It is said that no man is an island, and that's never rung truer than the time I've spent dabbling in making visual novels, interactive fiction and asset packs, even as a small-time soloist. It wasn't until I took a look at my own profile page that I noticed I'd been slowly moving from Wuxia into different genres as time passed, influenced by the people around me, whether it was on Twitter, ScribbleHub, Reddit, Discord or here on this very site.

My journey was an unexpected one, to be honest. I'm surprised I'm even here publishing visual novels on Itch, sometimes. Around 2019, I'd only been writing fanfiction on Archive of My Own for a Chinese novel called The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (Mo Dao Zu Shi), but as I explored danmei (Chinese BL novels) as a reading outlet on various sites, I found myself eventually writing my own Xianxia-themed original short stories, leading me to discover a site called ScribbleHub, where I started posting them.

Now, ScribbleHub had a forum of its own where its users could post topics and replies. As a lark - since I was then on a semester break from college - I'd decided to create a thread reviewing male characters on the site.

It was very obviously a joke thread, but a few of the responses I'd gotten there were pretty interesting. One in particular was a post by a BL Palace member, which stood out to me because... well, one: it was a post made by a fellow fujoshi and we were quite rare on the male-dominated forum; two: it was a pretty male Wuxia character, which I'd found rather charming.

The image that they had was made using Picrew, which didn't have too much customization available, so I was inspired to draw something on the spot inspired by their character:

And yes, this was my art style back in June 2021. At that time all my drawings were scribbled on an old Galaxy Note 3 using the Notes application. The particular post above was also the beginning of the abrupt change in my art style. Why, you ask?

Because this very BL Palace member was the same one who got me into eventually coding my first visual novel, joining Itch.io and submitting my game into my first game jam.

The Fanart That Started It All

Yue Changming, the character mentioned in the post, had a game of his own which I had then played (and, if I recall right, reviewed on Discord over chat), but it wasn't until July the same when I spoke to Summer (https://summery-studios.itch.io/) and discovered that Tsukimii (https://tsukimii.itch.io/) and the others were developing a visual novel together for Yaoi Game Jam 2021, a BL game jam featured by Itch.io. At that point I had no idea what Itch.io was, let alone a game jam. So, curious as ever, I asked for permission to join their game development server.

Now, I wasn't new to visual novels at that time - I had watched a play-through of Dramatical Murder, which was a visual novel, and had also played Silver Chaos at one point. What I didn't know was that individual fujoshis could band together to make one and publish it on a site for free. What I also didn't know was that there was a month-long event called a game jam that was -gasp- dedicated to BL!

This was very inspiring to me. I very much wanted to make fanart for their main character, which I had seen in an initial concept sketch, but I didn't want to go back to drawing it on my phone using Galaxy Notes. I wanted to make something worthy of their collective effort - so I poked around BL Palace for advice.

Some members pointed me to Medibang Paint, a free lightweight Japanese program, which I used alongside Photoshop for editing. This piece of fanart was the piece that started my descent into using an ornate transparent PNG "plate" style for over a year, a style which eventually led to creating assets for BL games of the Wuxia and Xianxia genres featuring transparent layered objects and frames that could be tiled on the Ren'Py game screen or background layers as they were easier to add and remove for animation and presentation purposes.

Douya and the Golden Scroll: The birth of Spider-Bro, Flower-Bro and my signature hentai monsters

After making the fanart to help promote their game, Scales of Fate, I found myself desiring to have my art in a visual novel too. I'm not sure how  other artists out there feel about it, but there's something very appealing about having your work used in a game for many to enjoy and interact with.

Scales of Fate already had its own artist, so there wasn't really any place for me to make any sprites for it - my brightly-colored cartoony art style was also extremely unsuitable for such an elaborate and beautiful visual novel. I wasn't really sure how I'd go about finding my own team or working with one either, so I did what I believed everyone else in my position would have done - I downloaded Ren'Py to make a visual novel which would suit the vibe of my own art.

Fortunately, Ren'Py was very easy to use. It was one of those VN engines that even a five-year-old could use, so yeah, even a bimbo like myself had very little problem with it. It was highly customizable and had an API which was easy to refer to, so coding only took about a week or two to learn and implement. It was within this timeframe that Douya and the Golden Scroll was developed, tested and published.

The character concept of Douya was fairly easy to do - he's modeled after the main character of Handsome Siblings, which was then popular on Netflix, and his love interest after Lan Wangji, then a heartthrob on the internet with thousands of GIF files on Tumblr.

The real challenge were the monsters. I wasn't particularly well-versed with monster design, but as it was a game about defeating monsters to collect a reward, there needed to be monsters. I'd already outlined a battle module and found good lo-fi hentai music; there was no turning back at this point.

Time was precious and I didn't want to lose too much of it brainstorming. So I went to a free stock art site and downloaded some images of random animals, human bodies and flowers. After that, I recolored them piece by piece and clobbered them together. Behold my firstborn, Spider-Bro:

My unholy spawns Satan himself had chosen to abandon surprisingly received very good feedback on my Discord demo. They're sexy in an otherworldly way and only took fifteen minutes to make. Anyone could hate the dumb dialogue, terrible gameplay and jerky animations consisting only of Ren'Py's with blind, easeoutbottom and dissolve, but nobody could hate Spider-Bro and Flower-Bro. They were the true heroes of DGS; boyfriends who would stand the test of time with glowing reviews on Random Boyfriend Generator by very satisfied users who got them on their first try.

As I've mentioned before, no man is an island and feedback is one of the things that can influence a visual novel developer or artist to create the things they do. Emboldened by warm, glowing reviews encouraging my frat boyish toilet humor, I went on to create other frivolous visual novels of the porny kind.

It's to note also that during this time, I'd also seen that there weren't many Xianxia/Wuxia-styled sprites out there. Xianxia and Wuxia had become quite popular with the premier of The Untamed on Netflix, but it was still a niche and not many sprites put out were themed this way. There was a gap there that I could squeeze into by simply offering something different, so I put out Murong Yi, the first of my free sprite series.

I'd received some interesting feedback from one or two developers. Apparently there was a lack of visual novel sprites for Wuxia and Xianxia, even in Chinese sites, because most sprites were ripped from existing games and therefore copyrighted. As Xianxia and Wuxia enthusiasts are a very small niche on this site, not many artists would have even heard of it, let alone created any. So, as I'd guessed, I was one of the very few putting these out.

Eventually Ertian, the second sprite pack was released, as well as Sanshan, Shifu, birdy and three Mo Dao Zu Shi characters. Feeling as if I'd completed my journey in the Wuxia and Xianxia genres, I started dabbling in other types of genres and settings.

Twine, and the beginning of Victorian-esque designs

One of the things I'd noticed reading the community posts was that a lot more people were playing games that had web browser versions available. Granted, it was mostly developers complaining that they weren't getting many views and downloads although they were pay-what-you-want (their games may have gotten filtered out once folk clicked on the 'Free' filter), but it did strike me that since my VNs were 100%-no-payments-free anyway, it wouldn't be a terrible idea to get more parties interested by creating a browser-playable version of the game.

At that time Ren'Py Web was still rather wobbly and the files generated were far too large for Itch. An email to the admins to allow my VNs to be published despite their size was turned down, so I began looking or other avenues to create web browser games. It was then when Owl, a member of BL Palace, told me about Twine, a web browser interactive fiction engine.

I'd tried a demo of their Twine adventure game, which was playable within one single html file. Impressed, I went on ahead to look into using this engine. As I'd wanted to see if local files could show up on Itch after the ZIP file was exploded at runtime, I decided to craft a piece of interactive fiction to test it out.

Around this time in 2022, the Netflix hit, Bridgerton, was rising in popularity with season two being premiered in March the same year. I'd been made to sit down to watch it by my mother and brother, who were avid fans of the show. And well, again, as no man is an island, I found myself moving towards having an interest in fantasy Victorian era settings.

This was when I created Harlowe's Eve, my first browser-based piece of interactive fiction.

When I conceived Harlowe's Eve, the one thing that I wanted to do was make something swanky and tantalizing - meaning none of my usual frat bro humor. At that point I had also already watched Squid Game, so the idea of folk wearing masks was still rather fresh in my mind. The character had to be smarmy, rather flippant and know his way around playing with people and crushing hearts.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any stock characters of my own that I could quickly use, so I dug around Itch to look at character packs I could potentially use. None of the fit the bill; Victorian era styled sprites were rather rare and didn't turn up in the tags. After hours of digging, I'd found only one, but unfortunately he didn't have a nasty, spoiled look, so I was left needing to use my own art - with the only one available being a blond with two horse suitors from an original novel I never finished writing - and it wasn't even a sprite.

As, again, this was just a test, I'd simply saved it without its background and suitors and dropped it on top of a new background. The rest of the pages didn't have any character art in them - which was fine, as was the nature of interactive fiction browser games on Itch, which are primarily word-based, as opposed to visual novels, which were more image-driven.

Surprisingly, I ended up really enjoying the premise of the story and writing the whole thing. As this was done within the time frame of the Yaoi Game Jam that year, I also ended up submitting it.

As this game was browser based, its views were exponential compared to Douya, which then only had download options. So once Ren'Py had a web support update, I went on ahead to build and upload browser versions of all my old visual novels so that folk didn't need to download them anymore - and they ended up getting far more views and plays than they did the previous year.

That said, as I'd had good reviews and a heap of views on a more "serious" game like Harlowe's Eve, I decided to make yet another Victorian-inspired browser-based one.

Front-facing sprites and sprite base reuse

To cut down time making sprites, I started creating front-facing sprites inspired by another user's popular front-facing shoulders-only sprites, resulting in Adam Sandlerton and Dwayne Jeanson, character bases with items that could be easily ported over quickly to another copied base with minor changes to create a whole new look and character.

From Adam's sprite base came Florian's sprite, and from Dwayne's sprite base came Randy's and Dennis'. The builds were similar and could easily exchange clothing too, which meant the sprites could easily be updated with new looks and flipped to interchangeably create yet more new looks. As such, they could be released in series based on setting, and era - five different characters in one page as opposed to my older style of one character, multiple types of clothes of the same era.

Seeing that I could do this for more than just my front-facing sprites, I decided to "rescue" some of my waist-up sprites too by redrawing some areas of the sprites while covering other parts with a layer of clothing on top. After I was able to do so, I tried them out by creating The Himbleton Winter Affair, a visual novel consisting of reused sprite bases from older packs, including the newly "rescued" ones.

Once that worked, I then released a new Alice in Wonderland themed sprite pack which could potentially be used in another visual novel in the same vein as the front-facing ones of five characters in a single themed project. As I'd edited the erased areas such as the arms, I was very easily able to draw new poses for the same base and retain the expressions while redrawing only a portion of other areas to create completely new looks that fitted other genres and settings.

So far so good! The bases may be the same, as are the expressions, but they could very easily be used to make new sets in the future.

The thing about community is remembering that we, too, are a part of it.

My journey had started out simply wanting to have one of my sprites used in a game after seeing someone else's being used - then making my own visual novels by learning from the creators of Ren'Py who've kindly put the free tool out for everyone to use, and then making and sharing assets with others who might want to use them someday.

At some point, I myself wasn't able to find suitable sprites due to limited available ones of a certain setting, and due to time limitations, I wasn't able to conceive new ones and I did everything solo, right down to writing, coding and testing. If a developer was in a team they could hire someone else to make art for them, but if we can't afford it, free assets are mostly the way to go. They're often a quick fix, and while they're not fully customized for our stories, sometimes they're really just that thing that can propel us forward into making that very first game that might lead to another, another, and yet another.

Sometimes that first game's just a piece of interactive fiction that has one character on one background, and nothing else but text in every other page.

So yeah, that's my journey so far. I'm not sure what the future brings, but I suspect it'd have something to do with more sprite packs that I could also easily use myself for future game jams. I don't expect to get a lot of downloads for these sprite packs, but good golly, they did come in handy for me when I needed them - I was able to shave a lot of time off and focus on writing and coding as a one-woman show.

In hindsight, I could opt not to publish them since they haven't been really useful to anyone else but myself, but that's not who I am, I suppose. I hope that someday these niche and weird little sprite packs of bright colors and frat boy origin will help shave off someone else's development time too. Until then, farewell! ✨