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Still rockin' on with Will Chapter 2 in between being poked and prodded by various doctors (my new doc is doing all the diagnostics so that when she sends me to a specialist we can say we ruled out everything that isn't Long Covid) and then paying the Long Covid price for Doing Some Stuff, aka tipping over on my couch asleep.

My goal is to be well into Chapter 3 by our next Kickstarter update in mid-May.

#made marion #made marion dev update

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"Too much communication" is John's route. Pretty sure "too many beds" is Meissa's (Mar gets her own room, what a shame). Too hot to cuddle is just my life. :(

*takes notes ✍️ *

#made marion #silliness

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Enter a world of magic—of Fae and Dragon.

WE HAVE AN OFFICIAL TRAILER!!!!!!!

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Ha ha ha, I didn't think of Etza having writer rizz so much as being delightfully and sexily non-binary, which is 200% my jam.

Y'all should play the Alaris enhanced demo, btw. It has more of that role-playing baked into a romance VN energy if you like that about us!

In the most Ren'py dev demo reaction ever, I must say that I cannot decide which is sexier, Etza or your user interface. Seriously, that is one SEXY user interface. And Etza. OhmigoshIdancedwithEtzainaflowerfield. Ahem.

HELP

no but i do this all the time. i'll be like wow...this ui sfx is perfect.... LIKE LFIASEIFJ. also ur like my FIFTH writer dev friend who likes etza (i understand tho. esp after their flower field date, that's one of my tops). but what is their writer rizz. they r literally 5 for 5 right now i'm laughing.

((p.s. THANK YOU FOR PLAYING AHHH!!!!??? for anyone who doesn't know.... this is the made marion dev. made marion is a very sexy little fantasy game esp if u like robin hood vibes. this is my husband, will))

#alaris #etza #velvet-cupcake-games #other games

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Alaris: A Story of the Stars

Enhanced Demo Out Now

Enter a world of magic—of Fae and Dragon.

A global crisis that only continues to escalate. A dangerous run-in with a shadowy stranger. And a mysterious word that won't stop gnawing at you. How does everything tie together? And what role could you possibly play in all of this? 

Features

Aside from my blood and remnants of my soul, the New Alaris Demo contains:

A Customizable Protagonist: Choose your name and pronouns (including a whole new Expanded Pronouns system)

Personality: Shape your personality with four different traits and watch how the world interacts with it. Punch people, scare people, live your life how You Want!

Free Time: Choose from four locations and go on a date of your choosing with any of our love interests.

Affection & Stats Screens: Check how much the LIs are interested in you and what your personality looks like!

Communicator Interface: Improved messaging and calling features

Energy Vision: Tap into one of the MC's special abilities to see the different auras of the cast.

Memories: Revisit free time dates and let our love interests woo you as many times as you'd like.

Extended Music Room: Listen to the custom Alaris OST

Partial Voice Acting: Hear the characters come to life through the talented cast for the LIs

Updated Art Assets: All new sprite, CG, prologue, background, and GUI art (basically Everything looks Different).

If you played the old demo, the new one is Very Different! While the general story is the same, many features have been revamped to create a New Player Experience.

❝ Not all mysteries... ❞  

Some mysteries, beyond man, have no logic, have no fate. In the face of such, keep your wits close, but do not trust them.  Trust not yourself, nor your senses. Your time, nor your wit.

For where time has stopped, but its flow has no end.  For when passion calls, but hate runs deep.

Heed this warning, and do not wait.  For laws of nature and laws of man.  Have no logic, and have no weight."

❝ ...can be explained by the logic of man. ❞

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So many cool games in the comments! Here's mine, Made Marion, which takes the Robin Hood legends, mixes in a dash of magic, and makes it all otome.

Yes, you get a sword. And yes, you can romance the Sheriff of Nottingham.

✨show off your visual novel in 4 screenshots!✨

I want to see your VNs!! share 1 of your VNs with 4 screenshots to show it off and give a lil blurb~

this is Asphodelium, a gay lite horror slice-of-life VN about doppelgangers and stopping cults.

feel free to make this a reblog chain or make your own post!

#visual novel #english otome #amare game #visual novels

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Happy Tuesday!

This week I wrote a scene and did some important editing and plotting work.

We also have a nice sketch going for Alvin's replacement sexy silhouette (in the new style that you can see in Robin's route).

All the threads are coming together for the various twists in Will's route. My writing process is about half pre-planned and half extemporaneous - I find my dialogue in particular is better if I just let it flow as I write and allow the characters to inhabit the scene.

Will's route is the opposite of Robin's in some ways. Robin's political/conflict plot was fairly simple, Robin vs. the Sheriff for the leadership of Nottingham. It was his relationship plot with Marion that was more complex. Will is the other way around, his relationship development with Marion flows pretty naturally (for a rivals to lovers, that is), but there are a lot of chess pieces being moved around in the background of his political/conflict plot. There are multiple antagonists that Will brushes up against, and not all of them are moving out in the open. Most of our antagonists are not nearly as straightforward in their confrontations as Geoffrey!

So it's been a lot of fun to take the basic plot building blocks I put together for the route and add more antagonist involvement behind what's going on. Plus I need to make sure Will and Marion get the clues they need to get from point A to point B. It's a ton of fun to weave all the threads together but it does mean I need to go back and add bits to earlier scenes more than I did in Robin's route.

#made marion #made marion dev update

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After almost 5 years of ups and downs, Reanimation Scheme is nearly ready to meet you all.

The full game will be released in Q3 this year, with limited beta access currently available on Patreon and to Kickstarter backers!

Reanimation Scheme is an otome / romance visual novel about necromancy, love, life and death. Step into the shoes of the necromancer, Raenelle. Meet a colorful cast of characters, fail to summon the spirits of the dead, unravel mysteries, and maybe — just maybe — fall in love.

Featuring:

A gentle nerdy childhood best friend 📚

A bubbly sweet gal pal 💖 (yes, there is a WLW route!)

One icy jerk of an earl ❄️

One playful prankster spirit 👻

A grumpy tsundere cat shapeshifter 🐈

Wishlist the game on Steam so you won't miss its release! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1520740/Reanimation_Scheme/

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(Devlog) What We Learned Making A Trans Dating Game

Hello, Amelia here, the writer for Breathless Winds. It's been 250,000+ words, countless revisions, and three years since this game entered development, and I wanted to talk about what I've learned leading up to release.

The concept for Breathless Winds was actually sort of a joke between friends. I was talking with Doris about how there should be a dating game where you play as a trans woman and your dating options revolve around certain ‘tropes’ we’d both seen in trans fiction-- the totally accepting cishet guy who falls in love with the trans heroine before she even knows she’s a woman, the cool trans woman who the heroine doesn’t know if she wants to date or wants to be, and so on.

Doris wound up suggesting we make this game ourselves. We both like visual novels and want to tell LGBT stories. Still half-jokingly and half-seriously, we started fleshing out what the romance options would be and coming up with a setting-- and soon, we were fully committed to making this game real.

I was a fan of visual novels but had only ever written prose. I knew which visual novels I liked and which scenes stood out, but I didn’t know why they did or how to make my own. 

I read some great advice from visual novel developers, but a good amount of my knowledge came from just working on Breathless Winds. As our first project, this game has grown a lot with us and we’ve learned a lot while making it.

Learning How to Write Visual Novels

A bad habit I had to break out of was only using the ‘novel’ part of the game and not the ‘visual’ part. I would sometimes write “He smiled” or lines like that, and Doris informed me that we can convey this much more simply with a sprite change.

It sounds obvious in retrospect, but lines like that are often pretty invisible when you’re reading a non-visual novel. These lines change the sprite of the character inside your head (if that makes sense, haha). I realized that I’m so used to them being ‘invisible’ that I didn’t notice their absence in visual novels I liked, so I would accidentally include them while writing. 

I was also writing these routes in a word processor, so I didn’t have the visual portion to reference, myself. I wound up making a lot of ‘tone’ notes like, “Lantana should be smug here” so that the meaning would carry when revising and implementing these into Ren’py. 

So, while visual novels share a lot with prose, they’re an entirely different medium. On the subject of representing things visually, I’ve struggled trying to figure out how much can be visually represented and how much should be written. 

Every asset in the game has to be drawn by Doris, so if I want the characters to go to a new location for a scene, I have to keep in mind that’s another background that Doris has to draw. If I want a new character to show up, that’s another sprite she has to draw. I don’t want to overload her, but if I’m trying to avoid this entirely, characters sometimes wind up standing in one room talking for ages without anything significant changing on-screen.

I’ve learned that it’s recommended for something to almost always be changing on-screen, though, so sometimes I just have to ask Doris to make a new asset for a certain scene. I still try to stick to locations/characters that already exist more often than not.

Every single thing in a visual novel is deliberate. Another thing I’ve had to learn that I never even considered before is how to write each line so it fits in the text box. It sounds obvious, but when I’m playing a visual novel, I don’t usually think about how each line has to be carefully constructed so it doesn’t need to be split up into two or more text boxes. In my mind, if a visual novel is well-created, there’s not much that breaks a reader’s immersion.

Planning & Outlining

The previous section might sound really weird to some people, so let me elaborate.  I’m a lifelong ‘write by the seat of your pants’-er, so the biggest trial-and-error of creating Breathless Winds for me was planning out the game.

Initially, I created outlines for each of the four routes, and we agreed ahead of time on which CGs each route would have. That way, Doris could draw the necessary backgrounds and CGs while I was in the long process of drafting this game.  My original outlines weren’t great. I know a lot of people have different experiences with writing, but for me personally, a story is always shaping itself in my mind. When I started making the outlines for Breathless Winds, I knew the concepts we wanted to convey, but I didn’t know what each route (and the game as a whole) was really about yet. This might sound weird and unprofessional, but sometimes, I don’t know what a story is about until I finish the first draft.

So while I was writing, I would look at my outlines and I would think, “this doesn’t actually make sense, he wouldn’t say that” or “this plot point would work better if moved to this other section” or “there’s a plot hole here I didn’t notice”. The story wound up changing a lot in this way as I learned what it’s really ‘about’. 

And even after I finished the first draft, I’d get feedback from Doris and/or my editor and they would suggest fixes to problems that even I hadn’t noticed, and then I would revise the route some more, and later on I’d come back and need to redo part of the route to comply with something I wrote in a later route-- I haven’t really felt ‘finished’ with Breathless Winds at any point, and I think I’ll still feel this way after the game is released.

This means that sometimes, a background was created but would go unused because there was no space for the scene that would use it, or we’d need a new CG last-minute, or so on. 

When I’m figuring things out as I go while writing a non-VN, the only person that I can adversely affect is my own self… so I’m eternally grateful for all of Doris’s patience with me on this matter. I think Breathless Winds has come out a much better game for all the re-plotting and revision. 

I redid the outlines several times as I went. I think I’ve understood how to create outlines that personally work for me-- ‘living’ outlines that hit all the main points, but leave wiggle room for moments when a character does something unexpected, work the best for me.

Scope Creep

So, originally, each route was meant to be 40,000 words. “With four routes, that’s only 160,000 words!” I thought. “And some of my favorite visual novels are about that long, so I can write that much, too!” ← clueless

This is the most infamous mistake that new creators make, and I walked right into it. I should have known better since I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with past non-VN writing projects before, but I was starry-eyed and didn’t realize how much work it is to make a VN. Some of those favorite visual novels I referenced were made by much larger teams, writers whose full-time job was writing (I wrote all of these routes on the side while working at a day job). 

If I could have done it again, I would have asked Doris to start out with a really short VN. But, I don’t regret making Breathless Winds at all. It’s brought Doris and I a lot closer, for one. Every time I thought I wanted to give up on this, Doris would motivate me to continue. Without the two of us both and our strong friendship, Breathless Winds wouldn’t exist, and I think that’s beautiful. 

No matter what, we’re going to see it through to the end. (I hope people like it, though…)

Anyway, here I am talking about how much 40,000 words is. Each route now is about 60k to 70k words. The problem with having evolving outlines is that they can often evolve into double their original size.

We came up with the idea of the poachers really early in development, and then not addressing the poachers felt like a failing, but by that point it was too late to remove the poachers entirely… and so the game wound up a lot longer dealing with the poachers. 

I think that if we had an editor sooner on in the game’s development, then we might have had someone to tell us, “do you really need all of this in the game? Does this plot point really need to be there? Will you be able to write all of this in a reasonable amount of time?”, haha. But Doris and I were really excited about the possibilities of this game when we started creating it, and without anyone to reel us back in, we wound up coming up with more and more things we wanted to put in the game.

Did you know there was going to be an island full of talking rats who say things like “the big cheese” and stuff all the time in Breathless Winds? Yeah. 

The Core Design Philosophy of Breathless Winds

So, for anyone who’s read this far but doesn’t know yet-- the premise of Breathless Winds is that you play as a trans woman who doesn’t know she’s trans yet, and she finds love with one of four love interests as she discovers her gender identity. 

In real life, it can be a lot messier for a person to date when discovering their gender identity. To put it briefly and mildly, a trans person’s life and sense of personal identity can rapidly change during a gender crisis and the early stages of transition. 

However, we wanted to make this game a ‘wish-fulfillment’ type story-- a trans fantasy about acceptance, community, and love. During a gender crisis, it can be easy to feel as if one has lost touch with themselves and become isolated from others. A sincere wish shared by many trans people is to be accepted, loved, and even celebrated as their true gender, not just tolerated. 

Since many trans people don’t get love and acceptance in real life, especially with the ongoing transphobic moral panic, we wanted to create a game that would bring this feeling of trans joy and celebration to trans audiences. 

We also hope that cis players will still enjoy the story and characters, and maybe come away from the game with a new understanding about being transgender and other aspects of LGBT identity (although we never intended this game to be ‘educational’).

Making Characters that Celebrate Trans Identity

Although we went through several revisions, the core identities of each character stayed the same since the game was first ‘jokingly’ pitched. In another post, I discussed how each character is themed around a change in seasons. (I also wound up theming them around the four humors when I was initially concepting them-- I really wanted to avoid too much ‘overlap’ in the LI’s personalities, haha). 

Ultimately, characters are created to serve a role. The LIs in Breathless Winds were designed to be love interests, of course-- characters who would appeal to the hypothetical trans femme audience. As mentioned earlier, we modeled them after other trans fiction tropes because these types of characters have a certain tried-and-true appeal, but this left plenty of flexibility to put our own spin on it. 

A trans woman being loved as a woman by a cishet guy can feel like a high form of ‘passing’, ‘fitting in’ to the female gender role, and being validated by his orientation. He only likes women, and he likes you, so you’re undoubtedly a woman. As a cishet guy, he represents a sort of acceptance into a societal norm that trans women can desire to live to. (Lantana, as a cis lesbian, represents the sapphic counterpoint to this-- although there is of course a big gap between the ‘normalcy’ of a cishet man and a cis lesbian woman, and I don’t mean to say those two are equivalent.) 

But not all trans women want to live to that (cis) societal norm. Rue and Valerian, as a trans woman and a trans man respectively, are the t4t options. 

Rue’s route represents that trans/sapphic ‘envy’ (“do I want her or do I want to be her?”) as well as finding power in community aside from what society considers ‘normal’. We’ve always been pretty clear about what we wanted to do with Rue’s route.

We went back and forth a lot more on Valerian’s route. Initially, we were unsure if he should be trans. He and Rue are the two less-friendly love interests (at least initially), so I was afraid it would come across that t4t is a more hostile option, which is not true at all. But it also felt like a mistake to not have a trans man in the game-- but making Gallardia trans would have required a big overhaul of what we had in mind for him and his route. (Although, childhood friends t4t is a really good idea...)

Beyond that, Valerian takes a villainous role in any route that isn't his own. We were worried that it would be wrong to have a trans antagonist who represents unjust power. However, Breathless Winds is a queer game with other positive trans characters, and we've always approached Valerian as a hot anti-villain man that you can't help but like.

In the end, Valerian’s route is about breaking generational cycles and what it is that makes you a man, and I also managed to sneak in a scene where they dance at a ball in the royal palace, so in the end I think it all worked out great.

Wish Fulfillment and Catharsis

Doris and I both agreed that we wouldn’t depict on-screen transphobia in Breathless Winds. Poppy worries about not being accepted, but fear of acceptance can come with any change in identity. Rue was rejected by her family for being trans, but this doesn’t take place ‘on screen’ in the game. There exist certain metaphorical parallels for transness and transphobia, but every route has a happy ending. 

Following up on this-- it can be difficult to write about discovery of gender identity without writing about transphobia, considering how many trans people suffer from internalized transphobia during their period of repression.

Sometimes, repressed/closeted transgender people ‘hyper-perform’ their assigned gender as a form of denial. A trans woman might grow out a beard and join a gym, while a trans man might become very interested in makeup and feminine clothing. 

In Breathless Winds, Poppy often struggles with ‘strength’ and what it means to be a man. In several routes, she tries to prove her strength under the assumption that being stronger would make her happy. Afraid the world would reject her if she became who she really is, she preemptively rejects herself.

Not every trans person suffers from prolonged denial, internalized transphobia, or even gender dysphoria. I don’t think it’s impossible to tell a purely-positive story about trans joy. 

While Poppy never gets rejected for being trans, faces transphobia, gets called a slur, etc, she faces both internal and external (metaphorical) obstacles to realizing and accepting her identity. 

Gallardia represents a societal norm that Poppy can’t live up to herself as a man.

Lantana suffers from certain aspects of her identity as a woman, which makes Poppy feel guilt for wanting to be a girl.

Rue is isolated from town at the start of her route, a ‘punishment’ for breaking this societal norm.

Valerian has to hyper-conform to his masculine gender role at first in toxic ways before finding acceptance from within and from his loved ones.

These struggles are real to a lot of people, but instead of pretending they don’t exist, I hoped to tell a story about catharsis. Poppy is able to live up to her truth as a woman and finds love with Gallardia, Poppy and Lantana redefine what being a woman should and does mean to them, Rue and Poppy find community in others who don’t fit the norm, Poppy and Valerian stop seeking gender validation from a society that was never made to serve them. 

Although these powerful forces of oppression exist, loving yourself as a trans person- and loving those around you, protecting the natural world, and standing up for what you believe in- can save the day. That’s the kind of story we wanted to tell.

Wrap-up

There’s a lot more I could write, but this has already gotten really long (sorry!) so I’ll wrap it up here. 

Learning how to write a visual novel in terms of technical skill (how to depict events on-screen, how long each line should be) as well as in terms of writing skill (how to outline the game, how to plan visual assets) has been a massive undertaking for me. 

Writing Breathless Winds has been a big challenge but also deeply rewarding, and all of your support has made the experience even more wonderful. Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting the game!

#This is a great devlog! #Very excited to play <3

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FACTS. As Amun is my witness, if I have the space to work this into my Nottingham's backstory somehow, I will do so.

Do you know anything about Nottingham? I was told once that it was made up for Robin Hood, which I was confused about, since I live there, but was that person actually telling the truth?

I was gonna make up a joke about it being originally called Snottingham and looked up its history and what the fuck, history. It was originally called Snottingham, named for a man called Snot.

Not even making this one up.

#robin hood #nottingham #made marion #Did I just swear by my own fictional deity? #Yes I did

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Mark your calendar, Trouble Comes Twice: Bonus Stories is coming out on April 8th at 8PM CET! 🎉

The DLC will contain three bite-sized stories for each couple, including a Beach Episode with variations depending on which protagonist you're playing as and who you're romancing!

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Happy April!

We're still cruising along in Will Chapter 2. I'm happy to announce the return of cut-in and lore intro artist Lawrichai, back from a health related absence. I have some fun stuff planned for her to illustrate!

We didn't participate in AFD this year. I have a feeling our current focused character would not be a fan of April Fools, especially because a certain cousin of his would adore the tradition.

I imagine Will just hiding at the top of a tree for the day or something.

That's it for this week. I'm at a pretty good energy level for a change, so I'm going to see how much I can turn up production speed!

#made marion #made marion dev update

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Not really an ask, just some screeching -- I recently played Robin's route and Ioved it (and him) to pieces, but that much I had already expected. What I did NOT expect was how obsessed I'd become with Layton, PLEASE I love that shady bastard so much

Y'all saw him on his best behaviour in Robin's route. Yes, that was his best behaviour.

He and Will do not get along, so soon you will see him behaving badly. I do not expect that this will make his fans love him any less.

#made marion #ask #layton tuck

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We are looking for voice actors! [PAID]

The time has come! 💜 We are looking for eight voice actors to bring to life our main cast and a secondary character for the upcoming demo of Lost in Limbo, a dark fantasy-romance visual novel!

DEADLINE: April 10th!

Reblogs are extremely appreciated ; v ;! Thank you all as always for the unending support you give us!

⭐Check the audition info here! ⭐

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When writing Medieval, I try to remember that people have always been more "modern" than we think.

I like the expression new-fangled. I don't know what it means for something to be fangled, but I sure as hell know it was recent

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A bit of a nsfw question — do you think any of the routes (main game or dlc) will allow the mc to be a bit more of a dom?

Yes!  Your choices before the love scenes help determine Marion’s general assertiveness in the scene.

There’s always a choice that leads to Marion being at least assertive and egalitarian in bed, yes, even with Geoffrey (and he’s 100% fine with that, he has dominant tendencies but he doesn’t have a need to be a strict dom in bed - although if you ask him nicely.... ;) ). And John, Meissa, and Gui are all love interests who are happy for Marion to be more firmly the one in charge of the encounter if she so wishes.

If you do the math, it’s a fair bit of love scene variation I’m writing on the routes. Many of the routes have the main love scene after the major route choice, so for instance on Robin’s route, I have: Clever Marion:  * More assertive Marion scene  * Less assertive Marion scene  * “No explicit text” scene with important dialogue preserved Straightforward Marion:  * More assertive Marion scene   * Less assertive Marion scene   * “No explicit text” scene with important dialogue preserved

It's going to be a bit of a challenge writing this much variety in love scenes across characters without things becoming too same-y, but I think different scenarios, a smattering of possible kinks, and of course very different relationships between Marion and the LIs will help!

#made marion #ask

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Made Marion Development Update, March 2024

Hello everyone!

We're continuing writing Will's Chapter 2 this month. I went back this past week and wrote the final action scene in Will Chapter 1, so now that chapter is entirely complete.

Writing isn't going as quickly as I'd hoped, but I'm doing as best I can with my health limitations. I have a new lap desk so I can write on the couch more often, and I have a new doctor who is being much more attentive in trying to get me help for my lingering long Covid symptoms.

Since we're largely just writing and sketching art right now, I'm going to take April off from major development updates and send out the next big one in May. I will still be posting our weekly mini-updates on Tumblr if you're interested in more granular progress.

In the meantime, enjoy this sketch I approved of Will's common route CG (I approved two Will CG sketches, but the other one is spoilers), and my silly little contribution to Tumblr's Ides of March-o-Rama.

#made marion #made marion dev update #english otome #amare game