I appreciate the insight into your development process. (I was also scrambling at the last minute.) I’m new to the whole visual-novel-making process and it helps me to see how others do things. Like with thinking about it as prose vs screenplay, I would think that it’s more screenplay, but a good amount of prose does end up in the finished product, but then there’s that whole thing where reading the script is an incredibly different experience than playing the game, so you can’t look at the script as if it’s just prose. And the difficulty of making character expressions when the script isn’t finished yet (though I wasn’t making my own sprites, I did want to have the script finished before I started anything else, but then I took way too long with the script where maybe I should’ve started programming earlier).
Congratulations on getting as much done as you did.