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I hope you know how much it means to me to have someone read and recount as much as you did from my project. Whenever my friends make games or write stories, I always try to give them detailed reviews like this, because it brings me so much joy when people write this kind of thing about something I’ve made. I’m gonna be self-indulgent and give you some comments on your comments and a bunch of behind-the-scenes about the making of Act 2!

-I’m glad you like the backgrounds! They were originally supposed to be fully rendered. My friends saw the fully rendered backgrounds, and rushed to tell me how bad they looked. It was the first time they really told me something I was doing was bad, but I don’t like ignoring criticism. They were the ones who suggested the more minimal backgrounds with lines. I’m so glad I listened to them, they were SO right, and they saved me a TON of work rendering backgrounds. Sometimes, less is more!

-Val’s cute new outfit is based off of a bottle of perfume! It’s based off of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male Terrible.

I saw this bottle, the name, and the razor blade necklace, and felt so inspired. This outfit has existed since before Val was nice. He used to be kind of terrible! I’m satisfied with where he was then and where he is now, because I was able to write a nice guy who does messed up things as a result. I looked at that bottle, and thought, “whatever man wears this is trying so desperately to be a bad-boy type! Let’s put this on this Scandinavian dork!”

-oh my god I’m SO glad you said what you did about saturday because AAAAAAAAH! I really have trouble writing side characters. I mean, I don’t have trouble writing them, I just feel weird letting side characters be side characters. I want every character to have a spotlight, in some way, so when I have a side character like her (I have such a soft spot for her too) I worry that I’m letting other characters take too much of a spotlight over them. I really wanted her personality to shine through.

-Lupine is a trans guy, and Dash considers himself transfemme (he/her), but is not explicitly a trans woman. When I was writing Dash the most, I was in a transition period where I was in the same kind of spot as him, but I’m transmasc (so, inverse almost!) Now, I’m in a more explicitly masculine place, but I have a lot of friends who have settled into their gender feelings in a place that’s more like Dash’s. He’s a character that, whether people are transmasc or transfemme, they have told me they feel represented by. I feel like a lot of trans characters out there are put into neat little boxes, when in real life, gender is messier than that, yknow? I wanted to convey that with some of my characters, especially with Dash. Even I feel represented by Dash, despite being on the other end of things. For example, I still use “she” pronouns despite being a man (he/her). the important thing about any of my trans characters is that they are trans and that me and other trans people can look at them and go 🥰🥰🥰 omg i’m trans too

-The parts where Lupine or Dash say “don’t think, it’s bad for you…” This is something known within my circles, but my husband says this to me. I stole it from him! I was having trouble wrapping up a lot of scenes I wrote between my characters, because there were just so many thoughts and words that bubbled up inside them. But sometimes, you need to have silence, and I knew when they needed to have silence. I remembered what my husband tells me when I’m thinking too much. We’ll be in the car, I’ll be staring out the window, and he’ll say, “you’re thinking. Stop that.” And he’s RIGHT!

-Donna wouldn’t have killed Val lol. I know that, but I don’t think Val did. She’s too scared to kill anyone anymore, I think. Both her and Val could never kill anyone like that nowadays. She was a character that took a lot of work to write. I didn’t want to let people down with her. I didn’t want it to seem like Val was the good guy the whole time. I wanted to show how traumatized she was and how much she tried to look tough in front of him. So I gave her a glock.

Anyway, it’s been a pleasure to read and reply to this. Thank you so much for reading!