This is a personal diary entry.
It is meant for a limited audience of friends and strangers interested in the same interests as I am.
More importantly, please consider it just like you would if this were a physical diary —the writing here is entirely personal and subjective. I write entries like this for myself first, though I do find it fun to open up to a limited audience online too. But that’s all there is to it!
Hi everyone,
It’s been a while, I hope life’s been at least alright for all of you lately!
This is a long overdue update on things I’ve been up to, in life and in VN development. It might again be the last update in a long while, so I’ll try to take my time for this one.
Life stuff — Job, blog writing, etc
I was on a good roll of semi-frequent blog writing in summer and autumn 2021 and it felt pretty good, and then I started a new job in November 2021 and things came to a very brutal end. Life is life.
There’s still a part of me that wished I’d stuck with more frequent blog writing even while joining a new workplace, but deep down I know quite well it would have been fairly difficult. I said in my first post here I wanted to write without any self-imposed pressure, and I’ll stick to this— if blogging starts becoming a chore, then it’s not worth it to me, I want it to be enjoyable before anything else.
Starting a job tends to suck up a lot of energy away from everything else, and this time didn’t miss. In particular, I expected to be able to work in part remotely from the start, but the exact contrary happened: except for the Omicron surge of December/January 2021, I had no remote work until April 2022, and still very little after that. The awful state of train commuting in my area since the start of the pandemic hasn’t helped either.
It’s not all bad, though.
I’m complaining because I like to do so, but remote work policy aside, this was without doubt the most satisfied I’ve been with a job, in no small part thanks to incredible colleagues who I feel very grateful for. So part of life over the past year has been busy simply because I got very involved with this new work universe. It’s a completely different place than what I’ve been used to in the past (in the public sector, though I’m not a civil servant at all), and mostly very pleasant!
Unfortunately, this was a temporary position with a fixed term, and I finished this summer— I found a way to stay, but this involved joining a very different department. I’ll be starting soon in this different department, but it’ll be yet another very different job, so I expect to have to start from scratch on a lot of aspects, hence a possible lack of updates in the very near future.
I can’t wait to have reached a more stable routine again, after going through a lot of doubt and shorter positions over the past few years. I should also be able to improve my living situation if things go well, so fingers crossed!
An update on Blooming Chasm
I did find some time to work on Blooming Chasm over the past few months. Well, I had to prioritise creative writing over blogging if I want to release this VN someday lol. Let’s get to it.
General progress
Writing-wise, it’s been going OK!
Last time we spoke, I said I’d written 18 000 words out of 50 000 words planned. Now I’ve reached 36 000 words, but I think the total might reach 70 000 words instead…
The planned scope of the story did not change, I plan to have as many characters as before, and the story beats remain largely unchanged. I guess what inflated is the pacing of certain scenes, often through the amount of dialogue. We’ll see if it is entirely for the best when I start to edit the draft down the line.
The main hurdle so far has been finding enough mental space and energy to get back in the story again after leaving it aside for a while: I could get back to writing only in short, fragmented bursts throughout the year.
To help with this, I try to document my progress and my current state of mind thoroughly, by continuously updating a production diary with my thoughts throughout the development of the project. This way, I can always pick up from where I left off weeks ago fairly easily, understand what the point of the scene I was writing was, and so on.
A sneak peek of the above-mentioned production diary.
It’s a page with chronological entries and a clickable table of contents. I add an entry whenever I take a major story decision, or to remember important inspirations, to write down current doubts about the story, etc.
This production diary has been a real save, but it doesn’t change the fact that it requires enough mental energy to get back into it when it’s been a while, which has not always been easy.
That’s definitely where you see the value of shorter projects.
It’s not even so much the amount of work involved that makes all the difference, but the fact that with a shorter word count, the entire scope of the story can be easily visualised and worked through mentally, without having to be fragmented: in a 10 000 words-long story, the end is never very far from the beginning, so it’s easier to make everything cohere without having to resort to documentation to remember your initial state of mind.
Even if you do have to split work on such a story in fragmented sessions because of real-life obligations, it’ll always be easier to pick it back up than it would be with a story with a larger scope.
Outlining or not
The other hurdle I face is the fact I only have a rough outline while writing: I know the core story and emotional beats, but I haven’t drafted a strict scene-by-scene outline.
This is a big divergence from what I usually do!
I tend to like planning ahead, and I did so thoroughly while working on Sylvan Disappearance. Given this was an epistolary VN, and that part of the mystery involved concealing events occurring between different letters being sent, I had to strictly adhere to a certain diegetic timing between scenes, and to know exactly what I would tell next at every step.
However, it backfired.
I felt so constrained by my outline that I often didn’t allow myself to rework through scenes which didn’t ring right. Even when I couldn’t really feel them or visualise them properly, I just pushed through— which resulted in a weaker slice of life storyline in the seaside city. Had I allowed myself to pause with my doubts, I would have been able to restructure things.
By contrast, most of the better scenes in Sylvan Dissapearance were very late additions, which came only when I was well into scripting, and could allow myself to be freeer just because it felt right to do so. These scenes were also, by far, the ones I most enjoyed writing.
The True Epilogue from Sylvan Disappearance was a very late addition, like many of my favourite scenes in the story.
So for Blooming Chasm, I took that lesson to heart (perhaps a bit too much…) and decided that beyond the high-level outline and emotional core of the story, I’d allow myself to define what I want to write next at every step. I know all the major sights on the journey, but I allow myself to find out how I’ll go from one to the other.
The good thing is that this makes for stronger scenes overall; I write only what I fully visualise, so the atmosphere is always spot on, and characters mostly have the depth they deserve. The bad thing is that every few scenes, I have to spend time pondering what’s next now?, lest I start writing gibberish. I’ve skipped that step sometimes, and it never resulted in good work.
Scripting and/or writing
I tend to rely a lot on sounds and music for atmosphere’s sake, but that’s difficult to plan ahead while writing without also starting to script the scenes in-engine: you have to see it come alive on the screen to know if it works or not.
But I’ve avoided scripting anything beyond basic UI tests, because I just know I’ll never get anything done if I start implementing scenes I’ve already written in-engine without making actual progress on writing.
Screenshot of an UI test for Blooming Chasm (that scene no longer exists in the story). I wanted to have an NVL presentation for certain scenes, but still wanted a character portrait to be displayed when minor characters without full-body sprite are speaking. Little is scripted beyond specific tests like these. The portrait used here is only a placeholder; it comes from CLOSET, a site offering free resources for RPG Maker VX. The background is based on a photograph by JR P licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0.
This means I’ll have much editing to do in-engine down the line, when I have backgrounds, character sprites, sounds and music to test everything.
For certain scenes, this might help a lot: I think I have a tendency to overwrite and to forget what it’s really like to read through a horror story in VN format, where music can add so much atmosphere-wise. So there’ll be a lot rewriting involved down the line, and much of it will probably involve cutting words down instead of adding them, which is always for the best!
Horror is so cool, everyone
When I first got into game development as a teenager, I remember that the time I took to learn programming and to work on game experiments often took precedence over the time to experience art. I often didn’t allow myself to experience media I know I’d enjoy out of guilt, and so I kept returning to work instead.
I did have a lot of formative experiences anyway, but still sometimes I wonder whether my entire world wouldn’t have been split apart by experiencing more of the things I enjoyed much earlier in life.
This is hardly a purely personal problem of mine either— having no time to play games because one is making games has got to be one of the most frequent gamedev complaints I see on Twitter. And I’ve already spoken about it, but I just know Fujimoto (and countless mangaka) would find it all too relatable as well.
This is all to say that this dilemma is definitely a thing of the past for me. I’ve made a dedicated effort to take more time for experiencing horror media I was interested in (in VNs, film, literature) this year, and it’s been the very best. Horror is so cathartic for me and I couldn’t live without it at this point.
Besides all this, it is just so much richer to create things when you can also take the time on the side to experience what made you fall in love with art in the first place. Retrospectively, it was the same for Sylvan Disappearance as well, and it contributed a lot to the story’s atmopshere. It doesn’t even have to be simultaneous as the process of creation either, all that matters is to take the time to replenish oneself without feeling guilty for it.
Gosh, it sure seems like every post out of three on this blog is about freeing oneself from unattainable productivity standards, and still finding ways to make the creative process enjoyable. Sorry if I ramble so much about it, but I guess it matters a great deal to me, I see so many others struggle with it, and I’d really like to convey the sense that it doesn’t have to be this way.
I hope other creative people elsewhere may find some comfort in it, and have a well-deserved rest as well.
So… what’s next?
I’ve had free time in late August, so I’m trying to make progress on Blooming Chasm before starting work again. I have a naive hope that I might be able to keep a bit of mental space for writing throughout the autumn given I’ve been on a good roll, but overall, I think reality will be harsher and I’ll have to make slower progress.
Blogging will probably have to take a backseat again.
Potential blog post ideas involve: an August travel diary, my (super belated!!) final thoughts on Fatamoru, another music mix acting as Blooming Chasm atmospheric moodboard, more about my production diary and note-taking system, a recent horror media roundup, and another roundup on a favourite mystery trope of mine.
… Yeah, I’ll have to make some choices if I want to write anything at all.
We’ll see, I can make no promise in advance.
Until we see each other again here, take care everyone!