Happy New Year, itch.io community!

Firstly, thank you to every follower I've gotten, and thank you to everyone who's taken the time to play "Apparition." I never expected anyone to play it at all, especially given how I made the game to teach myself how to code for larger projects in the future. It really makes me happy to see all the love and positive feedback it's gotten, and it's especially helped me as a dev to hear the criticism I've gotten as well. All in all, it was a great introduction to game-making, and I'm ready to jump into something new.

This "something new" is actually, for me, something quite old. My next game project is a story I have been writing since 2013 - yeah. 10 years is a long time, too long to write something without having much at all to show for it. I'll be honest, it's taken me this long to even announce a published story because "Black Swamp" is my baby, and I still haven't gotten to a point where I'm 100% satisfied with it. But, I've decided to take some writing advice from school, kill some darlings, and get out my story. 

So, what is "Black Swamp?" As the promo image says, "Black Swamp" will be a longform mystery/horror visual novel with a medical theme. We follow Maeko (center left, pink cardigan), a photography student with a memory-related illness, as she's offered a chance at recovering by her friend Armie (center right, red sweater), who's running a medical experiment for his thesis. This game will have a wide arrange of themes, some of which may be incredibly triggering, such as themes involving eugenics, ableism, homophobia, suicide, and abuse. The horror aspect will come into play, especially integrated with these themes. However, "Black Swamp," at it's core, is a story about healing. This is a queer driven story by a queer author, so please take that into account when interpreting the material as it comes out.

I've only slated our prologue (slash chapter 1, still not quite sure what makes the most sense to call it) for 2023, as very honestly, this will be a project I intend to work on 90% of the assets for. I've always liked creating as a solo-artist, so I know every element of this game will take me a long time, from outlining to writing to coding to designing to drawing to researching etc etc. So, I've broken the games written outline into chunks, and rather than focusing on tackling the entire written script at once. That's another confession to make - there's still a LOT to sort out in writing for the latter half of the game. But, I have my ending pieces settled, and I think as a writer that more and more will fall into place as I step away from outlining and crack further into completing one written and playable section of the game. That being said, the game will release chapter by chapter - and even then, I'm not sure exactly how many chapters there will be. Our first installment will be free to play, and the chapters after that will each cost some amount, TBA.

As for gameplay style, I intend to focus much more on story than literal gameplay. There definitely is a mystery to solve, and I'm still working out how much of the player's involvement I want in solving it, or if I want to take a 07th expansion approach and write a straight, clickable novel. My main concern is that I don't want the story to get diminished if I include gameplay elements that aren't up to par. For that reason, I will not be returning to RPGMaker for this project and am instead looking into several programs to code the VN, such as ren'py. If you have any strong recommendations, feel free to shoot them my way!

TL;DR - I'm writing a VN! It's long, and it's gonna take me a long time. I don't have all of it written, nor do I have all of the game elements planned. Right now, it's a little loosey-goosey.

So why am I announcing it? Because I have to get it out! I'm someone who's absolutely terrible at finishing personal projects without a deadline, and my goal for 2023 is to have something published for this story, whether that's one chapter or the whole darn thing. It's a story that means the world to me, and I don't want to let life pass me by before even getting a chapter out.

I'll be posting my devlogs here, and some occasional content on my twitter and tumblr pages:

https://twitter.com/cartyrs

https://cartyrs.tumblr.com/

You can find all my other creative links here: https://cartyrs.carrd.co/

So, thank you for following me thus far, and please look forward to Black Swamp: A Game of Murder, Mystery, and Memory.