‘Backchat’ is a visual novel game about piecing together dialogue.

Players take on the role of 11-year-old ‘TheBoy’—a transfer student with ASD. He craves friends, but socializing is like trying to catch scattered words in a noisy environment. Each response in the game requires piecing together the correct sentence from fragments within a normal social timeframe. Correctness affects the final ending. The game revolves around five days of school life, with each choice leading to three different story endings. We don’t want to tell a story about healing a wound, but rather invite you to step into the heart of an ASD teenager, feel the difficulties and obstacles they encounter in social situations, and embrace and understand them.

1. Completed the first day’s storyline. The outline of the first day’s storyline is that the protagonist, ‘The Boy,’ transfers to a new school and meets Tyler, a former elementary school classmate.

2. The game has three side quests, each corresponding to one of the three NPCs. We completed the narrative for Tyler’s character.

3. Completed the personality settings and appearance designs for the three main NPCs.

4. Completed the redesign of the protagonist’s appearance, based on Oliver’s design.

5. Tested the newly added mechanics (excluding spelling) in the first day’s storyline: dragging fallen leaves, finding items, and catching falling words within a short time.

6. Set up affinity values ​​for each question, which will allow us to set an approximate ending score based on the average player completion score during game testing.

7. Completed the UI for the dialogue boxes between the protagonist and Tyler.

8. There will be a total of 5 main scenes: the school gate, the classroom, the sports field, the library, and the protagonist’s room. Completed all scene drawings for the classroom area.

9. The game has 7 endings: three happy endings (where you successfully befriend any one of the three characters), three bad endings (where you miss the opportunity to befriend each of them), and one hidden ending (where you befriend all three of them; this requires completing all six other routes and then restarting the game to unlock this hidden side quest). We completed Tyler’s two endings.