what if?....

First and foremost, thank you all for your support, fan art, and kind words! It's made the whole grueling process of trying to make something in renpy without any foreknowledge of the tool worth it, ultimately. My bitter, shit-smeared husk of a heart has been genuinely warmed seeing how much people got out of Abbey & Sylvia's little adventure. I've had a couple people tell me that it made them tear up, which is surprising, but welcome information. I'm not sure how I did it, but I hope I can do it again in the future!

For my part, I've found myself quite attached to the character of Abbey Apples. I originally just made her as a character I thought it'd be fun to see get horribly tortured and murdered over and over again- and don't get me wrong, she is absolutely that... But, in addition, I found myself increasingly endeared to the miserable woman. As the writing process went on, I wound up making her history increasingly miserable until I felt sufficiently bad for her despite her rather rotten attitude towards life.

It's interesting though, right? The world that the conservative mind perceives/fears is often a weirdly sexy place- if nothing else, it's very pulp. Devil-worshiping torture cults, Death Wish style pervert gangs roving the streets, sinister foreign spies around every corner, and perpetually endangered womenfolk that these forces (usually in cahoots in some way, of course) plan on doing terrible things to. Maybe even doing terrible things in the butt, no less!

It'd be a very good world for a weird pervert to live in. Specifically, the kind of weird pervert that the conservative mind presumes their culture war opposition to be, whilst simultaneously loathing themselves for being. The lengths that someone who hates themselves for having a secret account on "fartingbitches.com" will go to in order to maintain the illusion of not liking those amazing farting bitches. All of traditional morality is built on this tragic reality. So, what better world to write a grisly little romance story in? You take one wrong step in the big city and you're getting abducted by a transgender crack dealer who's threatening to feed you to piranhas the local hospital uses to dispose of all their abortions. Sexy stuff! I have a lot more stories I'd want to tell in a world like that, and I think Abbey is the perfect gal to explore it.

That said, whatever I make next, it will absolutely not be a visual novel. Working in the engine was the least fun I've ever had working on anything game-design related. Just a miserable, mind-numbing experience. And to top it all off, my darkest confession- I just don't like visual novels that much! That is to say, at all. I just don't like 'em. I know, I know... Never try and make something for a genre you don't like. My bad. Honestly, the only reason this game was in visual novel format was that a friend got me into a game jam (which wound up not really happening for us) and it needed to be in visual novel form, so here we are. I just didn't want to have to re-do a bunch of stuff switching to a different engine or something. Sorry to disappoint the VN fans- it simply wasn't meant to be.

Expect the next Abbey Apples adventure to be something in a classic RPG Maker horror adventure sort of flavor... But first, I've got a couple zines I wanna do, I think!