I just wanted to get a quick post in here at the start of the month. First, to play some catch up with what's been going on: I'm doing good! Readers of the previous newspost will know that at one point in time, I was doing extremely bad. So, I think this is what we in the business call a "W."
And... that's all I'll say for the time being! I'm big on emotional authenticity as part of how I present myself, and I thought about writing a whole thing about trauma recovery, but you know what? I straight up Just Don't Wanna! So, please forgive the brevity.
Project-wise, I'm finally performing the final pass on that Animal Girlfriends minicomic it feels like I started ages ago. That's Priority #1, and the finished product will be available for all of you to download this December.
Also before the year is out, I want to have a working prototype for the first chapter of the relaunched CURSE/KISS/CUTE visual novel, which I have already written the first pass of a script for.
As for the thing itself, I'm coding the engine on my own. While there are visual novel engines that will run in a web browser, including on phones, the existing options are much heavier than I want or need. To keep it brief, I'd like to optimize for small filesizes, fast loading, and a minimum of scripting overhead beyond what HTML and CSS can already do on their own. I want this VN to run on your grandma's phone. The ideal here is that you should be able to click exactly one link and be fully into the VN within a few seconds, regardless of your device.
If I were a freak, I might say that I'm attempting to webcomic the medium of visual novels.
Actually, let's talk briefly about my relationship with visual novels. Here is my relationship: I fucking love visual novels. I have read more visual novels than you have heard of. In my teenage years I was one of those people who would proudly show off a screenshot of their desktop fully blanketed by icons for random visual novels. It's a medium I love so much that I learned a language just to get more of it.
Anyway, it's that familiarity with the medium that makes me hesitate to call my thing a "visual novel." There's no shortage of Americans who pop onto the scene announcing their intention "fix visual novels" who never understood what's appealing about visual novels in the first place.
So, my take on the medium should in no way be regarded as a "fix." I'm reconstituting the elements that I think define a visual novel's appeal into a format more suitable for serialized storytelling, and -- importantly -- more viable for a single person with exactly my skillset and level of patience to produce. What will this look like exactly? Well, answering that is why I'm making it Priority #2 (after finishing up the Animal Girlfriends minicomic) to have a playable prototype before the year is out.
See you then!