The team behind 妄想発想 Paranoia Hyponoia speak about it after development, however they want. 

ART (kirin, koumori, kuruma)

kirin: I did not do the main art for this, but I still ended up drawing quite a lot. The entire “extras” is my stuff. I think I drew up the itch.io banner chibis, the main menu, and the CGs with the names. Koumori handled the character designs, sprites and general art direction.

Koumori: For the art, the two main girls are loosely based on my old designs for two original characters that I never gave proper stories to. The concepts for them were also initially different and I did not really want to use the same concept for this game so they ended up being different from the initial idea. I think I wanted to portray them as two very different girls in terms of looks and personalities. As for Gen, he was just there.

But! Kirin did design Aiko and Miyuna’s timeskip clothing and Miyuna’s wedding dress. Overall the designs were kept simple so that it would be easier to focus on exaggerating the shading/rendering more to emulate the whole vn aesthetic.

Though, the three character designs (mainly Aiko and Miyuna actually) were purposely designed in a certain way such that you would have to zoom in to take a look at the smaller details and changes in the character. For example, the color of Aiko’s hair in high school and Miyuna’s eye color, as well as their timeskip designs. Everything was done so with meaning!!

Koumori: I have actually done game making before for school projects a few years ago, so the overall process and making sprites was not new to me. Although it has been a while since then, it was kinda exciting to step back into game dev. I tried to get the sprites out early but ended up crunching most of it in the last few weeks.. 

I was largely worried about how the sprites would turn out as it was my first time rendering my art like this. I prepared a bunch of art references to games like SayoOshi and Higurashi, and even took some inspiration from Danganronpa’s sprite designs. The rendering is exaggerated by adding more clothes folds and intentionally having a harsher contrast in shades. Before the jam, I was already interested in learning how to imitate the old art styles of older vns, so I am very glad that it was well received!! I really enjoyed studying and rendering this way as it reminded me of my old art style when I started learning digital art and would only spam the airbrush. If I had more time, I would have wanted to design a few more sprites in between chapters as we scrapped a few due to time constraints and some procrastination on my end.

I am also quite thankful for Kuruma joining our team at a later date because it really helped with the workload on my end. I initially wanted to add CGs in, but also realised the timing was a bit difficult to work around. The CGs turned out really amazing and well captured key moments of the story!

CG ART (kuruma)

Hi, this is Kuruma, the CG artist for Paranoia Hyponoia. As someone who joined the team much later, a lot of preestablished ideas, themes, and thoughts were mainly left for me to interpret or to backread. I think there was an ongoing color scheme and elements that were reminiscent of older visual novels, so I tried to emulate it through the usage of color and atmosphere in the CG stills. In a way, I think Kirinkoumori and Uma Unko wanted to display this as a tribute and love letter to old-school visual novels with darker themes, such as SayoOshi, SubaHibi, Higurashi, and such. Living up to those expectations with the CGs while giving Paranoia Hyponoia its own flair was a tall task. Hence why I was inspired by SayoOshi’s usage of harsh colors, and I want to display Aiko’s paranoid mindset with intense colors, if not, a bit of a dramatic atmosphere with it. 

With the time limit, I think I rushed the last CG, and I felt like I could not do the final scene justice, so I will be working on a better version of that soon, plus additional art that will be needed. But aside from that, a lot of old-school or denpa visual novels usually feature cute girls doing horrendous things, so it was easy for me to emulate it due to my art style being somewhat catered to that style. And as someone who can understand Aiko’s paranoia and struggles, I think a lot of the CGs I drew were made in the mind of someone who was unsettled, paranoid, and untrusting of others…and if you noticed… the hue of the orange-red gets bolder and brighter with each CG. People experience paranoia in different ways, but I think that in the mind of an unsettled person, it gets worse for them. Everything becomes heated, it becomes too much and intense for one to handle. Once affirmed, it’s too much for them to accept the reality of things, especially as someone like Aiko.

I’m not as avid a reader as Kirin, Koumori, and Uma Unko, but I knew the references of each scene. Since the visual novel dealt a lot with intertextuality, there was another vibe I had to achieve, and that was making the CGs appropriate to the associated text with Kirin’s thumbnails. I think this was also the biggest struggle for me, not as an artist but as someone who barely knew the text I was working with. I researched it and read a few excerpts before I worked on the CG stills. I managed to pull through with the art. However, I did learn from this that I was quick to realize and understand the intention of the literature we were referencing in Paranoia Hyponoia. Unrelated to the process of the CG art somewhat, there were a few times Kirin asked me if the writing was okay, I think due to that, I was able to work with the CGs and ideas properly. If anything, I’m grateful that everyone trusted me with giving ideas when I joined the team quite late as well. 

This was a learning experience for me, honestly. I was surprised that people liked the CG stills to an extent, as I’m not very confident with my art, and using bold, harsh colors also wasn’t my usual style. I’m glad the CG stills were able to complement and tie the important scenes together. I had fun working with the team, even though at first I was a beta reader. And this is more of a personal opinion, but I do believe Aiko’s mindset is rather relatable to those who feel extreme paranoia towards their relationship, and it’s not just a one-time thing. Relationships can be really unstable for a paranoid person like Aiko, you’ll end up doubting everything and everyone’s intentions; believing everyone hates you or is some way or form out to hurt you. Well, in this case, the things Aiko believed came true. I believe having Miyuna’s point of view will clear things up, as Aiko is definitely an unreliable narrator. I hope that through the usage of colors, distortion, and perspective, all of these things were conveyed properly. 

GUI (kirin)

kirin: Graphic design is not my passion. All the transition screens, buttons, etc were done in mostly Photoshop or Illustrator. Both of those programs like to burn holes in my laptop. I also argued with Koumori over the logo a few times. We compromised, using the logo Koumori liked for the transition screens, and the logo I liked for the main menu. 

kirin: Though I’m really biased because I only like that logo since it took so long to do. https://youtu.be/_HIv5XOzrA8 ← This sort of thing is easy with Latin text, but it was a huge go fuck yourself moment if you wanted to use Kanji.

WRITING & PROGRAMMING (kirin, koumori)

kirin: Writing this was so tough. Trying to get the right tone down, and integrating the inspirations of this work in a way that made sense was really difficult. I struggled with writing pretty much the entire thing. It also felt like both the girls took over my body as I was writing it.

kirin: Koumori had the original idea. She DM’d me one day, saying she thought of a game “about two best friends and one of them convinces the other not to marry their fiance but in the end she ignores her so the protag shoots her friend.” It was originally just going to be the two of us making this game, but we eventually got other help, when it started looking more feasible.

kirin: We had both been busy with school work so we left the idea aside for a while, and when there was an announcement about a “Toxic Yuri VN Jam”, we decided, why not. 

kirin: The first thing we obviously needed was a title, and to name the characters. We did this in a few hours, joking that it would be funny to just call it 妄想発想 without an English name. Eventually, we decided on Paranoia Hyponoia, since we wanted it to rhyme like how it does in Japanese. Hyponoia is a very rare word, one that I found in a medical dictionary. It means ‘deficient or sluggish mental activity’. It suited pretty well, so we went with that. The characters were much easier to decide names for.

kirin: One of the things that we both really enjoyed before development of the game was Sartre’s “No Exit”. We would constantly reference it to each other, saying how sometimes we have real life situations that feel exactly like “No Exit”. Where the wrong people (or just the right people) stuck together in a room do nothing but torture each other simply by speaking (or existing), and this was hell. That other people are hell.

kirin: In some ways, I agree and disagree with Sartre’s work. Sartre manages to capture the perfect dynamic between three people who simply just do not get along. By also making Inez a deliberate lesbian, it added so much flavour to the play, where she feels tortured when Estelle refuses to look at her. Garcin, on the other hand, desperately wants Inez’s validation, for he cannot forgive himself for everything he did in his life before he died. This isn’t shown in the game, but it was a background aspect, as I believe both Aiko and Gen wished for things from each other, yet could never have.

kirin: Earlier this year (2025) and the end of last year (2024), I was also trying to challenge myself by reading books that I didn’t necessarily like. A lot of Camus’ works greatly annoyed me. Similarly, Dazai’s “No Longer Human” was something I wanted to enjoy, but the flaws in his writing were so much more than I expected. Dazai’s “No Longer Human” was fascinating to me in the sense that it seemed to take a lot of inspiration from Western philosophies, and then completely misinterpreted them while also never finding a conclusion. And then, a similarity in Camus’ “The Stranger” and Dazai’s “No Longer Human” would be the vehement misogyny that permeated through both works. Women were always the secondary character. They were never the focus. They were sex objects. “The Stranger”, in particular, opens up with “Mother died today. Or yesterday; I can’t be sure.” 

kirin: Of course, this wasn’t just something that stuck in novels or in the last century. Nitroplus’ “YOU and ME and HER: A Love Story” suffers from the same problem. What should’ve been a compassionate understanding of mentally ill women and/or sex workers turned out to be misogynistic drivel against both the heroines of the game. For Aoi, it was because she’s a whore. For Miyuki, it was because she was fucked up and evil. The messages I got from this game, as well as the general fan responses, drove me up the wall. I really thought I would like this game, but I ended up greatly disliking it, yet obsessed with the core concepts it had. I think, somewhere online, someone called it an “entry-level denpa visual novel”, which was the reason why I checked it out in the first place. So thinking about it now, I can’t help but disagree so much more. I streamed this game to Koumori and some others, and by the end of it, we were all so exhausted because it really just wasn’t enjoyable to us.

kirin: As a refresher, we also both played “Sayonara wo Oshiete” and “Higurashi” together before the start of the jam, and it made us remember how much we loved the old styles of visual novels in the 2000s, which haven’t made much of a return. It’s understandable, since text taking up the entire screen isn’t exactly popular for modern visual novels. But it was our game, so we wanted to create something that respected that old format.

kirin: Programming it was a bit awful, though. There was a lot of stuff I was unable to replicate. The limitations of both Ren’Py and my own programming ability. It seemed like Ren’Py wasn’t able to even achieve the exact sort of thing I wanted, but other visual novel engines were too difficult to use. I had also been rusty after maybe about a year of not touching any form of programming at all. Re-opening VS Code felt like such a nightmare, but I got over it when I realised how much I wanted to make this game a reality.

kirin: But the crunch was hell. I had messed around with Ren’Py before the jam started, so I had a sort-of base on what to do regarding programming, but it didn’t prepare me for all the bugs and issues that would eventually turn up.

kirin: I spent a few days just bug fixing, since we used an unusual 800x600 size game, and one completely in NVL mode at that. A lot of plugins I was considering using got thrown out the window, because there wasn’t enough time for me to brush up on my programming ability as well as write the damn script. 

kirin: Actually, backreading my messages now, I had plans to make the game menu features nicer, but those also never happened. 

kirin: Back to the writing, I wrote up a quick outline using the basic premise Koumori had thought up a while ago, and then integrated all of our recent inspirations alongside it. After, I basically wrote the entire thing in about a week, got Kuruma to proofread, and then I procrastinated fixing all the issues until about 4-5 days before the deadline.

kirin: To be fair, pretty much all the sprites that are currently in the game were made in the last week… no, maybe the last 3 days? All of us apart from Kuruma, who got the CGs done nearly right after the script, except for the last one, procrastinated really hard.

kirin: After some of the sprites were made, I added them all the night before, and then woke up the next day to see Koumori had sent me the final Miyuna wedding sprites, and added those in pretty much two hours before the deadline. At this point I was so sick of VS Code I left any other issues/bugs/updates needed for the next day. I was also so sick of my own writing at that point, having read and re-read it several times over, to the point I had no idea if it was still impactful or not. I’m glad the reception to the writing was good despite all of that.

kirin: In particular I want to mention I have never written lesbian sex before. While I’m not new to NSFW writing, lesbian NSFW was completely new to me. I agonised over writing it, and then surprised myself when it came out (lol) pretty easily by the end of it. Aiko and Miyuna are, in general, surprisingly easy characters to write, I say, after struggling about their story for hours. But they felt like my friends—I talked about them to Koumori as if I knew them in real life.

kirin: Currently in the works for these two we have some plans regarding a “Miyuna POV Post Game”. Though we’re not sure when that will be released. Please look forward to it when we do. [bows]

Koumori: I was honestly very surprised our plan to make Paranoia Hyponoia actually made it out of the planning phase. It started off as a random idea when I first told Kirin. But the more we discussed the characters, the more it really started to feel as if these characters were alive and writing their own stories and woes out. A lot of moments in the story were impromptu and our one thought driving us was “how do we make this game more toxic and fucked up”. We threw around a lot of ideas and discussed how to make them work and how well it would fit the characters. It was important for us to ensure that whatever Aiko and Miyuna did, there was meaning behind them. 

I grew up watching gameplays of old Japanese RPG maker games and choice-based games which made me think about how differently things could have gone between Aiko and Miyuna, had they both chosen different options. However, there was never any doubt about how the ending would go where Aiko shoots Miyuna then herself because that was our original plan and the final ending we would give them. I am very thankful to Kirin who wrote the majority of the story based on bits of pieces of ideas thrown around in our discussions.

Koumori: I actually do not read many books in general, but No Exit was one that really resonated with me! Like what Kirin said, I would sometimes joke with them about stuff that happened in real life and compare it to the famous line from the play “Hell is other people”. The relationship between the three characters in the play are heavily shown through the cast of Paranoia Hyponoia. I would personally push for you to check out the PDF in the downloads or look for the adaptation on YouTube if you enjoyed our work :) !!

Overall, I am glad our game was enjoyed by many individuals as I genuinely did not expect this many people to play it. It was truly an honour to work alongside Kirin, Kuruma, and Uma Unko. We hope to work together again next time on a future project <3

MUSIC

Uma unko: Hello ! I’m in charge of making the title screen music, and assisted in one of the songs Kirin made. I want to thank Kirin and Koumori for inviting me to be part of this lovely project :D 

I had a background in playing music but boy oh boy making music is on another level, it was my first time composing music so it was an eye opening experience for me tweaking and experimenting in beepbox. I felt like a conductor for a moment !!! I also want to thank Kirin for helping out in giving all of the possible music tutorials and free music making websites, they were really useful !! Kirin told me that Aiko usually plays the violin or keyboard/piano while Miyuna plays the flute , and Gen plays the tuba. So we were thinking of how to incorporate their instruments into the soundtracks. For the title screen music, I went for a light, calm feeling. I tried to make the violin and the flute compliment each other, like finishing each other’s melodies ! (tuba wise errmmmmm….. It just did not feel like it fit in… so bro is not invited) Unfortunately due to time constraints, I was not able to make as much music as I could, however ! I would like to add more in the near future !! and add the tuba in for sure ! 

Seeing the project becoming a legitimate game made me feel like an aunt watching the kids grow up (Aiko and Miyuna are my children now) It was fun seeing the K gang, Kirin, Koumori and Kuruma brainstorm so many interesting ideas, and as a person with terrible attention span at reading in general, having to reread the sentences before processing it properly, the script and the art had me at a chokehold, my eyes locked in and glued to the screen. It made my heart twisted in a good way. 

peak writing, fire art, this is absolute cinema Funny side note I decided to fuck around and draw a little art in the notes, Koumori was listening in and both of us went “wait this bangs” so its now part of the music

Love and peace gays !!!!

[24/07/25] addendum.

kirin: I forgot to mention I was heavily influenced by CHAOS;HEAD NOAH throughout the production and conception of this game. If Aiko's delusions seem familiar to Takumi's in any way, that's why.

Additional art stuff I'd like to share regarding this project.

Unfinished sketch of the two.

Early concept art.

Original future outfits/designs.