exclusive bea lore drop!!!!

hello everyone! today i would like to talk about my absolute love for visual novels (as well as the production of two of my own!)

i.. absolutely love visual novels. i love characters and dialogue and all of that stuff!! although most of the visual novels i've played were boring as fuck and full of microtransactions (mainly the ones i found on google play like the freemium junkie i was), stuff like ddlc, mystic messenger (despite its batshit writing), and liar liar made me fall in love with the style of game <3

flash forward to 2019, and one of my classmates introduces me to the webcomic homestuck! i somehow read the entirety of the comic and finish just in time (note: i did not fully read the epilogues nor do i wish to) for the release of the visual novel pesterquest!

around that time, i also really got into making homestuck ocs with some of my friends!

i'm not exactly where i'm sure the exact idea came up, but i decided that i would make something similar to pesterquest with a bunch of friends ocs as a little gift for everyone :) well, technically not pesterquest, but more of a "come join us in our fansession!" type visual novel! you, the mc, would be a mysterious character who somehow ended up in the some kids' sburb session, and depending on whose route you chose, you'd get certain answers as to how you got in that position :)

now, onto the actual production of the first sim...

did i know how to code? no! did i know how any of the basics of making art for visual novels? also no! but was i willing to try? yes!

learning how to code the basics was surprisingly fun! i got a lot of help from the old renpy forums and other youtube tutorials. it turns out it's really simple to make a basic visual novel if you really wanted to try. as long as you know the basic commands (which there are like 10 of) you should be able to do just fine! 

moving onto the art, i tried my best to emulate homestuck's style (as a 10th grader could do) while also putting my own little twist on it! i found it really fun planning all of the CGs and the sprites and stuff (although i think i personally did too much planning...) 

it was also my first time trying out plain backgrounds as someone who had always been avoiding drawing backgrounds until that point..

 here are some images i made for the sim:

here are some introductory cgs! i only got around half of them done, so here are the finished ones..

background cgs!

sprites!

i didn't really plan on doing much with this VN during its conception, but i eventually became super invested in its production and would not do anything except work on it for an entire month!

i may have gotten a bit carried away with the planning, as there were about 8 or 9 characters overall that i wanted to create routes for... i wanted each and every character to have 3 endings, with one of them being the True Ending.. 

so, i never actually finished that lol. i quickly got burnt out over my workload and one day i decided "oh, i'll finish this next month!" (i never did). 

i still have a working-ish copy of the game, but other than the selected cgs, i don't think it'll ever see the light of day.

onto the second sim!!!

so! fun fact: i never really wanted to make another visual novel after that (could you believe that!? probably!) i just wanted for it to be just a one time that i quickly forgot about lol

but then the pandemic came around, and i was super isolated in my house with nothing to do outside.

sometime during the isolation period of the pandemic, my friend reminded me of the previous sim i made in a month. they replayed it along with some other people i made it for, and really really liked it! they asked me if i could remake it (or at least do something inspired by it), and i told them "okay, i've got nothing better to do."

the concept for this VN would be the same, except for this sim, i dialed it down wayyyy back (at first) - i decided that i'd still do three endings for each character, sure, but 8 or 9 characters? really!? i decreased it to simply four characters that had intertwining stories. these stories or "routes" would come in chaptered installments, which would make development and release smoother considering our circumstances and audience :)

i also had a friend help me in doing a whole bunch of the art - specifically the sprites and CGs... trust me, the sim would have been much further behind if it weren't for them!! their art is absolutely amazing (and thus looks a little jarring amongst my crude background concepts lmao)

they really spent a whole lot of their free time just contributing to the visual novel and really making the characters come to life :) i could not ask for a better person to work with!

(sorry, you're only getting one image for this one! :P)

for this sim, i managed to create an entire timeline of general events/secrets/chapter outlines while still managing to juggle school and life events B) the time spent on this was WAYY longer than the second one, as we spent about uhhh a year or so on development? 

we managed to expand whatever lore was present in the first iteration of the fansession sim, and countless weeks, if not months, were spent just talking about the game and its development! my friend, working on the art, and myself, working on the script, absolutely fell in love with creating this game despite whatever pitfalls came our way.

we were only able to get the first chapter completed, though, as there were some issues regarding creative differences that popped up during the second chapter..

we haven't given up on the characters, however! we're still working on some of them until this day :) traces of them can still be seen in my doodle dumps and social media posts 

conclusion..?

making visual novels is literally so fun.. even though all of my own have dissipated into development hell, i still really enjoy the process of making video games that people can play! it's really awakened a new creative side in me over the years!! it'll probably be a while until i actually decide that i'll make a new visual novel on renpy, though.. i did get rpg maker mv a month ago so maybe in a year or two, i'll have another blog post titled "*two of my old rpgmaker games". who knows!