#incursion postmortem

Rough development timeline-

Aug 2025- Started development around mid august- mostly playing around with concept art, sketching phase & conceptualising the game overall. The first appearance of Eddie before he was really fleshed out as a character was this quick doodle from aug 14th~

he kinda just appeared on my page to be honest...~ the look of him felt like it would be just right to put him into a home invasion fetish game, though.

from there I wrote my first draft of my software specification (if you aren't from a software dev background, this might seem like a kinda weird step in indie vn dev? but I definitely recommend it, just a simple/basic one to ensure you don't overscope and don't end up with a project that runs away from you!)

Incursion was conceived with the intention of something like "I want to make a small, palatable but spicy otome adult visual novel of around ~20-30k words long (yeah, i overran...) with Ren'py. ideally finished by EOY 2025, one yandere boy love interest and a generic y/n as the protag."

The idea for the story itself first came about as a notes app back-of-the-napkin sketch...

"Otw home from work

Pervy guy grinds on you on train

You have sex

You go to work next day, come home

He's waiting for you and knocks you out

You wake up

You're bound

Yoy get him to untie or not

Fuck"

As you can see, the idea changed/evolved a little during development- but I still quite like where I was initially going w this, maybe I'll use the train idea on a future game?

Sept 2025- Sprite art completed and rough outline of game logic drafted/implemented. I wanted his design to be pretty simple, since I tend to like simple character designs. He also had to look like a cute burglar, so I tried to design an outfit with uhhh the costumes that models tend to wear in home invasion fetish photography in mind! that's so cringey to admit but I have to be so for real with u guys. I was real tempted to put him in a cute sexy balaclava because I looooooove them but decided against it since it seemed like it would impede his chainsmoking abilities, and heavy smokers are a huge thing for me. I mean, it's not like I was drawing him with "being my type" in mind exactly, but... i guess yeah I did want to make sure he was cute, y'know? His gold teeth were kind of random and mainly appeared because I wanted him to have a unique "charm point". As his character shaped up, I realised that he'd probably canonically have terrible teeth, so it felt fitting to him. They're intended as crowns, but they could also be interpreted as grills, which is also really aligned with his vibe since he likes to be a little flashy~

During this month i also decided the overall flow of the story, how many endings do i want and roughly which choices will get you to which. For a short game like Inc. i felt like just a simple one-variable favour system was the way to go, and i kinda mapped out the story top-down like that. I also started writing little notes app drabbles of scenes i wanted in the game, specifically the intro scene of the game

"Man, are you exhausted.

Work has been way, way too much lately.

To the point that you're not even sure how you've been handling it."[...etc]

and a couple of the sex scenes as well. eventually, a detailed outline of the plot appeared. it's kinda long but w/e im including it here bc its part of the process.:

"He drugged yn on the bus

He's been bribing ur boss to overwork you

He's been watching yn for months before you noticed

You ride the bus together back to ur hometown

You allow him to walk you most of the way home, but not all the way.

You go home, go to bed, few weeks later

Have felt him stalking you, framed as gaslighty as possible, "you havent been right in the head", window being left open a crack, door slightly ajar etc

Two weeks after the night you meet he break into ur house

Tie you to the bedframe and threaten you at knifepoint, knife teasing your body

Talk with you, explain that hes been following you, you tempted him too much

drugged you on the bus because he thought you were cute

He tells you that he's given you a drug that means you cant lie to him(?)/aphrodisiac or something

(later: There's no such thing, baby. This was all you♡)

Starts to grope you and molest you, force you to kiss him, cut off your clothes

You can moan or scream, increase love or hate

Feel him getting hard, you get excited too

You give him oral while he straddles your face, he says how much he loves you when you cum

He notices after rhat you're wet/hard

He makes you beg for stimulation, you do and then pass out

When you wake up you're still tied up, body is stiff

You yell for him and he doesnt appear until you were crying and raw throat

Comforts you, says its precious you needed him, shhh shh its better now

You can cry or bite him, increase love or hate

He unties you after blindfolding and gagging you, ties ur hands and ankles together instead and carries you to the living room

He has a coffee and a cigarette while you watch tv

You beg to be ungagged by initiating a kiss

He ungags you and the two of you watch tv together and hang out.

He asks what you do for a living, threatens you to call your boss and hand in your notice, voice is shaky

praising you

Your life is ruint, cant pay rent

Living together time starts to pass

>Love ending

He already spoke to your LL and transferred the lease to his name, even offering to pay back your arrears because he's such a generous husband

You live together forever

>Hate ending

You try to get a knife, stab him

He stabs you too

Kiss while you bleed out

You wake up in a hospital bed, your neighbour called the ambulance because she heard a struggle

He's nowhere to be seen, you're free

>Equal ending

He doesnt know if you love or hate him, you get a hatefuck scene with mc dom

yn chloroform him and chain him up, mindbreak him and keep him as a pet"

Oct 2025- Now that the basic plot outline was all ready to go, it means that development in Ren'py itself can be started. Personally I like to write most of my prose directly in Vscode straight into Ren'py, but it isn't for everybody. My first step was to map out the logic and choices based on that outline above^ as well as set up the variables i need for stuff like y/n's name, the endings/paths i needed, etc. I also made sure to set up the "intro" section of the game, where the pre-story admin like name and pronoun selection takes place.

Since i wanted this game to give the MC some customisation options, i had to set up variables for those as well-

during this phase i also tend to plan out which CGs im going to have and where i'll have them by making comments like this as i write:

and then drawing out a really rough sketch for each one in procreate. imo it helps to have everything there to compare the thumbnails all at once, because i felt that i could ensure variety in the CGs themselves- as well as ensuring that i wasn't missing out on CGs where they would really be useful. i really like to draw so i kinda went hog wild on the CGs and ended up with just over 40. It definitely took time to draw all of that, and I'm not sure if i would do as many in a future project this size. maybe? anyway, this month was mostly just writing and drawing. These were some of the first CGs, including this second one that didn't even make it into the game but instead found itself edited for use in promotional materials only~

Nov 2025- Pretty much just writing! as i go i also leave comments telling myself "#knife slash sfx goes here", "#[specific renpy transition] goes here". etc for sound design or animation notes as i write. I kinda also implement stuff like transitions, source backgrounds etc as I go along, so my writing process ends up being "write until you need to take a break, then if you don't feel like writing anymore you can draw/animate/implement/test/source sound effects & music" etc. The prose was finished by early nov, and after that I was just finishing up my editing, adding transitions, creating more assets for the game and so on.

Dec 2025- Implementing sound design and editing/testing phase. I decided to try my hand at using stock VA barks for this project, it actually was my first time trying to make a partially-voiced project! I learnt a loooot of lessons about voiced games, in particular:

Finding stock VA barks for a non-american character is reeeeeally difficult. Since the game is set loosely in a fictionalised britain-esque country, having Eddie sound american felt like it would probably be totally off. However, the overwhelming majority of english voice clips available for free are shared by USAmerican VAs. in the future, i'd probably try to write in a more region-agnostic way if i plan to use stock/free VA barks, since it would make it much easier to find material. i usually write in british english being a brit myself, but i think maybe it would be worth the effort to make the switch to usenglish for future projects if i plan to have them voiced.

I had assumed that chopping and changing and using a clip here and there from various voice actors would be totally fine and that VA worked much the same way as other SFX. In hindsight, this was totally wrong. the fact that several totally different guys voice his voicebarks is imo flagrantly obvious despite my best efforts to disguise it.

Basically my lesson when it comes to VA is that next time i'll probably try to find a VA to do a small pack of voice barks for me as a commission, it would be much better to have one person voicing one character rather than trying to cobble together clips of different people passably.

As well as the VA i spent time this month sourcing sfx and music for the game. i kinda went ham on the music and ended up having a game file size far too large to build for web (itch limit is 500mb...) but thankfully a friend helpfully recommended using the opus audio codec in order to save space. it really helped and doing it with ffmpeg was super easy and took like 5 minutes for my whole folder of tracks, seriously nice!

I'm not good enough at music production to try making my own music for games yet, so i tend to find free stuff online, but i'd love to try it out someday! maybe sometime in the future i'll dust the cobwebs off of my poor neglected copy of ableton...?

Jan 2026- Testing phase completed and ready for launch. I had already created the itch page atp though i was careful not to make it public since itch really punishes you for listing a game's page as public before your actual launch. I created a private beta and invited a few irls and online friends to share their feedback on the game, as well as doing my best to post a few times on socials about the launch. I made the decision to host my detailed CWs list document on tumblr instead of itch, since itch's new strict policies have been known to seemingly accidentally flag game pages for containing certain words even if those words are used in a context such as "this game does not contain gore"(etc.) and i've heard that it is important to avoid accidentally triggering those sorts of flagging systems.

Jan 16 2026- Release! yay yay yay~ personally I usually put games out around the weekend if i'm able to, since i find it a good time for it, unlike what you'd usually imagine for a regular kind of software release date. to me the weekend is the best for hobby projects since i'm free to hotfix anything i need to and won't be occupied by my day job, and my itch traffic tends to spike around the weekend too (which makes sense and correlates with what ive read from other devs too!)

Personal lessons for future games-

Voice acting is not something that can be taken as lightly as other types of sfx. In the future I would probably want to either commission a VA specifically for a voicelines pack or else use stock voicelines provided by only one specific VA- it can be quite noticable if the voicelines are said by different people. Also, i want to keep in mind that if a game is not set in such a place that characters having USAmerican accents would fit it could be much harder to find VAs.

People really seemed to value the game having pronoun and body type options, even more than i expected. i would definitely consider adding this feature to future games even projects that i hadnt initially thought about it, because it seems to add a huge amount of appeal for many players.

Making the adult scenes skippable was interesting and definitely seemed to be a useful thing to do considering that it makes the game streamable, but i'm not sure if i'm going to be able to do this for future projects- it probably depends on how essential the sex scenes are to the plot. in Incursion this turned out to be "not essential at all" but this won't always be the case, it's something i want to keep in mind though.

it seems like being able to be sexually aggressive and also MC being heavily suggested to be at the very youngest in their mid to late twenties were qualities of the game that added a lot of appeal for some players. I had honestly thought that these would be the opposite of selling points, since the traditional otome mc is a classic {ageofconsent}-years-old virgin schoolgirl who wouldn't say boo to a goose. but i guess that i like writing switchy adult mcs, being indeed a switchy adult myself? it made me happy that people seemed to enjoy this aspect of Incursion.

Overall i'm really thrilled with the positive response i received and i feel super excited to work on my next vn!

My analytics from launch weekend are as below-

compared to my most popular game on my main (PG13 games only) dev account, which only accrued ~700 total plays on launch weekend/~300 downloads/ 1.5k pageviews- yeah, i was shocked! i've heard that adult gaming attracts a huge boost in audience numbers, but i was shocked to see the difference- especially considering that Incursion is my first product launched on a totally blank account with no prior following whatsoever. This is actually super heartening to me, especially since this past year has been a weird one for adult gamedevs. so, y'know, great to see that the audience for avns is alive and well on itch!

What's coming next?

I'm hoping to work on another short avn in the first half of this year! I'm pretty set that this one is gonna be a little smaller in scope than Incursion- though not by too much. Initially I had been tempted to try developing a game with a set protagonist rather than a y/n, but now that i've seen how well received the y/n aspect of Incursion was specifically I'm a little tempted to consider reworking the story to provide a choice between blank y/n and set protagonist? I'm thinking about a story involving a yandere childhood friend filled with lots of love and limerence and featuring some nice juicy hard-ryona and maledom themes, because those are some of my favourite things!<3

As well as that, I'm plodding along on day 1 of my oc Seth's game (the working title is Drilled Into You! but this is subject to change still~), a longer-form avn about a big-n-mean yandere repairman who just can't get enough of y/n after meeting them by chance and Falling In Love~<3 I've written around 50k on DITY buuuut i've not really done much else since I wanted to make sure and practice avn dev hard first so that I can do my sweet little sethy justice...<3 though i plan DITY to end up as much longer than that and be released over multiple "days" a chapter at a time.