#general-dev

What did I do last month?

MindMindMind was very kindly translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Samara Marx, so I implemented and tested it! It's so cool seeing my game in different languages, and I got quite a few comments from people who played the translation, which is amazing!

The backgrounds were Villainfall were also completely finished (barring any random last minute additions, I always seem to manage to add scenes as I write...) They look very nice, and I can't wait to show them off in game.

I also completed a detailed outline for Countdown to Midnight! I had a more barebones outline completed before, but I fleshed it out quite a bit and wrote a much more detailed event flowchart. Countdown to Midnight will be an "adventure game" style title, where you wander around a city map and interact with people and collect items to progress the story - It's my first time trying out this kind of gameplay, so I was experimenting with a few different methods of outlining it/fleshing it out (sketching out what items/interactions the players needs to acquire to progress, and so on and so forth.) I ended up pretty happy with the result. Hopefully the production is smooth!

I also continued working on the Karamu artwork! Honestly while looking at my old art for it, I realized how so many of the compositions were a bit samey... (well most of it is a conversation between two people in a bus stop, I guess that's unavoidable...) But I do want to try to make it more visually interesting! So you might see me start to do stuff that's more experimental (okay, so maybe making the characters little cute bobble heads won't do much for the eerie atmosphere but... they came out cute, so...)

What am I going to do this month?

This month I'll be working on Karamu and MHIAS! Both games will be participating in some Steam festivals in May, so I'll mainly be preparing for that. I'd also like to get back into the swing of writing regularly (I was doing so good at the beginning of the year...)

I hope that everyone has a happy April, and see you next month!

Hello everyone, happy March!

Spring is coming~ I live in a naturally warm place, so when I took a trip to a colder area last month I was freezing almost the entire time 😭 Luckily it started to warm up a bit towards the end… (It's sad to know that I've become so weak to the cold 🤣) I hope that everyone had a good February!

What did I do last month?

So as I mentioned in February, I released Update 2.0.0 of MindMindMind! So the first half of February was spent polishing that build - fixing certain GUI screens, fixing some bugs with the language selection, adding in the little expression popups, implementing the Spanish translation, revising the storefront pages, and playing through the game about 10 times in different configurations to iron out the bugs (Web, web on my phone, the Android build, the translated version, the Steam version… and so on and so forth). I thought that I was basically done with the update at the end of January but alas, there's always a million small things that need to be fixed up before any release (hence why all game development takes twice as long as you expect…) It was my first time implementing a translation as well as implementing achievements for Steam specifically, so it was a very good experience (hopefully each release makes me a little faster at doing all this…)

The rest of the month was a bit slow since I was on a trip and away from my desk. I DID STILL GET THINGS DONE because I'm nothing if not a workaholic apparently, but it was mainly a variety of little, miscellaneous tasks that I could hammer out in an hour or so. This included various adjustments to the GUI for Countdown to Midnight, Rohais, the Karamu Trilogy, and My Husband is a Stranger (fixing scrollbars, implementing SFX, implementing content warnings, refactoring the dialogue screens, and so on).

I also got a couple people who reached out to me to provide additional translations for MindMindMind! Hopefully you'll be able to see those sometime soon~

Lastly, I continued redoing the artwork for Karamu, for when it's implemented in trilogy format! To be honest these have been like 90% completed since last fall, but I was being so fussy about the rendering at that time that I only finished and polished them up now… At first I thought that redoing Karamu's art was a bit unnecessary since it wasn't eye-blindingly bad, but putting the old and new versions side by side made me realize that - "Yeah I'm really glad I'm redoing all this…" Raku looks much softer and cuter now, my precious little emotional manipulator 😏 And hopefully it'll look much more consistent with the artwork from the third installment!

What am I doing this month?

Since the MindMindMind update is out, this month I'll be returning to work full time on the Karamu Trilogy and My Husband is a Stranger! Hopefully I'll make good headway on both projects, fingers crossed 🤞 (alas, I keep getting new ideas for MHIAS and keep wanting to expand the script… someone save me from myself…)

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and see you next month!

Chattercap

Since the devlog this time came so late, I'll review what I accomplished in both April and May. I also think I'll make a slight adjustment to my monthly devlog scheduling from now on - for the most part, I've tried to get them out in the first week of the month (to extremely questionable success), but I think that I'll start putting them out near the end of the month instead. (This is 90% because I constantly write "What did I do this month" as my header when it should have been "What did I do last month" and I'm tired of making typoes…)

What did I do last (and this) month?

First of all, I had the honor of participating in a couple of Steam festivals earlier this month - the Otome Games Celebration hosted by Crystal Game Works, as well as the Storyteller's Festival hosted by Two and a Half Studios. To celebrate, I put out a small updated demo release of Steam of Karamu, covering around half of the first game. I wanted to finish the entire game, but I didn't make it 😭😭😭 (for some reason I thought it was a good idea to do a million and a half CGs for it… somehow it has even more art than the original game?!?! Blame Nelli and Raku for being my hyperfixation couple…) However, you can check it out if you want a sneak preview at all the shiny new art for it!

In addition, I:

-Implemented a Russian translation of MindMindMind -Received sample style backgrounds for Our Hollow Appetites -Finished most of the character designs for Countdown to Midnight. -Received and made some adjustments to the Villainfall GUI. -Wrote 29k words

The biggest thing that I did last month is that I put out a recruitment form for character artists. In the past, I've done the character art for all of my projects. However, I've been interested in collaborating with character artists for quite a long time, but I could never get the courage to actually reach out… (As for what made me want to finally commit? I got a project idea that I wanted to do for Otome Jam and realized that I couldn't do it because my project list was too long 😔 I am cursed by the amount of things I want to do in my short lifetime… 😔)

This form generated quite a lot more interest than I was expecting! The first day I got 20 applicants and I was like "wow!!!" Then the next day it was 200 and I was like "…wow!!!" All in all, I got almost 900 extremely talented artists who were interested in working with me, I was so honored 😭

I reviewed all the applications carefully, and there are some artists that I'm extremely excited to work with 🤭 There have been a lot of discussions for the past 2 months! Unfortunately, I have to keep a lot of it secret for the time being until I'm ready to make public announcements, but I'm pretty excited 😏 I will say that there's a gorgeous knight lady in our future…

What am I doing next month?

Next month is… largely a secret! I'm working on a pretty neat project with some very cool collaborators, and we're hoping to get it out for Otome Jam, so I'd like to devote all of my attention to that for the next month. There should still be a bit of progress to announce for my own projects, but it'll be a little bit less than what I usually do in a month.

Thank you to everyone who's following along!

Early last month I was on a trip! While I was away I finally finished updating my website, and I also worked on finishing up some presskits for my games as well. (If you're interested you can check those out here!) It's certainly not the fanciest website, but it's about the limit of what I can put together myself 😅 and at the very least it's up to date! You can find little consolidated pages for each of my games there, as well as a page with recent news!

I also did quite a bit of sprite work this month! I worked on around 10 sprites total, and I finished 2 of them (I think I'm finally starting to iron out a nice workflow for myself in CSP, so hopefully I can put art together a bit faster.) In addition, I wrote about 10k words, and I adjusted the outline for Day 5/6 of My Husband is a Stranger to make it a bit more exciting ✨

Lastly, I was thinking a bit more about assets for my games for next year. Since I do my own character art (at the very least, I can't afford to commission that out 😅), the other large consideration that I have is background art. The backgrounds for Karamu, My Husband is a Stranger, and Project R will all be done by sometime in spring next year, but I want to start production on a few other titles in 2026 that I'd like to finish within the year, ideally 🤔 While I can crunch out character art myself, background art takes quite a bit of time to produce, and it's something that I need to start thinking about quite a long time in advance 🤔 So I decided to reach out to a studio for a long-term contract to produce art for those games 🤗 We start work this month, and hopefully it all goes well~ and hopefully this means I can put out games more quickly, with nicer art!

As a little teaser, here's some sketches of backgrounds for a project I plan to work on in 2026! It'll be a yandere GL game set in a magical school ✨

This month, I should be getting the assets I need for the MMM mobile/Web port, so hopefully I'll be able to get that up sometime this month or early November! I also had the somewhat insane impulse to redo all of the art for Karamu (the first installment), since it's my oldest art in a released game and also the first impression that people will get when they play the trilogy, and I'd like it to be a little more consistent with my current style. After that's done I'll be putting the Karamu trilogy demo (which will contain Karamu) on Steam - I also hope to put the demo for MHIAS on Steam as well after cleaning up a bit of the code and adding more font options.

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and see you next month!

What did I do last month?

Last month was a big writing month for me, as I participated in NanoWriMo - but with visual novel writing, of course. To be honest I stopped tracking my word count partway through, but I think that I got around 70k words done 😂 (averaging over 2k words per day, that's my best writing month ever, wow!) Hopefully I'll be able to keep this momentum going through the end of the year as well 😊 (I have, so far!)

In addition to that, I finished a couple of sprites. Unfortunately, it was a hectic month for me personally, as quite a few issues came up unexpectedly that I had to deal with 😓 so besides the writing I wasn't able to squeeze much in. Hopefully December will end off on a more productive note.

What am I doing this month?

Since it's a holiday month, I don't want to stress too much trying to churn things out. As a result I won't set any big "goals" for the month, though I'll be working steadily on my various tasks, as usual. Since I have a lot of fingers in disparate pots right now, I think I'll try to reorganize myself a bit so that I can start off the new year on a slightly more steady foot.

Like I did last year, in January I'll post an updated roadmap of all of the projects that I've been working on! Last time, I refrained from chatting about everything, since I "wanted to time my announcements" or something, but I think I've realized that I am absolutely terrible at marketing, and organizing, and gosh darn it I just want to talk about what I'm working on, so I think I'll probably talk about everything. It'll be a big mix of things, since I'm really trying to enjoy myself and have fun making games in different genres, with different mechanics, so hopefully it'll be interesting to take a look through, at least!

I hope you all have a good holiday season, and I'll see you again in 2026!

Hello everyone, happy September! (I'm… posting this early?!?! Woohoo?!?!)

What did I do last month?

Unfortunately it was a bit of a hectic month personally for me last month, so I mostly worked on a variety of miscellaneous tasks across a variety of different projects. This included:

-Finished Nelli's sprites for Hanasu (including 4 different outfit variations and 2 poses!) -Started putting together organized presskits for all of my current projects (and future projects) -Fleshed out the concepts of a couple projects that I want to tackle after my current ones. -Came up with a list of achievements for MindMindMind's upcoming new build and made icons for them. -Reached out to a couple new artists for some Secret Design Work (that will hopefully end up being cool!) -Started experimenting with Clipstudio Paint. (I mostly work with Procreate, but I've been wanting to experiment with CSP's more advanced features so that I can hopefully use different post-processing effects and make art a bit faster. Of course working with a new drawing program is always a bit of a learning curve, but I'm getting the hang of it!) -Wrote 15k words. -(Finally caught up on answering my itch comments! I'm sorry for the delay…)

What will I do this month?

Unfortunately this month will also be a bit hectic since I'll be going on a short vacation later this week! After that, I'll mostly be planning on storyboarding the remaining MHIAS days (I have a long af list of illustrations that I want to make that I have in a notes file… I should probably organize it…) as well as working on artwork for Project R. I'd also like to finish updating my website (did you know I have a real website that isn't my Carrd? It hasn't been updated in around 2 years, but… I have one!!)

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and I hope you have a fantastic September!

Hello everyone, happy July! I hope that it's not too hot where you are (and perhaps you're playing visual novels indoors where it's nice and cool~ 🤭)

Before I get into my dev rambling, I'll mention that I recently started a mailing list! Since there are usually several months between my releases, I thought it would be convenient for players to be notified whenever I release a game or major update without monitoring my socials. You can sign up for it here!

As you probably know, I released a game last month for Otome Jam! The demo of "My Husband is a Stranger" is now available to play on itch.io! You can find it here!

It's a psychological/drama/romance visual novel about a sweet marriage that slowly rots into a nightmare. It has a customizable protagonist (including skin color) and different font options! The game will take place over the course of 7 days; 3 days and 23k words are available at the moment (around 2 hours of playtime). Please read the content warnings, and take note that the final game will contain horror and thriller elements, in case that's not up your alley!

So… this month I basically did everything that was needed to finish up the MHIAS demo! This included:

-Drew 4 CGs -Drew 19 smaller illustrations -Fixed one of Morgan's sprites and added sprite expressions for both sprites -Made 7 time of day variations of 5 different backgrounds, plus alterations to some commissioned backgrounds (there are 45 backgrounds for the game at the moment! Wow!) -Coded in the entire script, including visuals, audio, and dialogue formats -Put together achievement icons and implemented the achievement system -Implemented BGM and SFX -Coded in the settings and archives -Implemented the gallery -Implemented blinking -Learned how to use Ren'py's particle system -Fixed the Web build so that it works on mobile devices, added a notification to the Web build informing the player of performance issues -Implemented the icon and loading screens for PC, Android, and Web -Finished and styled both the itch.io and Steam pages -Wrote the developer's note -Beta testing -Various bugfixes

Whew, it ended up being a lot! I also made achievement icons and implemented the achievement systems for both Project R and the Karamu trilogy, finalized a few commissioned assets for Project R, and set up the mailing list that I mentioned at the start of the devlog.

Lastly, I was interviewed by the very kind people at Otome.com about MindMindMind! If you're interested, you can check it out here:

It goes without saying that I'm… a bit tired! As much as I loved working on the MHIAS demo, it's also easily my most ambitious title yet. It has the most art assets out of any of my games (over twice as many as any of my other titles). It's also the first time I've worked with Ren'py (pretty proud of myself for going from complete novice to workable game in around two months!) and the first time I worked with an artist for a custom GUI (among a dozen other things).

So I took around a week break from development. Now that that's over, I plan to slowly ease back into the swing of things. My main focuses this month will be the MHIAS script (I plan on finishing it completely before I release the next update) as well as the art assets for Project R and the Karamu trilogy. I'd also like to make some headway on the Android port for MMM this month since I don't have any imminent game releases looming over my head.

Thank you to everyone who's following along, and see you next month!