Crescence Studio hosted another exciting Secret Santa exchange for indie VN devs this year. ✨ It's my first time participating and I had loads of fun with it! Low-key I had also been wondering whether the gifters and giftees were truly randomly assigned because all the combinations are so perfect? 🤔 The fanwork gifts are tagged with the #VNSS2024 hashtag at Bluesky, Twitter, and Tumblr and you should check them out! You may recognise familiar faces or end up discovering cool devs and games you never heard of before.
OK, it's maybe a bit early for holiday festivities, but *spoiler alert* if I don't post it right now I'll probably regret by 2025 that I'm way too late to make a post about it. 🐌 Regardless if you celebrate it or not, I wish you early happy holidays and a kinder next year (as I don't know anyone who isn't going through difficult times ).
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Rachel painted Lima sooooo adorably and I'm super happy with my gift! 🥰 It's a complete surprise to me because I hadn't written any additional notes for my secret santa and I wasn't sure if the project they're from even counts as a game. 😅
Lima is a character from my game mock-up project "WITH DIVINE PROTECTION! Doorway Deities Simulator" based on a relatively obscure goddess (?) by that same name in Roman mythology. Truth is, I sincerely can't tell what other people see in my drawings. There is something extremely satisfying about when another artist interprets your character - with visuals as the sole reference - and other commentors collectively chime in that they're cute with the fluffiest hair. ☺️ It is a bit surreal that for the first time I could join them with 'They're indeed the cutest!!' 😤 without feeling awkward, because I would never use positive labels to describe the characters I'd drawn myself.
The other day I was thinking about classical art and the frescoes in the historical times... and the stress of rendering a more painter-y style with my digital art since I don't think I've ever tried that in Clip Studio Paint before, therefore I don't even know where to start. One of the optional prompts of that game mock-up project jam was utilising different art styles, and I wanted to do a throwback to antiquity. It's beyond my imagination that I would actually receive a portrait of Lima that is crafted through traditional tools and evokes the qualities of an ancient mural in a sacred temple. 🙏 I don't know how it's possible how the Santas can read my mind of what I was wishing for at the very moment! 😂
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Download and play this chatsim VN via this link: https://robobarbie.itch.io/seekl and perhaps you can even learn a bit of SQL! I highly recommend seekL to close the year with, because it perfectly encapsulates the bittersweet 'end of an era' sentiments, where the overall atmosphere is happy and upbeat, but there's also the loneliness of not meeting your acquaintances again. Perhaps it's closer to the analogy of graduation, but since I've been out of school for years, I associate it with the turn of the year when it comes to goodbyes and new beginnings.
robo and their teams made so many awesome visual novels, and initially I was thinking of an entirely different game to make fanart for, because I hadn't played seekL yet despite it being on my radar for quite a time. While playing this game for idea brainstorming, I instantly knew that it was it. You have the hilarious hacking shenanigans but I was entirely absorbed by the emotional story beat revolving odxny (their character art and VA are so good). I'm a simple person who's fuelled by the need for a follow-up scene where thrim can give odxny a hug 🥲, with the type of reunion between friends who can rib each other lightly. 🤭 I did not know that ArnoldC is a real language and one regret is that I could have done something with the line "Hey, Christmas Tree!" from "The Running Man".
There are indie OELVN fanart I never posted on my itch.io account blog because I keep these things on my social media (formerly on Twitter, now on Bluesky), as I automatically assumed that it's not interesting for my itch followers. Oh well, I don't post bonus or concept art OC sketches of my own visual novels either. I find all the characters looking weird in their first sketch attempts, but I don't have time to streamline their designs more frequently -- when I'll probably figure out their final looks by the time I do in-game assets (might as well say never 🫥). There is no good explanation for why I don't post that one or two bonus art, when my followers on social media and itch.io don't overlap (apart from dev handles I recognise). 🤔 I don't like clutter for game devlogs, so perhaps in the future I'll only reserve them for devlogs that are not associated to any project.
Into the bin goes my previous dev announcement post: Winter 2024 + 2025 approximate roadmap! 🗑️
During my winter break I'm focusing on preparations for a job switch. Without elaboration, very few people want to be in a job hunt, and this is exactly how I feel about it, yeah. 😑 I'm already way behind schedule because I accepted the risk to squeeze in relaxation in the final months of 2024. For this reason I'll be less active on social media from now on.
Nowadays when I look at my dev announcements which I don't stick to, I find it moot to still schedule anything. It worked in the past that I'm motivated at making things when I broadcast it out loud, but it's time I should adapt to new methods.
...Not me pulling extremely dangerous antics one second later... ok, I can't stay quiet about doing a tiny bit of gamedev in the remaining 2024. But hey, I'm not announcing what 🤐, so this is totally different and does no fall in the same clause!! To keep the expectations in check, I can give away that it isn't for a game.
- No announcements or extra elaboration, just randomly post/update projects. 😆 If you follow me on itch, you should see my stuff on your feed, albeit not that frequent.
- I rather work on brand-new projects than refining published project pages. Play along with me that I never said I would write devlogs for "Doorway Deities Simulator". 🙈
- Project popularity is rarely a factor. "Faceless Date" is by far my most popular project and I consider that finished, which is one of the reasons I don't do anything with it. And of my unreleased project ideas I can't even tell whether they count as popular. Such as the development hell otome project (believe it or not, I do have a title after 7-9 months but I feel like announcing it might confuse the reader that it's in fact in development 🤣) had split up between otome main works and the Ancient Rome AU spin-offs which probably do not speak to the same audience groups despite they feature 'technically the same' characters.
EDIT: I forgot to mention it at all when I published this post, oops, but dev work -- apart from activities for very small non-game projects -- is halted until my job situation is stable. I expect it to last for a lengthier period because new environments are always draining to me.
I'll give myself a breather and stop the DevLog at this point, instead of snowballing it into an extra paragraph of 'year reflection'! (Watch me not do the follow-up post with the actual year reflection when it's the proper time for it 😁)
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