#fantastic visual novel

[aashiyancha]

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It's been some beautiful spring days that made me think of the summer to come. So, I decided to give this game another whirl

Also peak summer moment. I wanted Jeremy to come back just so I could pour another cup on him.

[ennaih]

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

259. Doctor Sleep (2019)

[pink-anonymous-person]

:)

last one is a reference from this image ( day 4 )

[just-a-carrot]

Two more days! Just like there were only supposed to be two Arc 5 parts! Haha… hahaha… 💦

Anyway, uh, today's OFW lore:

Resident scholar and mage Cecil prefers to stay hunkered down with his books in the academy library, but he can sometimes be convinced to lend his aid to the group when asked very nicely... His magic has helped them out of more binds than they'd perhaps care to acknowledge. And despite his air of coldness, he must get some enjoyment out of it, right? Right?

[chubs-deuce]

I have been playing Sable a lot lately and have made it my personal mission to find every last one of these funky floating worm babies

please if you haven't yet, do consider playing this game, it's a pressureless free-roam exploration game with a side of self discovery journey plot and was made by essentially just four people

[hexgirllovesyou]

My expression when Baldur's Gate 3 has stolen my boyfriend and hasn't given him to me back yet...

[turochamp]

slay the princess was overhyped i think

[h-worksrambles]

Tier list of my thoughts on all the characters of Echo and how interesting and well written I find them to be. Note: these pics do contain some out of context spoilers.

[theriverdalereviewer]

replaying cause of death right now... everyone this game is genius and I need you all to check it out immediately

[singinbluebird]

Playing Heart of the Woods again. Reminding all my followers that they should also play Heart of the Woods.

[dontmindmejustafangirl]

You will not see me being an enthusiastic lorehead for minecraft roleplay like I used to be (or still is?) for ace attorney lmao

[blacktabbygames]

hey did you know that slay the princess is out now? did you know it's on sale with a 10% launch discount until november 2nd? do you want to spend several hours getting sternly lectured by and annoying jonathan sims?? well this is your game i think it's good and you should buy it but don't listen to me look at that 91 metascore—and for us, just a couple of lil guys make a game with no gameplay other than click dialogue options! idk must be fun

“An existentially horrific visual novel, with an incredibly well-written plot, a beautiful score and graphics that will enrapture all senses. One of the best narrative games of 2023.” 10/10 – Voxel Smash

“There isn’t a single thing I don’t like about Slay the Princess. The presentation is beautiful, the story is fantastic and moving, the voice acting of amazing characters is done phenomenally well, and the branching paths of the story give you what feels like unlimited possibilities.” 10/10 – Try Hard Guides

“Slay the Princess will stay with you for a long time, I think. It’s absurdist and dark and haunting in a way that not a lot of games are. If you have an itch for something that’s spooky but also morally confronting and you will be thinking about it for days to come, it’s impossible not to recommend this.” A- – Player 2

Anyways more seriously truly from the bottom of our hearts thank you all so much for making this launch a world-shifting experience for us! We can't wait to share more games with you, starting with Episode 5 of Scarlet Hollow 👀

[physalian]

You don’t have to pay for that fancy worldbuilding program

As mentioned in this post about writing with executive dysfunction, if one of your reasons to keep procrastinating on starting your book is not being able to afford something like World Anvil or Campfire, I’m here to tell you those programs are a luxury, not a necessity: Enter Google Suite (not sponsored but gosh I wish).

MS Office offers more processing power and more fine-tuning, but Office is expensive and only autosaves to OneDrive, and I have a perfectly healthy grudge against OneDrive for failing to sync and losing 19k words of a WIP that I never got back.

Google’s sync has never failed me, and the Google apps (at least for iPhone) aren’t nearly as buggy and clunky as Microsoft’s. So today I’m outlining the system I used for my upcoming fantasy novel with all the helpful pictures and diagrams. Maybe this won’t work for you, maybe you have something else, and that’s okay! I refuse to pay for what I can get legally for free and sometimes Google’s simplicity is to its benefit.

The biggest downside is that you have to manually input and update your data, but as someone who loves organizing and made all these willingly and for fun, I don’t mind.

So. Let’s start with Google Sheets.

The Character Cheat Sheet:

I organized it this way for several reasons:

I can easily see which characters belong to which factions and how many I have named and have to keep up with for each faction

All names are in alphabetical order so when I have to come up with a new name, I can look at my list and pick a letter or a string of sounds I haven’t used as often (and then ignore it and start 8 names with A).

The strikethrough feature lets me keep track of which characters I kill off (yes, I changed it, so this remains spoiler-free)

It’s an easy place to go instead of scrolling up and down an entire manuscript for names I’ve forgotten, with every named character, however minor their role, all in one spot

Also on this page are spare names I’ll see randomly in other media (commercials, movie end credits, etc) and can add easily from my phone before I forget

Also on this page are my summary, my elevator pitch, and important character beats I could otherwise easily mess up, it helps stay consistent

*I also have on here not pictured an age timeline for all my vampires so I keep track of who’s older than who and how well I’ve staggered their ages relative to important events, but it’s made in Photoshop and too much of a pain to censor and add here

On other tabs, I keep track of location names, deities, made-up vocabulary and definitions, and my chapter word count.

The Word Count Guide:

*3/30 Edit to update this chart to its full glory. Column 3 is a cumulative count. Most of what I write breaks 100k and it's fun watching the word count rise until it boils over.

This is the most frustrating to update manually, especially if you don’t have separate docs for each chapter, but it really helps me stay consistent with chapter lengths and the formula for calculating the average and rising totals is super basic.

Not that all your chapters have to be uniform, but if you care about that, this little chart is a fantastic visualizer.

If you have multiple narrators, and this book does, you can also keep track of how many POVs each narrator has, and how spread out they are. I didn’t do that for this book since it’s not an ensemble team and matters less, but I did for my sci-fi WIP, pictured below.

As I was writing that one, I had “scripted” the chapters before going back and writing out all the glorious narrative, and updated the symbols from “scripted” to “finished” accordingly.

I also have a pie chart that I had to make manually on a convoluted iPhone app to color coordinate specifically the way I wanted to easily tell who narrates the most out of the cast, and who needs more representation.

—

Google Docs

Can’t show you much here unfortunately but I’d like to take an aside to talk about my “scene bits” docs.

It’s what it says on the tin, an entire doc all labeled with different heading styles with blurbs for each scene I want to include at some point in the book so I can hop around easily. Whether they make it into the manuscript or not, all practice is good practice and I like to keep old ideas because they might be useful in unsuspecting ways later.

Separate from that, I keep most of my deleted scenes and scene chunks for, again, possible use later in a “deleted scenes” doc, all labeled accordingly.

When I designed my alien language for the sci-fi series, I created a Word doc dictionary and my own "translation" matrix, for easy look-up or word generation whenever I needed it (do y'all want a breakdown for creating foreign languages? It's so fun).

Normally, as with my sci-fi series, I have an entire doc filled with character sheets and important details, I just… didn’t do that for this book. But the point is—you can still make those for free on any word processing software, you don’t need fancy gadgets.

—

I hope this helps anyone struggling! It doesn’t have to be fancy. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Everything I made here, minus the aforementioned timeline and pie chart, was done with basic excel skills and the paint bucket tool. I imagine this can be applicable to games, comics, what have you, it knows no bounds!

Now you have one less excuse to sit down and start writing.

[just-a-carrot]

ONE WEEK OUT UNTIL THE ARC 5 PART 1/2 LAUNCH YEAHHHH. For countdown I'm doing OFW art. Why? Because I want to. And as a reminder to play OFW before this part???

Also OFW lore. Today's is:

Genzou has "saved" Iggy more than anyone else in the group. Quotes because this is mostly when Iggy gets approached at pubs. Or on the street. Or when someone tries to sell him something. Or get them tangled up in a new quest. (Iggy is a little clueless sometimes...) It's gotten to the point where when Genzou isn't around, Iggy often ends up almost dying or getting himself into really unfortunate situations because the others don't think to look after him.

[stealthnoodle]

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist flew under my radar until a friend recommended it to me, and now I am fully obsessed so here's me passing the recommendation on!

Do you like visual novels? Skill management? Timeloops? Deckbuilding? Gorgeous art? A whole bunch of fantastic queer characters? Staggering numbers of events and endings that respond to a staggering number of choices you make?

Then you should play this game and come scream in my ask box about it! I have said both "uh-oh" and "yesssss" out loud multiple times while watching the consequences of my actions play out. Absolutely delightful. Enjoy a little bit of screenshot propaganda:

Living my best/worst life

Exploring in the pink

Behold my self-insert

Also, you can have up to four different pets following you around and one of them is THIS cutie

[barbwritesstuff]

Fuck it, I need some serotonin. I was going to wait until next month, but my brain is too fried to edit anything anyway so here we are. Today's the day. That's right. Today is...

Fairy Day.

So, put on your tutus and glitter up those cheeks, because it's time for the new and improved:

A Fairy Tale is a 28,000 word visual novel about fairies finding love.

Play as the sole heir to a noble (but somewhat underfunded) fairy estate. You have one night to find a marriage which will secure your family's future... or lead everything to ruin.

Who—if anyone—will win your hand?

Featuring:

Five different romanceable characters.

An immersive experience with music, images, and sound effects.

Ability to choose your own character's name and gender.

A variety of different choices.

Scroll forward and back at any time.

Option to skip already read passages.

A save feature with multiple save slots.

Fairies, pirates, schemes, and whimsy.

Content notice for references to cannibalism.

I hope you check it out. 💙

Character art by the fantastic Gwen Young @gwygle.