I'm really glad you think so. Seriously. So I'll give a small update of where this at, where I'm at, etc. It took me more than a few minutes to get back into this account, lol.
Pink Noire as a project began in ~2017 or so as a TTRPG project running what was, effectively, a Danganronpa killing game with me, 8 players, and 8 NPCs that I had coded in-character bots for that I would control them through, etc.
From there, the canon quickly grew. It's created quite the monster, honestly. For transparency's sake, much of the canon is centered around the "Lumine" family (less of a family, more of a JoJo thing, but similar) and a certain arctic expedition that went very, very wrong (in a Lovecraftian sense) in the years 1955 and 2020. The latter of which basically triggered a gradual end of the world.
This is actually the one project that didn't feature a Lumine protagonist, ironically. Also, for the record, named them as such far before Genshin Impact came out.
---
I've played most of the great VNs of our time, NSFW or otherwise, and have been in contact with many developers. I also got really, really good at rendering in HS2, some of which is featured above - my best work is in an old archived hard drive, unfortunately.
This project got abandoned for two primary reasons (though I've got good news, just wait):
- I am very extrinsically motivated.
Full disclosure, I was really huge on Ao3 back in the day. It's left me with some permanent issues.. namely that it's really difficult for me to pursue a project without community backing. When I put some posts about Pink Noire out, I really expected some positivity, support, and at least a few people interested in viewing some of the content. I got nothing.
So I quit pretty fast for other projects. - I didn't think that an HS2 project would be taken seriously.
This is rendered in HoneySelect2, which is, effectively, a porn engine/game published by Illusion alongside Koikatsu. Both of these rendering engines are pretty common on Itch, but you can't make a fully published game or IP through them. It's not professional, for one - even though I have no issue animating nudity or sex scenes - and it's also got a myriad of issues legally if I wanted to pursue this project long-term. In fact, as a note: I had some actual 3d animators and artists review my renders, and the main feedback I got was that my composition, lighting, direction was all really really good - but the porn-coded models was a turnoff.
---
The Good News
I still write in this universe, and it's far from abandoned. Pink Noire's storyline, in fact, has had a revival within the last few months, and I definitely have the mentality to pursue this stuff again.
The other bright point is that, in the meantime, I've had a massively successful career and have plenty of money to pursue something like this. So I'd likely be looking to hire a competent crew (>1) of artists to take on the visual part of the game, which is really where a lot of the timesink was. Not that I don't love 3d design and animation - but I'm a better evaluator than I am an art director.
At the moment, there's a solid "alpha" of the storyline written in a proprietary engine of mine called NeoScript, which is similar to things like ChoiceScript or RenPy but with a lot of modern additions (it kinda combines what's good about both engines).
However, I'm looking to transform that into a Bevy Rust project soon.
---
Final Thoughts
I really, really appreciate your comment. It may seem extremely far-fetched and arrogant of me, but this is a project I one day hope to turn into a true piece of art a-la Disco Elysium. But this Pink Noire you see above is likely a dead end.. unless I get a very, very good reason to go and pick HS2 back up again, and I don't have one. My ambitions outgrew the engine.
The awful part is: I think I could produce Yurislop at an unstoppable rate and make a shitload of money if I didn't honestly care about the IP.. but I do. So I want to do this right.
Will there still be sex? Yes, very likely. I think Dispatch alone has shown how you can use that as a really solid storytelling piece, and that modern audiences aren't going to balk at nudity in their story games. That I appreciate. If people think my games are hot enough to want to jerk/jill off or whatever? That's a compliment, if anything. I don't see a reason to be prudish about it.
But there's so much other stuff I want to do.
It's just hard - I'm a writer. That's what I love. I love making stories and writing characters, worlds, convoluted storylines, weird Lovecraftian logic, all of the above. I have about a dozen short stories in this universe.
I picked up these other skills because I love games and wanted to make a game with my writing passion.. but they very quickly burnt me out.
So, I need a team. But it feels so arrogant to be the guy writing the whole universe everyone else needs to realize in art, in gameplay, etc. Maybe it's not arrogant, but it feels that way. So my mentality is that I better be paying these people well, and I better get some good professionals to work with.
I know this is a weirdly long and intimate response; half of this is for me. But I love that you commented and I can promise you, here and now: this will be something in the future, and you can say that you were first.
I have never failed at anything in my life. Not starting now.