vignettes is the spicy visual novel we’ve been plugging away at for the past year or so. It’s about transformation and sex and conflict and magic tricks. I think it’s pretty good! But I’m biased, so you’ll have to draw your own conclusions. By… playing it…?

It’s currently ten bucks on itch, but: we’ll be adding more stories over time, and slightly bumping the price every time. So this is probably the cheapest it’ll ever be. How compelling!

Some thoughts follow, as per usual.

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I’ve been trying to finish another adult VN for a while. We did Cherry Kisses, which even did alright on Steam… but that was 2019.

Before that was Alice’s Day Off, a “demo” which never became a full thing because it relied on a combinatoric explosion and it turns out that might be a bad idea even if you know it’s a bad idea and think you can turn it into a good idea. (I will definitely try to make it work again one day.)

And then I don’t know what happened exactly. A couple years passed as a sort of indistinct haze. I wonder if anything happened in 2020 to cause that.

But by 2022 we got back to it and tried something more story-heavy this time: Clover and Over… “prologue”, which remains only a prologue. There was a branching story planned to go with it but we just… didn’t… do it.

I don’t even know why we didn’t do either of these things. We just ran out of steam, I guess. The thing itself was too big and time-consuming and it was just draining to keep working on something without feeling like we were getting meaningfully closer to an end point.

I’ve been struggling for a few years, really. Even fox flux has been blocked on level design in a way I don’t seem capable of resolving. I don’t know why I’m working on anything or who I’m working on it for. Redoing this website is one of the larger things I’ve done in ages and it still took way longer than it should have. It’s like I have a leak, and something is draining out of me faster than I can refill it, but I don’t know where it is or how to plug it.

well anyway

I did come up with a workaround here, at least — vignettes is really a framing device for multiple stories, meaning we can release something now and also build on it later. We have a loose arc in mind that’ll span half a dozen or so stories, but even if we vanish off the face of the Earth, what’s already there is still a… complete thought.

And that’s nice, I think.

I hope the next few parts don’t take so long to get out. This took us over a year — partly because of other things going on, partly because I feel like an empty husk. But I have a big pile of characters I originally designed for Clover and Over and haven’t really gotten to share with the world yet, so I’d like to do that.

I dunno. Yeah. I wanted to also say stuff about how this format lets me skip doing a bunch of Ren’Py setup work every time and makes it easier to play with the VN format without dedicating a whole entire big thing to it, but then this took a bit of a weird turn, sorry. Hope you enjoy the game.