Wheee another month gone~! Before getting more into what I did for the month, I want to remind y'all that Queer Games Bundle 2024 is still running! For the price of one AAA game, you can get tons of games made by queer developers and support them directly! My games and assets are in the bundle, so I would really appreciate you either supporting the bundle or spreading the word about it! Pride month may be over, but you should always support queer people past one single month of the year.
So, admittedly I had been doing more art and planning this past month with not much else to show, but I do have two small visual novels I made for Neo-Twiny 2024. By the way, go play the games that were submitted to the jam!
It's funny too, because I honestly didn't think I would be able to get anything else out since I was busy with other things. But when I heard of Neo-Twiny Jam, which has a 500 word limit per game, I thought it would be a great idea to dust off a project I worked on from before I started working on Pillars on Poppy Hills, which was pre-2019. And then I proceeded to not finish the one I initially dusted off and instead published two new games that were related to that game, because oops ran out of time and spoons lol
Will I finish that game so there's at least a trilogy? Honestly, who knows, if only for the fact that July is going to be busy for me and I may just take a month long hiatus on gamedev just because I'm gonna be That busy.
Well, before I talk about my hiatus for July, let me at least talk about the games I released. The first one is called Please Don't Understand Me, and the last one is called Translucent Trails. I recommend playing them first before reading on, but hey I can't tell you what to do lol
I’ve had moments in my previous games where I did intend on making the text harder to read or unreadable for a narrative reason. And, well, people did complain about those moments lol, but those were artistic decisions I will not change or budge on. But when I got another comment regarding the legibility in these moments, I had an admitedly petty thought: what if I made a game where you just could not read or understand the text at all but the protagonist can? Not as in the game is written in a language you couldn’t read, or you are trying to understand a language you don't know, but kinda like a font you can read but nobody else can. Like speaking in a way that you yourself understand, but for some reason, other people cannot understand what you’re talking about, and your only cues for what’s going on are everything else, like visuals, music, and such?
When this idea hit me, I was interested in trying out Ren’Py’s new bubble textbox feature, something I've never used before since I usually think of my VNs in ADV or NVL style textboxes. The way you implement the bubbles in Ren’Py is super different in how I typically code my games in that you don't put in the actual numbers for the bubble's size and position in the code, but use a built in screen while you run your game to highlight where to put the bubbles, decide the size for them, and cycle through the types of bubble shapes you can input.
I will say, this is incredibly neat in that you don’t need to type in code and run the game over and over to make sure what you put in looks correct. I did find some downsides though.
One is that if you edit the dialogue after setting the bubble shape and position, the settings on your bubble will change back to the default bubble and placement. Which is frustrating for me only because I was placing the bubbles in a nonconventional way and would need to frequently put them back in the place I wanted them when I wanted to edit the text.
I was thinking of releasing the what-I-thought-would-be-trilogy as an anthology after releasing them separately, but I found out that even if I change the where the text would run in code, the engine will consider that dialogue change and delete all those bubble settings and set them to the default bubble and position. Which sucks lmao, because I put a lot of thought and work on how to lay out the text but I guess they have to stay like that forever until either I find an easier workaround or Ren'Py updates an easier workaround.
By the way, if you were curious about the font I used for the gibberish: I made it! Well, more like I put together some public domain dingbats into one font. When I look for fonts, I try to choose the ones that won’t make my dyslexic eyes need to read them over again, but since the main visuals are going to be the font being semi unintelligible, I scoured the internet for dingbat-style fonts that fit the vibes I wanted to go for visually, which was a variety of different visuals and somewhat child-like.
The two that I initially used, which was by heaven castro, didn’t use the entire alphabet in either KidPix Symbols or Weird Macintosh Symbols even if I combined them. But hey! I have the power of editing fonts, so why not make my own custom one? So I added glyphs that were from fonts like VesperLibre, OpenDyslexic, Hyperlegible, and a font I would use as the default in the next game. That way, the speech looks pretty darn hard to read but looks like you could make something out even if it’s hard for you to parse.
In the end, I really liked what I was able to make! At least my moment of frustration served as inspiration? Now for the other game.
A source of inspiration for me as a creator is the J-Rock band Yorushika, and their music videos are a fantastic watch. One in particular still stays in my mind, not just because of the story in the song, but how the art direction is in that music video plays out.
Itte. (or Say It.) was the first song I heard from Yorushika and I love the visuals of a simple (as in, just black, white, and shade) drawing in a photographic or real environment. It's a song about mourning someone you loved and moving on without them, and I really like how that visual style plays into the main character and the things they interact with feeling out of place in their environment.
I wanted to do a story with that visual style, with non-rendered lines and fill in a photographic environment. I know it’s generally a big no-no to photographs as backgrounds for visual novels because I Guess it makes your visual novel look amateurish since the art assets will clash. But honestly, I say: fuck it lmao. I had a reason to use a photo for a background, and I honestly don’t think the visuals or the narrative would be the same if I had painted it myself for this game. Plus, photos for backgrounds in visual novels make me nostalgic for older VNs that used them lol.
Like Please Don’t Understand Me, this was an experiment for text for me. Not for the font, but for text placement by not just bubble, but for NVL. I didn’t want to use a textbox because that would mean I would have to cover up the visuals: I wanted to have the text inline with the background, which means I have to use a set text color (good ol’ white text with black outlines) for the text for the best legibility.
Personally, I would love to have the text look like how the figures are abberating and I have an idea for how to do it but, well, I ran out of time and ran out of steam lol. Maybe next time, or perhaps if I ever get around to it…
So I won’t really go into what that game is supposed to be, but that game is meant to be the bridge between Please Don’t Understand Me and Translucent Trails. As is, the two games do tell an interesting story in of themselves, but I initially intended for all three to be released at the same time, with the third game being the second in terms of chronology. What ended up happening was that I whittled away at PDUM and TT in my free time, both of which became so close to being finished that I might as well finish making them, with Third Game having way less done despite getting edited down to 500 words.
But ah well. I’ll release it eventually! Maybe! Who knows though, only because I am going to take a break from gamedev.
July is going to be super busy for me because I’m going on trips to visit family. As such, I honestly don’t see myself doing anything gamedev related, and because of this you’re not going to see a devlog for July. You will see one at the end August, since I come back at the beginning of the month and may start back up, but we will see~!
I know O2A2 is around the corner but it starts at around the time I go on my first trip, so as much as I want to attempt a game because it's one of my favorite game jams, I highly doubt I'll be able to make one. If I do, it’s probably going to be a kinetic novel, but admittedly, making these two games and the unreleased one took a lot of creative spoons, which means I should take a break anyways. If I do end up making a game somehow, you won’t see any devlog for it until the end of August.
That’s all I really have to say for now! Hope you enjoyed my two small visual novels, and be sure to play the games submitted to Neo-Twiny 2024. Be sure to spread the word about Queer Games Bundle 2024 and support it if you can! With that, I’ll see you at the end of August!
~Knickknack PJ
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