oh i loooove those types of games! and there isn't a really great free (other than AGS, which is a little dated) option for making them right now so honestly a VN is a great way to scope down an adventure game while still retaining the overall design! i love the premise so far, and i feel like it definitely could have multiple interpretations of the "cold" theme too, so i'm really interested in seeing your characters. best of luck with the jam!

Oops. Well, better late than never. 

I guess I'd forgotten how long it had been since I'd tried my hand at Ren'py before, so I definitely had/have things to re-learn (and just more to learn in general), but at the very least I have the first little sequence written and coded! [Insert the screenshot of said code here, I ran out of picture space for this post so I can't actually put it in. It's only 140 lines though, so it's really not that impressive yet.] It's not very long yet, but it's a start!! Unfortunately even with my day off the other day I ended up having some other things (boo, real life) that needed to be taken care of, so I wasn't able to sit down and get as much as I'd been hoping done, but I should have a good bit of free time tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

Also, I come bearing some beta designs for the girls!! Most of my character design experience comes from drawing me and my friends' D&D characters, so the prospect of getting to draw regular, modern clothes is very nice, lol.  I think I've finally decided on the hairstyles I'm going to stick with, but we'll see. One or both of them might also end up wearing a beanie or other snow-appropriate type of hat.

Ah... as I'm uploading this I realize I forgot to color the truly absurd amount of useless clips I put in young!Vivian's hair, but I was mostly trying to decide on skin / hair tones anyway. Shoot, actually, on that note, older Teri should be growing out colored hair as well, assuming I can get it to look how I want. Oh well, I definitely have time to get back to that. 

As a note on the colors of the sketches - I haven't fully decided on this yet, but I was leaning towards giving Teri a "colder" color scheme, and Viv would get a "warmer" one. I originally thought I'd just stick with a cool color scheme in general, because of the theme, but I think maybe if the main character is the only thing leaning towards warm colors it would make her stick out more? I'm not sure. I'm a completely self-taught artist, and I'll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about color theory, so if I have extra time I might try to mess around with giving everything those cool stylistic touches, but most likely it'll end up being a little vanilla. Enough to get the story across. Clothes style-wise, Vivian will be more urban, and Teri will be more outdoors-y. (Although, they'll both be dressed for the cold weather.)

If I can make a bit of a personal aside about the designs for a moment, Vivian is Japanese-American, and Teri is Mexican-American. (Can you tell I'm from Southern California?) Somewhere along the way growing up, I got it in my head that I should try to create characters outside my own experience, as a way both to try to empathize with different types of people as well as to be more interesting to myself, trying to imagine something different from my own life. While I do think there's a place for that, I've also realized that, in a lot of ways, writing is a lot of sharing little pieces of yourself and the way you think. Also, hopefully without sounding too soap-box-y, I don't get to see enough people who look like me and the people I know in mainstream media, so I definitely have a vested interest in creating my own representation. In that way, if Vivian has ended up looking a little too much like a self-insert, ah, well. Her personality is very much different to mine. I will say I had a bit of fun naming her, though. Both my mother's maiden name and her mother's maiden name start with "Yama", which means "mountain", and considering that this story is meant to take place in the snow, I figured, yes they are in the mountains. Hence, "Yamauchi" (literally, "inside mountains"). Unfortunately for Teresa, her surname doesn't quite have as much meaning, haha. I picked Vivian's name first, and then remembering my mom's stories about always being stuck at the end of lists in school because her last name started with "Y", I thought it could be fun backstory for Teri's name to similarly start with an alphabet-backend letter, and that they bonded in seating assignments and such in school based on the proximity and shared waiting around, and that it was how they originally became close. In service of that, I pulled up a list of common Mexican surnames and desperately searched for one that worked but didn't belong to someone I know personally, lol. Not that I think this game will probably ever get back to them, but I feel kind of weird straight-up naming a character after someone I know without asking permission, and I don't really want to bring it up to ask permission. Also, I know that Spanish-speaking cultures use the naming convention of taking both your paternal and maternal last name, with no middle name. I'll admit, to avoid having to decide what generation American Teri is and whether or not she uses said convention, all you're gonna get for now is the one surname. It's not really going to come up during the story, but it is still something I've thought about, even if I've decided to ignore it at the moment.

Hoo boy. That was a lot of mostly superfluous backstory, but it is something I definitely wanted to put down in words, somewhere. I initially just made up a whatever story in a couple days so I'd have something to make for this jam, but I've definitely become personally invested in the characters and everything, which is certainly good for my desire to work on it / finish it ;) 

Finally, gonna stick up a pic of some of the alternate hairstyles I was also considering, and my very first sketch of the characters! Can you believe it's only been a week since I made them up? Whoops. I love them now.