Lasting Impressions Devblog

Development update! I’ve been hard at work finishing up sprites for the main characters and coding the game.

At the moment, the demo is in a totally playable state! ...Technically. Well, the text is readable, and you can get through the whole thing without any errors. So next I’ll be building on that to put in the sprites and other assets and overall polish. I’m aiming to have an alpha demo out in the next couple of months!

I’ve got an update! Here’s some new background art and sprites. These two are Rio, Owen’s childhood friend and one of the love interests, and Missy, Rio’s nosy friend who claims to be an alien.

Also featuring banana.

A lot of the recent work I’ve done on the game is writing, which doesn’t make for very exciting updates... But here’s some concept work, as well as the beginnings of actually putting everything together in-engine.

A small update! I’ve been busy at my day job, but I recently finished the sprite art for Owen. There are a few variations for him, including a younger version.

Let’s talk about our protagonist, Owen Yung!

Owen is a gay body artist who lives in Palmeras, the cute little beach town in which our story takes place. He has a mom, a dad, and a younger brother who’s currently in high school. He actually doesn’t have any tattoos, just piercings.

Owen comes off as a kind, dependable guy. He’s funny and charismatic, so he has a lot of surface-level friends. Unfortunately, his good luck with people early on has lead him to believe that he understands everything about everyone. He’s always giving out unsolicited advice, and acts like his opinion is the be-all-end-all. He’s stubborn, too. He lacks close friendships because people tend to get fed up with the black-and-white way he views the world, and his haughty attitude.

It’s something that’s been eating at him a lot, because he does genuinely care for everyone around him. He’s just got a terrible personality.

Hi there! Welcome to the Lasting Impressions devblog!

To start off, I’d like to tell you all a little about myself and the project.

The Game

Lasting Impressions is a work-in-progress BL visual novel made with the Ren’py engine. The game is about Owen Yung, a tattoo artist who lives in a cozy beach town. Owen’s life is pretty uneventful, but then his flakey childhood friend suddenly reappears in his life... Along with a girl who claims she’s an alien and might be dating him???

The game is approximately 50,000 words long, will feature 5 routes, 3 love interests, and over 50 CGs.  Around 20 of which are 18+ in nature ;) Players will have the option to turn off adult content, and I’m also considering making a version with no pornographic content at all for slightly cheaper.

Currently, the game is fully scripted, the characters have been designed, and I’ve started working on the artwork for sprites and backgrounds.

Since this is my first attempt at making a real game, I’m aiming to have a demo completed by mid-2018. The demo will be free to play and cover the first 30 minutes to an hour of the game. (By my estimates, the full game will take 4 to 5 hours to complete) I would like to have the full game completed by mid-2019, but since I’m pretty inexperienced in gamedev, there’s no way I can be sure! I’m sure I’ll have a better idea once the demo is finished. The full game will probably cost about $5.

The Dev

My name is Zoe! I’m a 26-year-old artist currently living in the Austin, Texas area. I graduated from SCAD in 2013 and have been floating around in various jobs and places ever since. I decided to go back to school recently in the hopes of finding more steady employment, and I’m currently studying game art.

I’ve been drawing comics since I was a kid, and I’ve always had an affinity for narrative art. I like character-based games with complex characters and stories, so I decided for my first foray into game dev, I’d make a visual novel.

So this devblog is kind of a diary all about me trial-and-erroring my way into making a game.

Since 2012, I’ve been working on one big project in particular: The Last Cowboy, a science fiction webcomic about a girl who was raised on an alien planet. But that project is in its final stages, and should be wrapping up sometime next year.

So for now, Lasting Impressions is a hobby project, and I can’t guarantee I’ll meet all my goals... But I’ll certainly try my best. I’m aiming to make a post here every week or so on my progress with the game, so feel free to follow along!

You can also see my illustration work on my art blog: http://zorinarts.tumblr.com/