate’s boss in Southern California Bugsy Siegel. I'm sitting here thinking 'but what if I made an otome about a divorcee in the 1920s and—wait a minute, her love interests could be an actor, a criminal and...a foreign diplomat'.

The rest, as they say, is history but Dorothy's life really led us to this point and I really hope that you all enjoy LM! as much as we're enjoying making it!