I'm an amateur developer of adult visual novels focused on characters and narrative.
I love to make stuff that's different and to entertain, but half of the time I don't know what I'm doing. And the other half I'm just sleeping. Did I mention the games are adult games? Yeah, erotic.
I really enjoy making something out of nothing, entertaining, and maybe (hopefully) provoking some feelings.
Yeah, I know, it sounds really pretentious. Especially for someone creating erotica. I'm no artist. But I do enjoy creating stuff that people might enjoy. And I especially enjoy creating stories that people might enjoy. So I set out to create narrative games, games that tell stories and have interesting characters. And sex. And I found out I needed to learn a whole bunch of stuff in the process, which I also really enjoy. I love learning new things.
I do prefer to work on smaller, self-contained stories rather than huge open-world games or episodic forever-games. I like to plot a story from beginning to end, which you can't really do with a more game-y project, and you definitely can't do with an open-ended story. I prefer to prioritize story over scope.
I also enjoy experimenting and trying weird ideas, though those can come out spectacularly bad. So smaller scale projects make for easier damage control. Though honestly, the time it takes to make a "smaller scale" game is way longer than I expected when I started!
I also love creating everything by myself, by hand, as far as I can manage. Which means everything takes way longer to create and put together.
Turns out you can actually make your own cake and eat it too. You just need to learn to cook. And grow wheat to make flour. And raise chickens to have eggs. Or whatever. This metaphor has already outlived its welcome.
So yeah, I soon realized I would need to learn a whole bunch of stuff to be able to create games, specifically visual novels. First off, obviously since they're games, you need to know a little programming, though using Ren'Py means it's only the tiniest little bit. You also need to learn to write, as the "novel" part of "visual novel" implies. And you need to be able to create the images that provide the "visual" part. But turns out that's not all. You also need to learn a little about sound design, UI/UX and graphic design.
Fortunately for me, I already had programming covered, and knew (very little) about graphic design. I love reading, but it turns out that's not the same as knowing how to write, so I'm still heavily struggling in that department. As for the visual side of things, I tried to use Daz but was utterly incapable of producing anything that was not nausea-inducing. So I decided to (re)learn to draw. Which would (theoretically) mean I wouldn't be constrained by what assets were available. And I honestly thought that. Like my lack of drawing skill wouldn't prove a bigger barrier than that!
But you know what? Frustrating, difficult and time-consuming as it is, there's nothing like the rush of knowing you created something out of nothing!
But wait, Feeneera ain't hand-drawn. You said you couldn't render, you liar!
This is where Kuvira comes in. I met him in a thread at F95 Zone, where he was already more than halfway through his awesome game Lovephobia. After we'd been talking for a while, someone (who might or might not have been me) brought up the subject of collaborations in the thread. And for some unknown reason, he said yes when I jumped on him proposing we did one together. I have no idea why he said yes to me, the nobody with no game under her belt and nothing to show for her amateurish efforts at other games. But he did, and we started working on what would become Feeneera.
We do the writing together, but he alone does all the renders. Which is why Feeneera is blessed with awesome visuals, breathtaking renders with a mind-blowing level of visual detail and gorgeous characters.
Feeneera and The Iron Spire.
So I'm currently working on two projects, Feeneera and The Iron Spire.
Feeneera is my collaboration with Kuvira, a short supernatural story about a couple of travel vloggers who come to a boutique hotel and find something they didn't expect. We write the story and characters together, Kuvi does all the renders and I do the sound design and UI/UX. It's still a work-in-progress, and the releases are far apart, as we are both focused on our main games, but I still feel it's coming along really nicely! Have a look at it if you want, I'm really proud of it, short as it is for now.
The Iron Spire is my solo project, a cyberpunk story about a group of misfits fighting a corporation to keep an illegall community center alive, while facing their shared past. It's a very personal project for me, as a lot of what's in there comes from personal experiences or struggles. And it's also fully hand-drawn, your typical "drawn sprites against a drawn background" fare. You can't really check it out yet, as it's still unreleased. Turns out hand-drawing everything is incredibly time-consuming! But I hope to have something to show for it soon.
So how are my games created?
Both of my current projects are Ren'Py visual novels. I've also worked with Twine and SugarCube together with fellow developer lmno, and coded a management simulator for a game with it, but my current projects are all visual novels. So I use Ren'Py for pretty much everything I do nowadays. I know a little Python, which makes it easier, and honestly, Ren'Py is incredibly easy to use!
For the visual side of Feeneera, Kuvi renders everything with Daz. For The Iron Spire I hand-draw everything on a Huion Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K), which was a game-changer for me when I bought it. I code using Sublime Text and use ImageMagick to automate image conversion tasks, Obsidian for the writing and Git for version control. When I work with Kuvira on Feenera, we do the writing with Google Docs because it's really good at having several people working on the same document at the same time.
And really, that's all there is. I don't know what else to tell you, and this is already incredibly long. So I'll just make haste with the end. I do hope you decide to try one of my projects, and that you enjoy it if you do! Thanks for reading!!
