These are some mockups from a thing that I started noodling around with back in...2019 or so. It didnt really stay this way for long. In fact, the next time I had the chance to really dig into it in late 2020, it turned into a visual novel, and rather than trying to figure out a good vertical slice of my very unfinished idea to use for testing, I wrangled together a little scenario with characters that existed on the periphery of the very unfinished idea.
Here's some screenshots from when it first became that, and also was not really all the way that, and was still kind of the first thing:
I did a whole bunch of noodling around after that, (all the way into the summer of 2021!) mostly to figure out what I could do with Renpy. Turns out you can just make a whole point and click game in that thing! I do not recommend trying to do that! I regret every second of trying!
The one good thing that came of it was learning that you can implement fully animated sprites. I recommend doing this one. If you want, I mean. I really enjoy animating, so I really enjoyed doing this one. Here's them:
Most of the other far more reasonable things I had wanted to figure out regarding menus, and text, and overlays got themselves figured out pretty easily after that. So, at that point I set the whole thing down and detoured into doing a lot of months of worldbuilding, and writing, and all the research-related things of that sort that aren't so easy to post about because probably no one wants to hear about that time you spent several hours one afternoon trying to refine a google search such that it would actually show you something from the very specific period of history you were searching for instead of something else only vaguely related due to geographical proximity before you finally just broke down and started buying books and then spending several months reading those books.
On the bright side, the books were very fun to read!
And after all of that, the setting of this thing has changed a lot. The characters had names that are now no longer their names (they have new more fitting names now, but I still think of them as The Monster and The Countess and The Saint because they were that for much longer than anything else,) and personalities that are only mostly no longer their personalities even if the specific relationships have managed to stay unchanged. The nature of writing a character to figure out their voice, and all that.
The story itself has also managed to stay pretty fundamentally unchanged. Somehow. The modern day version of it very prominently featured a fairy tale about fictional Olden Days to the already fictional Modern Days, and it ran very parallel to the modern day thing. Eventually I realized how much more work I had put into the world of that fairy tale than I had into the main thing, so it just became the new thing. Which is kind of neat. I guess. It doesn't really save me any work in the grand scheme. All that work still had to get done. But it sure feels like it saves me something.
I've been chipping away at the first draft of the first chapter of the current form of this still unfinished thing since the summer of this year, and looking at the word count (it is A Very Large Number Of Them,) I feel safe admitting that I feel better about it now than I have at any point prior to now. Maybe I'll even finish it some day. Maybe I won't. Who knows! I'd certainly like to start posting about it more than I have been, though. I have been posting about it basically never.
Anyway, all of this to say: hey look new unfinished art
