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Thank you so much!

Well, I'm quite experienced with art but an amateur with writing so making the novel extra artsy is a way to compensate for that (I hope).  If the novel you mentioned has a strong writing and plot, it doesn't need so much art)

Thank you! This was a very valuable experience. 

Hi!
I apologise for the lack of updates on this so called devlog. Things didn't go as planned at all, and I guess I just hate writing about things that don't go as planned.

Long story short, by November 30th I will only be able to release the demo of my project, and even that's only if I'm lucky. I'm  falling badly behind the schedule. Main reason to that is that I have grossly overestimated my ability to make art fast, which is embaassing because I've been making art for as long as I remember myself pretty much. And can't even cut much of the art content, because, since I'm not a coder and can't create exiting gameplay mechanics and my writing and storytellig skils are very limted as wel, so art is the only way for my visual novel to stand out. Other things took longer than I thought as well. Actually, Ren'Py seems to be mostly easy, but since I'm an absolute beginner, sometimes figuring out even the simplest things for the first time took hours, even with great studying resources avaliabe (BIG THANKS to everyone on this forum thread, I would've never figured this out on my own).

So, now I should concentrate on making the short demo for this challenge, but I'll try to release the full novel somewhere in December (although I already can see how these plans will go out of the window as well lol).

Hi! My name is Ana and I'm trying to make a thing! It is called Stella's Photography (working title, may be changed) and it is my first actual project.

I joined this jam because I think it is my chance to fight my procrastination problem and to start actually working on my projects instead thinking about how great they gonna be when they're finished. I also recently learned about the "minimum viable story" concept, which basically means choosing small things for the first projects - just big enough to count as a finished short story and stripped of anything unnesessary.

So, my project is planned to be a short, sweet and peaceful visual novel about a teenage girl named Stella travelling through space and visiting several defferent planets in order to hone her photography skills. The character is heavily inspired by Kir Bulychev's Alisa Selezneva. It is planned to be very short but it's still a lot of work because I'll basically need to learn Renpy from scratch.

What I currently have is a story overview, concept art of the main character and a schedule I'll try to stick to.

I'll probably post updates on what is done once a week.

Ooh! Wish she was real!