Untitled: WIP 1

After a lot of brainstorming from the day of my last post, I decided to change the main heroine of my story and follow a different character for the storyline. This humorously, allowed me to get rid of some characters while also simultaneously get rid of some characters . I think this new direction in the story actually increased the amount of characters I originally had. You should have seen my eye roll! Lol.

But, I’ve been having a lot of fun with writing this new angle that I think that it’s worth it. I’ll have to rework my progress chart to reflect the changes properly, but I’m happy with the change. It’s overall been a fun experience.

On a more personal note, I have to struggle not get to detailed with things that won’t matter to the story overall. I’m being pretty relaxed with my prewrite right now as long as it follows the basic story plot, but I know that I will probably have a lot to delete once I finish the first draft. Right now I just think it’s best to write down my purest and enthusiastic scrip for the first draft and work on the roof edges with the much needed rewrites. I am still currently in first act of the script.

Untitled: WIP

Sorry for the spam for yesterday, I finally got into the mood to update my website and realized that I had this site on private years ago and sadly can’t access my tumblr account either. Yikes! I think the plan was to revamp the site and make it public again later, but I never got around to it.

Whatever the case this year has hit hard and I, like many others, did not feel like creating. The last memorable post I made was after I reached the first milestone for Snow which made me very happy. Then, I decided to work on a small project, while I took some time away from Snow. (Snow will be huge)

Small, being the operative word. While this project is certainly smaller than Snow, it’s not as small as I would like it to be. I always seem to have this problem with keeping a project as small as I would like it and due to this, I have contemplated erasing one of the characters from this visual novel.

I’ve been working on this VN slowly. Little by little, piece by piece. So far it has eleven characters, and I’m trying to limit the amount of art and characters in this novel to prove to myself that I do know the meaning of the word ‘small’. While I was working on the first draft yesterday I was inspired to change the angle of this story entirely, switch the main character and possibly erase or forgo certain characters. If I decide to go this route though, some big changes will have to be made to the plot for hopefully a much better story. I am having fun bouncing these ideas around, so I will brainstorm as to how these changes could help my story and then make a decision. Until next time.

WIP: IJWMHB

So, I noticed that I have zero post talking exclusively about I Just Want My Heart Back. This must be fixed. Below I will include a picture of the cast of friends for our protagonist, Gizmo. I’m working on rewriting lost material that I need to lay down the foundation of the backstory. Right now, IJWMHB is not my main priority.

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Summary:  IJWMHB is a visual novel about a heartbreak and a lost heart. Follow the story of Gizmo, a zombie boy who just wants his heart back from his cold-hearted siren girlfriend, Celeste. To bad Celeste lost it. Now it’s up to Gizmo and his friends to find his heart and hopefully move on. If Celeste will let him.

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Branching Stories

Multi-path stories are hard, here’s some help

Hi, everyone!

For the past four hours, I’ve been banging my head against a wall plotting this new, untitled Visual Novel. Like Wish, it is ambitious. Due to my stress with writing Wish, I decided to take a break from plotting that novel. Since then I have finished Nanowrimo 2017 and started a new project.

Purely, because I like to make things hard for myself. ^__^

But honestly, the work has been a good kind of stress and I like it when plot points click together and start to make sense. Plotting this type of story is something that I have never done before and with this project, I’m trying something different. I want this thing fully planned out before I start writing everything, which has lead to some long notes on how I want things to go. Mapping a visual novel with multiple paths and endings make the writing process harder if you are not careful. And though I have completed three visual novels so far, it’s still an area that requires some area of study to do correctly.

If writing a regular story is hard work, then writing a multi-path is even more work and it can lead to a lot of wasted time and resources if not planned correctly. I have had plenty of projects that ended up unfinished or wasting time on CG and re-edits by the time I was finished. Proper planning can help save a boatload of time and energy.

One source that gives great advice on story writing is here. Morgan Hawke writes excellent content on how to create a visual novel. Beware that she writes smut and she is not ashamed.

Hope these links help. Now I have to get back to work.

Old article on Reducing your Renpy File

I recently saw a post about Katawa Shoujo and I was curious to try their game, but as soon as I saw the file size I changed my mind.

The file size would, generally, have been a none issue if my internet wasn’t prone to act funny recently and as such, trying to download a 173 MB sized game was not high on my to-do list. Just two weeks ago, it took my computer an hour to download a 23 MB file! How much more would it take just to download this file?

This is something that I’ve been worried about recently. Not everyone has a stable internet connection and not everyone can download huge file sizes and some of them don’t want to. Visual novels tend to be very image heavy. Add that to music files and your ‘small visual novel’ can develop a large file size rather quickly. Bunni and Kitty proved that to me and the last time I checked, my art images were only 8 MB, but my beta release was 22-27 MB.

It was my personal goal to make no game exceeding the file size of 20 MB and I’m already losing that battle and I don’t fully understand why. ATP Projects seem to have this down to a science since many of his games are positively tiny compared to visual novels being released from lemma today. Luckily, I’ve been searching around and found some tips along with this article on lemma that may have some suggestions for my goal.

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WIP: Snow

I thought about doing a huge master post for my work in progress works, but then got embarrassed the longer the list grew. Lol. I did post some updates on this title on my tumblr blog that I can now no longer log into. I wanted to share the links to the work, in case anyone was interested.

This project is back on hiatus and I’m working on a hopefully smaller one now. I also did a speed drawing of one of the characters to Snow and posted it to Youtube. I had forgotten I even had a channel for my game development. Lol

Branching Plot Problems

Hi, everyone!

For the past four hours, I’ve been banging my head against a wall plotting this new, untitled Visual Novel. Like Wish, it is ambitious. Due to my stress with writing Wish, I decided to take a break from plotting that novel. Since then I have finished Nanowrimo 2017 and started a new project.

Purely, because I like to make things hard for myself. ^__^

But honestly, the work has been a good kind of stress and I like it when plot points click together and start to make sense. Plotting this type of story is something that I have never done before and with this project, I’m trying something different. I want this thing fully planned out before I start writing everything, which has lead to some long notes on how I want things to go. Mapping a visual novel with multiple paths and endings make the writing process harder if you are not careful. And though I have completed three visual novels so far, it’s still an area that requires some area of study to do correctly.

If writing a regular story is hard work, then writing a multi-path is even more work and it can lead to a lot of wasted time and resources if not planned correctly. I have had plenty of projects that ended up unfinished or wasting time on CG and re-edits by the time I was finished. Proper planning can help save a boatload of time and energy.

One source that gives great advice on story writing is here. Morgan Hawke writes excellent content on how to create a visual novel. Beware that she writes smut and she is not ashamed.

Hope these links help. Now I have to get back to work.