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 enjoyed various aspects of this reflection, but in particular the report on the experience of writing. I’ve suspected for a while that, if push comes to shove, the writing in visual novels isn’t really prose. From the reader’s point of view the haptic connnection’s different, and for the writer the text-box adds a formal constraint—even if your ‘text-box’ is the whole screen.
Prose broken up into constrained electronic units through which readers must click/press/swipe does exist, of course: you can read a novel on a screen or an e-reader. But (leaving aside the absence of images) those divisions and constraints are abritrarily imposed in transmission, like a typesetter’s pagination choices in a printed book.
