Saintess of the Golden Bow: Creating a World Where Survival Is Romantic
We had the chance to chat with Anna from Transparent Games, the writer and game director behind Saintess of the Golden Bow, and Hubert, the mastermind handling all things marketing. Their game is a romantic fantasy visual novel packed with twists, magic, and a healthy dose of meta-book logic. With a successful Kickstarter and a passionate fanbase already cheering them on, we talked about the story, characters, worldbuilding, and what it’s been like bringing this project to life.
In this Interview:
Who are Transparent Games?
Anna: Okay, I’m Anna, I’m a game designer. I’ve worked in the game dev industry for over four years now and I’m the game director and writer on Saintess of the Golden Bow. I run Transparent Games, which is a Polish visual novel studio focused on otome visual novels.
And now we have a Kickstarter for Saintess of the Golden Bow, our first commercial project. We developed over a dozen free visual novels in those four years. And now we are doing a commercial project.
Hubert: Hi, hello. Well, I run a one-man marketing agency and I help indie developers like Anna with their marketing and I also educate people about effective marketing strategies. For Saintess of the Golden Bow I was doing, well, helping Anna with everything marketing related, although Anna came already very well prepared and needed only some structuring.
Anna: This is our first run together, and we met at the beginning of October last year. This is where we started with the campaign for Saintess of the Golden Bow.
The world of Saintess of the Golden Bow
Anna: Okay, so Celine is a fan of the web novel Saint of the Golden Bow, and one day she dies and wakes up in the body of Celeste, who is an extra character in that web novel. And that character is supposed to die to become part of Levi, the titular saint’s tragic backstory. But of course, Celine just dies, which she doesn’t want to do again. With the help of the player, she survives the event.
This causes a butterfly effect and soon Celine finds herself becoming the Saintess of the Golden Bow as we have in the title and not Levi. Levi doesn’t become the Saint, just stays the Knight of Celeste. And now Celene as Celeste is supposed to save the Locari Empire from the Demon Queen.
And she’s supposed to survive to tell the tale, something the player finds out is not so simple.
Anna: Celine really liked the story of Saint of the Golden Bow when it was in web novel format, but when she gets to live in the world of the book, she finds out it wasn’t that good of a book in the first place. It’s a romance book, and the boys love tragic fantasy romance. It’s pretty campy. Players have asked me before if I’m going to write that novel as an add-on or something for people to read later, but…
The problem with that book is that it wasn’t very good, and it’s part of the story that it wasn’t very good. It wasn’t very good because it leans into heavy tropes, for example, defeating the Demon Queen requires not only accessing the Golden Pulse magic, but also finding the law of interest.
As we know in Saintess of the Golden Bow, the love interests are bisexual and pansexual because I wanted more representation for that too, so it doesn’t really change much in the sense that it’s a boy’s love, tragic romance, but the love interest can be interesting in the player character.
And during the game, Celine comments often on the book operating on book logic. So she is criticizing the original web novel and I thought that would be an interesting exploration of what it would be like to
be reincarnated into one of your favorite books and then finding out that it’s not really that good of a book.
Anna: I started working on this story four years ago, and during those four years, many details have changed. So the world building of Saintess of the Golden Bow is very complicated because they didn’t want to only write a romance, I wanted to give the player a solid fantasy story as well.
So it’s pretty meta-contextual with Celine not really being Celeste and she knows a lot about the world from the original novel, but at the same time, she’s experiencing the story changing. It’s quite challenging to write, to be honest, because it’s so meta-contextual and especially it’s challenging when we go to the love interest about and they find out about Celeste, Celine not really being Celeste and I have an world building and outside document and that document is 36,000 words long so it takes four hours to read through all of it. It’s like half of a 300 page long book which is the usual length of romance novel and
Yeah, so because I started world-building so long ago, I really needed to document everything. And that’s why I ended up with such a long documentation.
Anna: So originally, when I started writing Saintess of the Golden Bow it wasn’t in Isekai because I wasn’t really familiar with Isekais four years ago. Isekais became popular in the recent three years or something. I think I decided one year into development that it would be a different kind of story.
I first started with Celeste, just being Celeste and the story wasn’t really working for me. So I think I will rewrote the part that you see as the demo four times since then, until I was completely satisfied with how it goes.
I have a few inspirations when it comes to from the point that I changed the story into becoming an Otome Isekai, that’s Villains Are Destined To Die, which is a webcomic and a web novel, as well as Re:Zero, the anime.
Characters of Saintess of the Golden Bow
Anna: So it’s good that we have a spoiler warning because I need to go a bit into the banking that trope. The story between Celeste and Levi in Levi’s route is not really a story that leans heavily into the trope of a noble lady of her loyal knight, but instead we have the problem of Levi being in love with the original Celeste who didn’t return his feelings.
And Celene is not that person, she is someone else entirely. And throughout the road Levi falls out of love with the original Celeste. The reason for that is a spoiler about how it goes and why he falls out of love so quickly. And quickly enough, because the route is 10 hours long, right? And he finds a new love with Celene.
But they are still living in the confines of the long-awaited empire politics, so to the outside world, they are still a knight and a lady, and that does add further complications to their romance, but I wanted to make the Levi’s role out to be more than just something that follows the trail.
Anna: So the original Celeste often ran away from Levi because she found his love for her overbearing. So he had to constantly be on the chase after her, in pining for her and in trying to protect her as her knight. After years of being her knight, Levi is frustrated with how Celeste is treating him, but we, as Celene are treating him differently of course.
If we try to go after him, that changes the dynamic between them and confuses Levi.
Anna: First, we see Celeste is a fun distraction from that whole being afraid of death thing. That’s why he teases her, but in his route, he becomes truly interested in her and starts changing under her influence. Plus, she is a great support to him, as we know. His biggest support so far has been Tarik, and he doesn’t really have a lot of people around him that he trusts. So…
With the impact of Celeste being there for him, he becomes less fatalistic and he gains confidence that he can indeed be in control of his life and change the politics of the Locary Empire in his favor. Being with Celeste gives him the strength to become a more confident person.
Anna: I’m a huge fan of the sword at the throat scene, which we can see in the first hour of the demo. It really shows how afraid and dramatic Noah is and how collected Celine can be when she thinks she’s just taking part in a scene from the book, it’s not real. But Noah’s feelings in that scene are real and it opens the dynamic between them as enemies to lovers romance.
Because after that scene Celeste thinks he’s very unstable and not serious about her and doesn’t respond well to his teasing, not being able to take his antics seriously.
Anna: It’s very difficult to talk about Elijah without spoiling his twist and I don’t want to spoil it because it’s his main thing. He really does have secrets and I hope the players who will play his route will see that too and enjoy it. I know Elijah is not the fan favorite from the demo because Noah and George are, but he has his fans too so I think they won’t be disappointed with the rollercoaster, his route is...
Anna: So they are at first connected by light magic, Celeste is strangely drawn to Elijah’s magic and neither of them knows why. Elijah thinks it’s funny, Celeste thinks it’s embarrassing. There are plot reasons for this connection that will be revealed later, but for now, I can say Elijah’s light magic gives Celeste a sense of comfort, like coming home, and that’s why she’s drawn to him.
Anna: So two hours ago from when we have this podcast, we announced that we will be making the George Road anyway, even if the stretch goal won’t be fully funded, but it will take us up to three years to complete the release and everyone who backed the tier 4 plus tiers, they will get that key for the DLC.
So I can safely say he is a romance option.
So the George route is all about helping Celeste to stand on her own two feet as a noble lady. George tutors her and gives her access to knowledge about etiquette and local empire politics that she otherwise wouldn’t have. Finally, she’ll be able to become a strong force in the struggles for power between nobles and influence the empire.
George is like the mature older guy option who supports Celeste’s So they have that dynamic between them. The fact that he really helps her grow into her full potential as a noble lady.
Anna: I tried to be as realistic as possible as to how Celene experiences being reincarnated into a world where she doesn’t have access to the skills of the previous owner of her body, but at the same time I didn’t want to dwell too much on the despair and anxiety this would probably cause, because then we would have no good pacing and no good progress with the story. So Celene decides to take on the role of the Saintess quite early.
And while she fears sometimes, and that fear drags her down, she’s still focused on doing her best in her new role, and I found that players who played the demo appreciated that she’s so driven and focused on becoming the scientist in her new role.
Anna: Celine can be pretty snarky, she often comments on how stupid the decisions of the original author of the web novel were when he was constructing the world. Like the love aspect of defeating the Demon Queen or how ordinary the creation move behind the fantasy world is. And I found it very fun to write from her perspective that she’s really opinionated when it comes to those things.
Anna: A funny thing is that in the original concepts for the game Celeste’s hair and outfit were blue, actually. But that changed as we developed the game. We wanted Celeste to look different from most automagic protagonists that we haven’t found that many that are purple or rather violet. So we decided to do that to make our protagonist unique.
Development of Saintess of the Golden Bow
Anna: We went to Kickstarter with 70 % of the game already developed. So it was just a matter of showing the community what the game is really like and we wanted to include the twist that’s at the end of the 4-hour long demo without spoiling it marketing-wise. So it’s a long demo, but the players who played till the end were really impressed with what the full game is promising to be like.
We also wanted to show the demo, the 4-hour long demo, to be representative of the full product. That’s it has so many CG’s and that partial voice acting that we are now covering fans for the full game.
Anna: We’ve been developing Saintess of the Golden Bow for 4 years, in those 4 years we released a dozen of free visual novels as I said before, most of them are fully voiced. They’re around 2–4 hours of gameplay. And in those years I’ve built a roster of voice actors that I trust and most of those voice actors that are voicing Saintess of the Golden Bow are the people I’ve worked with before on other projects.
As for who I’m most impressed with, I’m most impressed with Noah’s voice actor, Josh Portillo, who delivered so many different performances in other games throughout the years, for example in Desk and Dawn, as Magno, the villain. It’s still the same voice, but it’s so different.
Anna: So, first Kickstarter we’re going to revamp the demo to include the affection system, which means adding more choices. Those choices will increase or decrease the love interest affection towards Celeste and that will count towards getting the good endings, but there are two good endings planned per love interest and there will be major choices to get you to one or another, but you will still need high affection to unlock them.
Anna: No, no, we are splitting the love interest into routes, so that’s not possible.
In the demo, end of the common route, it is decided which love interest you get and then you are locked into that route.
Hubert: I believe I will take on this question. Well, the Kickstarter for me and Anna, it was our first time working on the Kickstarter campaign and we are thrilled to have such a… We are thrilled to success and to have a campaign perform well. But…
It was definitely stressful. The last half a year was each day was bringing something new, some new responses, some new people. And it’s a combination of fear, excitement, but also a lot of happiness.
Hubert: We are pretty close to it. I believe we are above 80% to it. We have still four more days of the campaign and I’m pretty sure we will be able to reach that. So all the CGs will be voiced.
And well, the next stretch goal already announced, the George DLC, even if not met as Anna mentioned, it will be delivered outside of the Kickstarter campaign, but all the backers above tier 4 will receive their George DLC key. What is further stretch goals? I believe this will stay as a secret.
Unless we have very, very, very good few days.
Hubert: We plan to have late pledges enabled. I believe Anna has a Patreon that works and provides some exclusive content there. But we haven’t decided yet on making more stretch goals of that. It will probably just enable Transparent Games to deliver the game sooner.
Exclusive Content
Hubert: Definitely a little backstory to this: throughout the Kickstarter campaign we’ve made some fun activities for the backers, one of them being the Levi’s brother naming contest and the best name—maybe not the best but the fan favorite—was Jean. It’s a pun on Levi’s jeans brand mark.
And I can’t say if it’s a winner. We were closing the contest today and we’ll decide. But another name that was quite common was Milo, which is quite fitting.
Anna: So I sent you Noah’s wedding outfit sprite. Yeah, what can I say? He looks very handsome and hot and I think people enjoy seeing this.
Anna: So the full game will be 30 hours long with three love interests Levi, Noah and Elijah and if the players have played till the end of the demo they already know there will be a lot of suffering plans.
Anna: I just wanted to thank everyone who supported our Kickstarter and who will decide to do late pledges as part of the support after listening to the podcast and also all the people who spread the word and will spread the word about our game. Every bit helps. So we’re happy that we were able to talk here on the podcast, the broadcast of the Golden Bow and I hope you found this interview interesting.
Hubert: I’m joining the thank you message and adding one thing for myself. After you play your preferred path, definitely go for Elijah’s ending, because it’s amazing twist.
Before You Go…
Saintess of the Golden Bow is shaping up to be something really special—full of heart, drama, magic, and just the right amount of chaos. If you’re into romance with real stakes and love your fantasy with layers, you’ll definitely want to check it out.
You can download the free extended demo here and see for yourself what all the hype is about. And if you love what you see, consider supporting the devs through late pledges or Patreon—it helps them make the full game even better.
Thanks for reading, and as always: stay romantic, stay curious, and may the odds be ever in your favor.
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