April 2026 - Production Coming Along Well!

The first full playable draft of the game was done and coded in January. I've finished the first structure edit, and I've added almost all of the final sprites. The game's gone from what was once a tiny, one-shot game for my Patreon backers in 2022:

To a deeply branching, 250,000 word game, with limited animation and cinematography:

I've finished most of the sprites so far, also! I had placeholders while writing the first draft:

But I'm quite happy with how folks are looking now:

And of course, some of those sprites also have animated expressions:

I've also been adding final CGs. Here's an old placeholder:

And here's the version I recently painted, scanned, and added to the game:

One thing that's harder to show off is the way I'm adding camera movement to most of the CGs. A a medium, visual novels are most frequently treated as a combination of game and book. But there are a lot of different visual languages you can draw from. Sprite staging can benefit from thinking of your characters as actors on a stage, and the presentation of CGs benefits from a light usage of film language. Not everything works one-to-one, and because I like reading, I'm happy to let the prose carry the most weight. But VNs give you such a complex toolkit to work with, and that's why I love to make them!

Join me next time and I'll show off some of my process for painting CGs and backgrounds in traditional watercolor. If you have any questions about that, ask them here, and I'll see if I can cover them. Thanks for hanging out!

-Royce