This week, I mostly succeeded in getting back into writing mode for My Violet Summer, my femdom adult visual novel. I added ~1400 words to the total count, but more importantly, I finished the Monday afternoon "free roam" events! This finally bridges the gap between Monday morning and evening in the game, which means you can now (theoretically) play from the start of the game at Sunday afternoon all the way to Tuesday morning! I still have many of these holes in the in-game schedule to plug, but I'm very excited to complete this mini-milestone. 😊

I currently have 22,056 words in the game, for an estimated 1 hour and 15 minutes of reading.

Sensitivity read (preliminary)

It's time to face facts: I'm a pasty-white European man writing about a love affair with a Black American woman. I've gone over the script I have so far with a fine-toothed comb and found several, let's just say less-than-stellar word choices that I've now addressed. I would very much like to collaborate with an actual sensitivity reader on this, so please hit me up!

Background iteration

A comparison shot of the living room shows the TV moved to the right side of the room, with another chair added next to it.

Once again, I've surprised myself by how much time it takes just to make some backgrounds! The issue is that the right third of the screen is often covered by text, so I needed to shift things around to ensure the important stuff remains in view. I debated whether to make a fancy system that slides the background to the left whenever text appears, but decided that would be complete overkill. It's easy enough to just move the camera in Unreal and take four new screenshots. Speaking of which...

Spreadsheets

A spreadsheet shows 34 tracked backgrounds, with 9 not started, 25 in progress, and 0 done.

I finally relented and built myself a spreadsheet to track the progress of my backgrounds. This wasn't necessary on Gas Station Dick Pills because that game only has six bespoke backgrounds. Thankfully, most of the 34 (!) backgrounds I have planned for My Violet Summer so far are just lighting variations of the same few rooms.

Fonts & colors, oh my!

I had this romantic idea to use the serif Playfair Display font for all my visual novels, but I felt it was holding me back on this game. My Violet Summer was screaming out for a much breezier, summer-vibes font. The new font is Sniglet, which we're all gonna do our best not to pronounce too quickly, alright?

I also finally picked a new primary shade for the UI: #9c61b8. A shade of violet, of course. 🤓

Xteink

And now for something completely different! An entrepreneurial hacker found a way to run the ink narrative scripting language on the Xteink e-book reader, so of course, I ordered one. 😁

At around $100, these devices are much, much cheaper than regular e-book readers. And since my games run on ink already, I view this as a super-longshot business opportunity. Will people pay to play my naughty games on their tiny e-readers? Only one way to find out!

My unit hasn't arrived yet, but I've been tinkering with eenk already. The display options are very, very limited, but that makes it an interesting challenge too.

See you next week!