I'll start off with In your Nature's progress first. Primarily I've been focusing on my plans to get a working demo and to set up the Itch.io page. So I didn't get much writing done but it was still enough to hit the 25k mark! Woohoo~! It's a milestone that had been feeling hard to reach lately so I'm very happy about finally making it there. Currently the Common route is done and Day 1 of Oleander's route is about 2/3 done. It's still first draft so things might need reworked a bit later but right now I'm happy with the progress I've been making. I've also been working on the GUI since I want what I show on the game page to be accurate to what playing the game will be like. I'm the first to admit UI design isn't my forte but I'm a lot happier with the new design I've gone with, themed around dried flowers and scrapbooking for Fawn. I still need to program the GUI to be adaptive to other types of scenes. I plan to have a variant for prolonged horror sections as well as one for when CGs are showing that covers less of the details behind it. But this is the base one and I think it's looking good! The mobile version will be similar but will contain a drop down menu as previously discussed instead of the always-visible washi buttons. The other thing the itch.io page will need are some key CGs that give the general vibe of the story as well as being eye catching and showing people what to expect from the final game, since they will be assets used in the final game. I want at least one with each of the route characters and I decided at least one of them should be one of the more casual scenes from the story since there are still slice of life elements between all the tension. Anyone who played Don't Toy With Me knows my horror isn't immediately fast moving, haha. Currently the only fully completed one is of Lily in the local cafe on the first day of her route. She's living her best goth babe life and is going to make sure nothing happens to Fawn. So don't even worry! She's got your back! 💪🏽😤💕 The semi-tough thing about choosing what to show on the page is making sure the things you pick to show are appealing, accurate to the game (so for example not something that would give the impression it's a different genre), but also not too spoilery. Obviously some things need spoiled. My main pitch on the game involves spoiling Oleander's relationship to Fawn after all. But that doesn't mean you've gotta put everything out there upfront. Pickles' game page CG is still a WIP but I'm feelin' good about the emotions on this one. Neither he nor Fawn are feeling the good emotions but, ya know, c'est la vie as a horror visual novel character. I'm eager to get these things put together since it will mean people will be able to Follow the game and be alerted right when it's released. I'm still planning on putting together the newsletter but I know there are people who only want the game/to know when the demo comes out and not these updates, haha. The Steam page will have to wait a little longer, partially because I'm wary of spending too much at once on things for the game since my funds are limited and partially because... The Don't Toy With Me FanpackI'm sure at least some of you reading this are familiar with Dan Salvato's Doki Doki Literature Club. Personally I have the girls on my desk! Doki Doki Literature Club launched as a free game on steam with an option to buy "fan pack" sold for ten dollars that included the soundtrack and some wallpapers. I've honestly thought a while on adding Don't Toy With Me to Steam, especially since it would be a good way to get people on an even larger marketplace interested in my work. But it's hard to justify launching a free game with no paid options when it costs $100 to put a game on Steam. So why not follow Doki Doki's cue and offer some bonuses? Now, Don't Toy With Me doesn't have an original soundtrack so I can't offer that. So what sort of things will the fan pack offer? I have some ideas.
The pack will be small and likely priced at $5. The majority of people who have paid for Don't Toy With Me (which I'm very grateful for! It's a huge help!) have paid that much and will find the pack is automatically included in their library once it's added as a paid file. I'm currently waiting on an answer from Itch.io on how I can make sure the fan pack also makes its way to anyone who purchased The Queer Games Bundle from either version as I feel they should have it too. (Just three days left on those now!) It would feel scummy to include my free game in the bundle then add paid content that isn't included with your purchase of that bundle. So I'll see if there's anything I have to do to ensure everyone gets their copy. Having a sellable item to include on the Steam page will help to justify the steep (for me) cost of putting Don't Toy With Me on that storefront. Success there would be nice for helping to fund my projects but primarily my hope is to get my games in front of even more people! I know people have their issues with Steam but it's still one of the primary online game stores so it is what it is. It will be a good chance to learn to add achievements and steam integration anyway, haha. If you have opinions to share on anything here or things you would want to see included in the fan pack, please let me know! You can comment below, let me know on any of my socials, or hit up my CuriousCat! Thanks for reading and see you next time~ -Karma
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Don't Toy With MeTen thousand downloads! This is definitely too big of a milestone to go unmentioned here so I just wanted to take the time to say thank you to everyone who played a part in this! People who downloaded the game, Let's Players and their viewers, people who told their friends about the game or recommended it to others or drew fanart or made fan pages. All of you made the game such a big success! It makes me so happy to see something I made being enjoyed like this. I can only hope that you guys will enjoy my next game just as much. ❤ I'd also like to thank everyone who has paid for the game and who has contributed toward the Queer Games Bundle. Not only is it exciting to be able to sell copies of something I made, this money helps toward future projects, including In Your Nature. In Your Nature: Writing and GUIWritingThis week's progress comes with a chunky 9,659 words added to drafting the script. The Common Route is just about entirely written, only needing some small additions to improve the flow and the rest of that writing went into the beginning of Oleander's route. I didn't hit the 25k mark for the total script as I had hoped to (just 1.3k away now!) but I did manage to write more days than not this week and the near completion of the Common Route means something else. I now have enough written to start focusing on visual assets I'll need for the demo. Right now I'm considering making the demo the majority of the Common Route. This will include the prologue, scenes introducing all major characters, and the inciting incident of the story, but without going into the point where you choose between characters to follow. Pre-editting, what I have for that section of the story amounts to about 16k words (some of which is optional reading depending on choices). So, comparable to the full length of Don't Toy With Me. It might be too long for a demo? I'll have to ask around other VN devs who have put out demos before I make up my mind on this. But I'd really like for you guys to have something playable that gets you invested in the story! Art AssetsI've gotten back to work on my sprites, though I'm trying to treat them a little more economically rather than just diving headfirst in. I have a big spreadsheet full of assets to keep track of what I need and while I do want to include more art than less, right now my goal is for each of the companion characters to have two poses and one outfit, plus little outerwear details like Pickles' apron which can be removed. This lets me focus on getting the most default aspects of the sprites nice and polished rather than scattering to try to hurry and do 12 sprites plus expressions plus alternate outfits and etc. etc. etc. GUI and othersI'm also working on the GUI as mentioned. This was a pretty funny bug I ran into last night. As it turned out, I had two conflicting alignment statements for the text box so when it was the narrator speaking, it would slowly edge its way off screen. I solved it before I went to bed but it really stumped me for a while haha. Right now this is how the regular GUI is looking. Right now my plans include making Fawn's side portrait a little larger, perhaps brightening up the quick menu buttons so they're easier to read. I have it designed right now with playing fullscreen in mind, and I want to include text scaling for accessibility, but the default selections should at least be comfortable for most people. So it's lots of fiddling with and adjusting things.
Other than that, I do have plans to start shopping around for a composer for the game's main theme. The money from Don't Toy With Me's sales and the Queer Games Bundle are what allows me to start considering this. Though a full sound track is still a long ways away. I might start a Patreon some time after the demo is complete in order to afford these other aspects of the game. If anyone is a patron for other VN devs or similarly narrative focused indie devs at the moment, feel free to let me know what kind of things you like to see on offer! It helps to know these kinds of things before I start solidifying any plans. That's all I've got for today! Thanks for reading as usual and I'll see you next Devlog Day! -Karma
First thing's first, what everybody wants to hear. The android build is finally here! I already wrote a little devlog about this in the middle of the night when I uploaded the new build but I'll recap it here so I don't have to bounce everybody back and forth between websites haha.
This isn't the happy ending update but it is one I know quite a few people wanted, whether for one or all of these things, so I hope it's well received!
If you've been on the itchio homepage recently you may already know this other news.
Queer Games Bundle
Don't Toy With Me is part of the Queer Games Bundle and shows up on the front page as one of the thumbnails for the Pay What You Can Edition! The bundle's purpose is to split profits between many queer devs to support their continued work. I encourage you to check out either version to support queer devs and see all of the other cool games being made out there!
In Your Nature
I haven't been available for much lately due to a lot of busy irl plans this past month, but I have been doing my usual scheming as well as starting on In Your Nature's GUI. Seeing how things went with altering Don't Toy With Me, I'm going into this design with several things in mind.
Here's a look at what I've got so far from today. The background here is one of the default "panorama" backgrounds included with Clip Studio Paint but it's here to help me see how the boxes look over busier graphics rather than just a plain background.
The Q.Save and Q.Load button are ones I haven't figured out how to fit in the sliding menu. There's still a chance I'll need to downsize things so the text box doesn't cover up so much of the screen. Maybe the dropdown menu will only be for the android version? Much to consider! If you have strong feelings about any of this, feel free to comment here on the blog or reply to a post on my dev twitter when I post there! I'm always happy to get feedback on things and I want my visual novels to be easy to read.
Keychains and printing stuff
Unrelated to game development, but still a little relevant to things I've been making. My keychains finally arrived last week!
The experience was helpful in learning about making merch! The colors are very close to my initial art, though I wish I had chosen to make the color frost on the background a lighter shade. I hadn't realized how opaque it would be when preparing the files for the printing service. I'll be sure to keep this in mind if I order something of this type again. I'm happy with the quality though and will be comfortable making bigger orders later on.
I'd like to eventually order Don't Toy With Me keychains so this was important to know. Plus, I'll keep what I learned in mind for the designs I want to make for RedBubble. Now that I'm not hosting any company or visiting away from home or too sick to do anything, I'm hoping to kick my art production back into high gear! We'll see if I actually manage it, haha. So where have you been?
If you're just here for game updates, you can stop reading here. I just figure since I've been so MIA, it's worth mentioning what I've been up to outside of game development. After all, the Android update should not have taken me an entire month. People following my art twitter might have already known that at the start of last month, I was away on a trip (or at least some of that week). My best friend of many years flew halfway across the country to stay with me! We spent a couple days in Vegas and had a blast then the rest of the week at my place.
After seeing her off, I was sick for a bit as I complained about on Twitter. No, not with Covid, and thank goodness she didn't catch what I had. So I was essentially wiped out for that week.
A week-ish of rest after that because the illness kicked my ass and I knew I had another trip coming up. I do basically nothing most of the time so this was a lot of activity for a shut in like me, haha. But I would be going at the end of the month/beginning of this month to stay with a different set of friends which was also fun. Our main target was Monsterpalooza. We went for a single day after an eventful week of visiting and had a lot of fun! But I'll be honest in saying I'm disappointed they didn't take as many Covid precautions as their website implied. I wasn't asked for my vaccine card and many people were not wearing masks despite it supposedly being a masks required event. I'm feeling okay so hopefully me masking up and being boosted was enough to counteract that. And on the bright side, I met a lot of internet friends and got some cool artist con swag.
I did still try to work on things while I was away, even drawing the RIP Huxley CG on my friend's laptop. But I had to wait until I got home to export anything since setting up the Android exporting in Renpy is a little more complicated than exporting regular VNs. I took a day to recharge before finally finishing the last of my work on the update and releasing it at like midnight last night when I was fairly sure nothing was wrong with it. (Please nothing be wrong with it!!! I did a lot of testing!)
But yeah, I had a ton of fun finally meeting people I'd been friends with for years in person as well as getting some new experiences under my belt. These are things I've never had the opportunity to do in the past so it's all been very new for me. I'm feeling recharged and eager to create! Keep an eye out for further updates on my projects, and see you again next blog day! -Karma Don't Toy With Me Android UpdateI have been Wiped Out the past couple of weeks since I've been sick but it hasn't stopped me from chugging on a little bit with my progress. Real quick before the progress summary, I want to mention Android porting is a faster process than expected so I will not be waiting until the Big Update to release it (but it's not ready Yet). So progress:
Still left to do before Android release is ready:
Once those things are done, I'll release an updated build to Itch.io with the new art and with the new Android compatible build. I'm hoping to have this done before the next Devlog. So here's hoping! In Your Nature Devlog: Restructuring and The Pickles RouteAs I've mentioned in the previous update, I'm working on re-outlining the story to be easier to work with in a visual novel format. Oleander's route is still taking priority as the first one I want to write in its entirety but having a plan in place is still important for how they'll interact with each other. My original structure luckily still works. There will be a common route, during which you'll choose which person to accompany for the rest of the story to try to help keep Fawn safe. After that, the story takes place over the course of three days, each with their own progression so each route still moves at about the same pace as the other, regardless of whether you've chosen to follow Oleander, Lily, or Pickles. Yes! After much thought during the outlining process, I've decided I would like to add Fawn and Lily's boss, dearest Dill "Pickles" Perkins as one of the route options. Anybody reading right now who makes visual novels or games is probably having a particular reaction to this new information. "The scope creep got her... This new outline is gonna be a million years long and unfinishable." To which I say, have a lil faith! I have a few points in favor of this not being too wild of a change to my initial plan. First off, Pickles was going to be in the story from the beginning, but more as a supporting character who showed up from time to time in the other characters' routes. This won't change but will justify his presence a little more since I would like for the routes to do a little intermingling.
I know I'm giving a lot of "just trust me" vibes on this but I promise I'll be posting more to chew on once I'm further along in the update on Don't Toy With Me or on my asset production for In Your Nature. That's the tough thing about the planning phase, and even focusing on writing. There's only so much to show! Plus you guys know me. I love a big reveal. As a tinier footnote, I've put together a carrd dedicated to just my Karmic Punishment stuff. I mainly shill my dev twitter as the place for people to find me because it's the easiest for me to post quick blurbs on or talk about the nitty gritty details on making stuff, but I also have a Tumblr and now CuriousCat and Instagram. I figured it would be easier for people to find where they want to follow me this way so they're not stuck with just twitter. (Bad news though, I'm still getting used to Instagram so have a little patience for me if you're going to find me there! Or even came from there!)
That's all for now, so thanks for keeping up with me on here! See ya next Blog Day. -Karma Thank You's and Milestones!
First the big elephant in the room since I know there will be plenty of first time blog readers here, Don't Toy With Me made a bigger splash than I could have ever hoped! At the time of posting this I've just passed 5,000 downloads and it's completely blowing my mind. When I hit 100 downloads, I was so delighted that that many people even wanted to play the game, but the big kick off was definitely ManlyBadassHero's Let's Play. Hey all who came from that video! Thanks for checking out my other stuff to end up here on my blog.
So I wanna say thank you to everybody who downloaded, left kind comments, made or watched Let's Plays of the game, and who went to follow me on various sites! It's really meaningful to me to see people enjoy something I made. Even more so to know they're looking for more. It's a huge motivation to keep moving forward with my projects knowing there are people excited for what I have to offer.
I'm not at all used to getting this many eyes on my work so unfortunately I've had to stop replying to every comment I get on the itchio page, though I do still try to answer questions! I'm also slowly making my way through the fanart I've gotten to try to leave a nice comment on each, though some comes from platforms I don't yet have a presence on. Know I love every piece I find and I save it with the user's name for my own lil private gallery. ð¤ð
FAQ
I've gotten questions on the itchio page, in youtube comments, in tumblr asks, and in twitter replies. And sometimes I'll get the same question a few times so I thought this would be a good place to put some of the most common questions about the game.
Q: Sequel/Prequel/More Toys DLC/Light-hearted spin off game?
A: I can confirm the additional content I have planned is not any of these things. I will explain my update plans below but I am not currently planning on doing a sequel/prequel/otherquel for Don't Toy With Me right now. That doesn't mean I won't ever! But I already have another project lined up called In Your Nature and I'm eager to make progress on it.
Q: No Linux version?
A: The "PC" version is the Linux version! Ren'py export by default includes Mac, Windows, and PC which is both Windows and Linux compatible. I don't have anyone who uses Linux to test this but so far nobody who has asked me about the Linux version has returned to tell me it didn't work when I informed them of the PC download. I'll rename this version when I update the files.
Q: Mobile version?
A: It is planned for the update! I only became aware of how many people play VNs on mobile devices like halfway through development? So I still need to do some research on making the menus and controls accessible. I plan to offer the full release version on Android as a downloadable via the itchio page.
Q: Happy Ending?
A: The new route will include a potential good outcome for the toys, yes. ð¥³
Q: My question wasn't here!
A: I have my tumblr asks open, CuriousCat, and my @KarmicPun_Dev account DM's / replies if you're looking for answers. â¤
The Update
The big question for sure, will there be more content? And the answer is yes! Here's what I have planned out right now.
I know people will be wondering when this update will be out and I can't honestly give an absolute date. This last week has been too busy to start making progress but I hope to get on it soon. And while I won't have to spend a lot of time making new sprites or backgrounds, CGs do take time of their own. So we'll see!
The Future of In Your Nature
People who have been snooping around on this blog no doubt already know about In Your Nature, my larger project I put on pause to work on Don't Toy With Me. I did a little musing on it in my post-mortem devlog over on Itch.io when it came to what I learned while making the shorter game, but it's a good time to talk about it here too.
My current writing for it sits at 18k words, already longer than Don't Toy With Me but not even close to having completed one of my planned routes. I don't plan on throwing away any of the writing I've already done since much of it is key "common route" material or major event set up that will still have a place in the story. Or I can easily edit it to fit anyway. But right now, I need to do some serious re-outlining on this story to make writing easier on me. I'm thinking of trying out VimislikArt's method of writing out one full route before moving on to the others, but for the outline I'd still like to include the broad strokes of each. Right now, I'll focus on the common route and into Oleander's route, since most of my pitch for the game is built around them. Aside from that, your oddball stalker is bound to show up in every route, so it will be good to have them very fleshed out before writing them in more minor rolls.
Going back to planning might feel like a step backwards but I did it multiple times with Don't Toy With Me and I feel it will save me work down the road to plan things out this way. Here I have some GUI ideas as I want to make the menus myself this time and keep them unique, but also mobile friendly so I can do a mobile release at launch.
â I'm likely going to be working on this aspect of In Your Nature at the same time as the Don't Toy With Me update, especially since the mobile coding will be something I'm learning for both. That's pretty much all I have to say in this update so I hope it was interesting for people! Below this point I'll be linking a few pieces of fan art / Let's Plays but know there's definitely more out there! Thanks for keeping up to date with my projects! â -Karma
We're approaching the end! And while I don't want to claim this to be the final update on this game since I would like to add the cut route eventually, this is definitely the last update before it's released to be played. This week I managed to finish writing all of Dahlia's route and most of Huxley's. Only his final scene is left to do. Currently the game sits at 12k words and judging by how other scenes have turned out, I'll say the release will probably be about 15k words long. I finished the final CG today so all I have left to do is writing and coding Huxley's final scene, formatting the music credits on the credit page, and fixing up the Gallery menu. Though, if it gives me too much trouble, I'll just disable it and impliment it in the update since I really want to get this game uploaded in time to submit to the Queer Games bundle. The rest of the game has already been put together and I'm happy to say I learned a lot in the process! Both about planning and on how to streamline my script-to-code pipeline since things I thought were making it faster actually slowed me down a bit. And while I considered myself a Plantser before, I found when I got seriously stuck that planning in more detail helped me out. So it's something I'll need to keep in mind when working on In My Nature. A couple of my friends have already tested Dahlia's route so I'm confident to say Huxley's will be ready and the game will be out in just a couple of days! I'd like to do a little promoting on the game once I publish, especially since I have my other project I'll be returning to, but I'll admit to being very nervous about that part haha. But that's just another area where this game will be good practice for me. Thank you everyone who kept up on my process building this dollhouse sized drama! I really people like it and are ready for some tense situations and weird toy body horror. 🤡 Thanks for reading! -Karma Well, not much point in pretending this is still a NaNoRenO game ha. And alas, it's still not done. But I've redone my plans so I'm hoping if I can finally manage to really get into the writing that I can release it sometime next week, but with plans for an update later. The game was originally planned with 3 endings, then 4 when I realized there wasn't really a "happy" ending and that people might be a little bothered about that even in a clearly intentionally dark story. But I want to get this thing out there before it gets any more out of hand than it has. So here's the new plan. Mosaic'd for spoiler protection Shown here is my whole story outline, with varying levels of detail as far as each event's description goes. On the right are the 2 main routes, and on the left a shorter route split into 2 endings. For the initial release, I'm going to focus on only completing everything on the right half of this chart. This means the two main routes will be the only ones available but that I can get the game done sooner. The third one is simpler so I can go back to working on In Your Nature and just pick at that route when I feel like it until it's ready to add as well. While I only got one scene written since last update, I did at least get some art done and some things fixed. The audio bug turned out to be the tutorial I was using being out of date. Ren'py didn't catch the incorrect syntax as an error so I didn't know that that was the problem. So much fuss over something so easy! I finished Dahlia's kitchen BG as well, which you're sure to notice is something way simpler than what I was using before. Even though I've done animating and comics before, looks like I forgot about the K-I-S-S rule. Keep it simple, stupid! In this case, I'd recently been reading more visual novels and noticed that while characters did need to belong in the environment, rarely did scenes ever make use of the space itself. Some were even filtered photos and it worked perfectly fine. Fancy BGs would be nice! But one finished simple background is worth 20 half-baked complex ones. The same goes for CGs. A small project like this is probably a good time to learn I'm not a studio, but a solo artist, and there's no point burning myself out on details that in the end don't matter. In the case of CGs, I"m not going to be included more environmental detailing than is needed to get the point across. Mood really matters more if the setting isn't the main feature of the scene anyway, doesn't it? And an update to the GUI for very particular scenes. In this case, the example isn't one where I would actually be using it, but is just to show the new window for NVL mode. I'll be honest, I was inspired to do this very directly after playing the Corpse Factory demo since I really enjoyed the more flowing text of the NVL segments in situations where there aren't characters around to be giving dialogue. And since I'll need to skip some time in this story, I thought it could benefit from a similar feature. We'll see how it works out in the end as far as helping my pacing along. Progress Summary:
Misc. Visual Novel Thoughts I've been playing a lot of visual novels lately, especially horror ones to check out what kinds of things other devs are doing. I've always liked VNs in general, but it's easier to look at them with a critical eye for things that work and don't work for me when considering what to do for my own games. So I wanted to talk about some different ones I've played recently and what things I've liked about them. These aren't really reviews and I will be relating them mainly to my plans for In Your Nature in particular, but I'll still be linking to each one if others want to check them out! Also please be sure to check each one's content warnings before playing as all of them are of the Horror genre and some get very dark! Corpse Factory DemoSince I already mentioned this one while talking about Don't Toy With Me, I'll start here and keep it brief. I feel the demo had very good sound design and good pacing, acting as a self contained horror story of its own even without the rest of the game that hasn't been released yet. I'm looking forward to playing this one! I enjoyed how things switched to NVL mode when it came to scenes that worked better with longer narration that was neither dialogue or the perspective character's thoughts/observations and it's something I'll want to keep in mind for future work. Our WonderlandAnother one that isn't done yet, but also isn't a demo since it's being uploaded one route at a time. I felt a little nostalgic playing this one with all of its bad endings to collect. But the main thing that stood out to me as far as comparing it to other games was its very effective use of ATL / animation using Ren'py's built in methods. ATL is something I struggle a lot with but works great with the style of this game. There are normal VN sprites but also lots of unique character drawings only used in certain scenes and when combined with ATL give a cutscene kind of feeling. I especially enjoyed the Arc 2 ending. It's a lot like what I was picturing for myself with In Your Nature when I mentioned in my 'scope' discussion a while back that I'd love to have an animatic style for big ending scenes. It was even timed to music, which is great! Super impressive stuff and I'm definitely going to be thinking about it down the road. AmelieThis one sat in my library for a while before I actually got around to playing it but I'm glad I finally gave it a try. The artwork has this eerie but beautiful look with its watercolor style and pink tints under the characters' eyes. It's much more of a romantic horror than I usually care for but it's an effective story and I enjoyed seeing it played out in three parts, each the same night from a different character's perspective. While it's maybe the farthest from what I'm picturing for my story out of any of these, I still saw some atmosphere building techniques I wanted to remember. Primarily its use of camera work and the way it used sprite overlays to convey the characters in darker lighting. EchoDefinitely the longest on this list and thus the one I spent the most time with, Echo takes place in the southwest and carried a lot of very familiar imagery for me. Of course the furry one would have the more relatable setting for me, haha. And while I can't say I enjoyed every route, every route had something to like about it. And while I don't want to risk giving spoilers by talking a couple of big reveals or scares, I can still say I think it made really good use of photo filtered backgrounds and knowing when it should show something vs. when to keep it as a text description. I know some of it is due to the scope vs. the budget but I think in some cases it was a blessing in disguise. I'll definitely be thinking of this one when it comes to deciding how to best distribute my resources and on making relationships between various characters feel flawed and natural.
And as one last thing, both Amelie and Echo have Android releases, Echo having only added its Android build just recently. Since I've seen quite a few people on various platforms either complain of not having a computer to play VNs on or about the downside of advertising a non-mobile game on mobile-only platforms, I'll have to put some consideration into trying out mobile releases too. It would be nice to save myself some headache and plan for a mobile GUI as a sort of future-proofing then I work on In Your Nature's GUI ha. And that's all for this update! I know it was another big chunky one and half of it was talking about games that aren't mine, but they were things I was thinking about anyway so maybe they'll be of interest to someone. As usual, thank you for reading and see you next update! -Karma Well shoot. The only update I can give for Don't Toy With Me is that it's going to be after the end of NaNoRenO that it actually goes up. I got about 1.1k more written since my last update, which isn't much, but on top of being busy with irl stuff, I was pretty demotivated by still not finding a solution to my audio problem. I wound up not even looking for music for it since I couldn't even get simple sound effects to work. I'll continue working on the rest of the game moving forward since I'm still determined to get it posted, but it's absolutely going to be late. I'll let you know next update whether two extra weeks was enough to finish. Progress Summary :
I don't think I've mentioned it before but I have a nice arrangement with my bestie Zee that every Sunday we have a Writing Check In. She's got her project she shares with me as she writes it (not sure if she'd like to talk publicly about it yet so we'll leave it at that!) and I bombard her with VN draft scripts whenever I have them ready. The idea is mainly to ensure we write something every week since we know the other will be expecting it, but it's low stakes since it's just us and we know we'll be the only ones reading this version of our writing. Anyway, this is all just to explain that today is Writing Check In, I had nothin', and I was still feeling burned on Don't Toy With Me, so I did some writing for In Your Nature and it went better than usual. I wrote a sort of pre-story chapter to introduce the threat of the story, similar to how a lot of horror movies have a cold open before introducing the actual main characters. It wound up almost hitting 4k words in one session, when I'm feeling pretty good about. I'm hoping to integrate a couple of small effects from your choices in the prologue into later in the story, since I really enjoy that sort of butterfly effect in VNs. I did a lot of reading on another VN during my wallowing and it gave me a lot of inspiration as well as ideas on things that could improve about my current outline, including further diverging major routes, so we'll see whether helps me put out bigger chunkier updates in the future. Progress Summary:
Bonus portrait sprite concepting sketches. How do I draw this girl again? KeychainsSo, Vograce was having a promotion on a new type of acrylic keychain and I used it as an excuse to kick my butt into gear and finally try out their service. It's also more motivation to figure out my online store. Ko-fi has its drawbacks, with having to handle my own sales tax payments and needing a Seller's Permit in my state. I still need to find out if Shopify has similar drawbacks or not, since selling through a "storefront" like Etsy exempts you from those kinds of requirements here since they handle it for you. My point is, I don't know when they'll be available, but I ordered 10 keychains with this x-ray bunny girl design to test the waters. Plus one for me because I too want a spooky bunny babe. They'll be 2.5" inches at their longest point and the background color will be frosted film on the acrylic. I picked a thick black kind of clip too since I find actual keychain rings really hard to use. But maybe I just have brittle nails? Hopefully they turn out nice!
A short one this week but thank you for reading all the same! -Karma It's blog day! And this week it's not a devlog for In Your Nature but instead of my NaNoRenO project I alluded too in my last blog. I'm sure if you've been following my work anywhere you've been getting bombarded with the art progress I've been making on the game, because that is the one area I've been excelling in for this project. Wowee! A background, sprites, a CG, a reactive imagebutton menu! I'm kind of surprised at how much I've gotten done despite a good handful of setbacks. And as usual I'm a slow writer, with 2500~ words at the moment. I'm hoping to sit down and cram a bit soon, especially since I was sick today and got nothing done. I think I'm psyching myself out a bit by choosing such a heavily themed topic for the game that I want to get across rather than it being strictly character driven like my other work but hey, it's nice to try new things. Hopefully people take it to be open to interpretation to a degree rather than just pretentious hah. Also hopefully it can still count as horror and not just an Utsuge with violence. But here's what I've got. Progress:
In Your Nature + Branding Updates + TwitterQuick notes, I made a VN Dev specific twitter you should be following if you want to get mini updates and the like on my projects more regularly. Full dev logs will still be going here and relevant content posted to my art twitter will be art stuff (EX: I'll still post finished CGs and sprites, but I'm less likely to show WIPs or screenshots there). Karmic Punishment is also the name of my itch.io page now, but KarmaLarma still redirects there. As for In Your Nature, it seems even being focused on my quicky project wasn't enough to keep me from thinking about stuff I wanted to do for it. I resisted working directly on it but did do some thinking on various bits of the game.
Would it be strange to have a side portrait for the protagonist and have the story still be written in third person? Now would be the time to make up my mind if I'm going to go with a different perspective, since the longer I wait, the more would need to be editted. But at the same time I feel like first person horror scenes might be more effective. Currently the script is written in such a way that it's from Fawn's perspective, but still written in third person. So EX: "Fawn does a thing. Lily also does a thing. Fawn thinks to herself about how good Lily is at doing the thing." Any information conveyed only comes from things she can see/know or reasonably infer from others' reactions around her. So first person may make more sense anyway. We'll see what I decide but if anyone has strong opinions on this, feel free to let me know.
Dev log starts here. Skip down below for just the shop update. Current Wordcount: 14,125 This time around I wound up getting the urge to work more on my main sprites. Since I added the first scene in the game into my Ren'py file and started messing with the general placeholders, it's made me a little anxious to see how the scenes actually play out when not laid out in script form. I feel like it gives me a better idea of pacing and it's nice that the program has placeholders built in. But the placeholders are... pretty distracting. So I'm not at the point of having scene samples to share just yet but I might in the near future if I keep up my sprite work. Until then, I'm going to be the only one subjected to Twintail Girl AU. I originally considered doing sectioned sprites similar to those for Doki Doki Literature Club, where each base sprite simply has an image of the character's head/face overlaid on top and lined up to match. However, in one of my previous projects, I used Ren'py's dynamic images system for my sprites and enjoyed the freedom to mix and match face pieces for various one-off or rare expressions without having to render and export every possible option with every possible outfit. At the time I mainly used it because the characters had animated eyes that blinked, but since these characters have different outfits with a lot of layers, I feel dynamic sprites will be easiest for me. The way this works is the sprite is sectioned up into pieces and displayed with the layers placed over top of each other. This allows things like Odd's bangs falling over the front of their eyes rather than the eye having to be drawn to clip around the hair. For pose one, they currently have 5 brow shapes, 4 eye shapes, and 6 mouth shapes, all of which can be used interchangeably. Currently I have their outfit and body on their own layers as well, but this is mainly to make edits easier. If I want to change something on the body layer of a pose, I only need to edit one image and not every outfit that uses that body base. Fawn is the other sprite I got a notable amount done on, but I'm not entirely happy with her yet so I haven't exported the layers yet like I have for Odd. It's a good start, but there's just some adjustments to be made to her face and some color adjusting to do. Her apron in particular bothers me as I write this now that I've uploaded the image haha. On a quick sidenote, the day after tomorrow is the first day of NaNoRenO. I feel there's no way that I could finish In Your Nature within the month but I do want to participate. Looking at the other VNs on my itch.io page, they feel pretty lacking. So progress for the next couple weeks might actually be dedicated to a short side project. Concepts for the Dollhouse characters. I don't expect to spend the entire month on it, mainly because my hope is just to make a very quick project that I feel can better display my writing and my style of horror. But if it ends up that way, it is how it is. I hope anyone who has been keeping an eye on my progress here will consider also reading this VN if I manage to make it work for the game jam. Last thing for this devlog is these two promo images I made for Fawn and Odd. I felt like I hadn't quite told enough in these updates about them as people, so at least now I have the main outline of their characters and their place in the story for you. Devlog over. Thank you for reading and continue on if you're looking for the sticker info. Stickers / Store / Etsy / Ko-fi updateOkay so anybody who's been around on twitter has probably seen the Etsy change that added a bunch of extra fees and charges onto things. For big sellers, that's probably not an issue. For me, not having even started and mainly offering items under $5 each? Big problem. I can't afford to pay Etsy like %50 of my profits on each sticker.
So! Here's the plan. Ko-fi has the option to sell physical goods through their platform. The downside is they don't seem to have consolidated shipping options like Etsy did, though their shipping pricing is a lot more clear. I'm going to look at how Ko-fi's shipping situation works and most likely will be going with them for my homemade merch. On the flip side, I think I'll be opening a Redbubble store too as an alternative and so I can offer designs on things that I can't personally make myself. As much as I would love to offer more options like acrylic keychains and the like, stickers are currently what I can make at home and will likely be the only thing in the shop for a while. Thus Redbubble can offer anything else with my designs. I don't think they offer kisscut stickers anyway which is what I'd like to mainly focus on until I've made enough sales to justify buying some sleek vinyl sticker paper that doesn't require me to hand laminate every diecut sticker. When is this gonna happen? Ssssoon I hope. Honestly I've had a lot going on lately and my main concern with the shop's opening isn't making a big splash but instead making a good first impression by ensuring nothing could possibly go wrong with the shipping and etc. Maybe the perfectionist side of me is biting myself in the butt but I honestly feel a delayed opening is better than a botched opening. This update has been pretty long so we'll leave it at that. Thank you for checking this and I hope when I do open the store(s) you'll consider checking out what I have to offer! -Karma |
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