Hello, 2024! I hope that the new year has started out well for all of you :3

This probably isn’t the kind of update post you would want to see, but since it’s been a while without saying much besides responding to questions in comments, I figured it’s time for a big post that lays things out more clearly while also cleaning up the project page a bit!

Aside from this gigantic ramble, I also posted my rough schedule for 2024 if you happened to want to nosy at it x3

This will be the last time I post a dev log on the DD page for a while. Any future major progress reports will be made as public posts on Ko-Fi, and any behind-the-scenes WIPs and stuff will stay as supporter posts on Ko-Fi & Patreon. The only time I’ll use the dev log feature for this page in the future is if there’s an actual new update of the game to release and upload + possibly major progress reports, like fully finishing the writing for a character's route. I just don't wanna spam anyone who's following me with notification posts of progress if they're not fussed about seeing it and just waiting for an update that they can actually download, haha.

Thank you for all your patience and support so far. I appreciate it more than I can put into words :3

Alrighty, so I’m gonna do my best to try and split this up into smaller sections cos it’s probably gonna get pretty long >.< If you’d rather not read through all of it in detail, I’ve written a separate FAQ post to answer some of the most common questions I receive about the project :3 If you want further explanation, it’s probably covered somewhere in this giant post, haha.

2023 Progress

As you can probably imagine, there wasn’t a great deal of progress on DD specifically last year because I was busy working on smaller game jam projects (Bitter/Sweet, The Hostage, Tunnel Vision, Sapphire Snowe) for a few different reasons + just generally struggling a lot with my mental health and living situation. It wouldn't have been practical to work on long-term stuff because of too many irl interruptions >.< Having my arm broken in the first quarter of the year didn’t exactly help matters either, but at least it healed x3

On the art side of things, the amazing Lazy Polar Bear has finished some designs of CGs for Castor/ia’s route which covers the content currently in the demo version. I plan to continue to commission her in the future for CGs for the game for as long as she is okay with working on the project :3

On my side with writing & programming, I didn’t exactly achieve a great deal! I managed to get the opening of Cana’s route playable in my WIP copy of the game, along with writing the opening scenes for some of the other characters + more of Castor/ia’s route. I don’t really see the point of getting all of that added to the game and releasing an update with it in though when it won’t have voice acting and other relevant features would be missing >.< 

So while a small amount of progress has been made, it’s not the sort of progress I’m going to be able to show anytime soon, so I can only apologise for that :( 

The Old Plan & The New Plan

Because my vision for the game is pretty large with so many different character routes, I had initially thought that it would make the most sense to release new characters & chapters episodically so that content updates would be more regular and anyone following the project wouldn’t be stuck waiting years for me to finish all the game in its entirety.

However, after much consideration, I’ve decided that it’s not the best way forward.

Since losing the VAs who originally played Castor/ia, it got me worried that a similar thing could end up happening again if I don’t just finish writing scripts for the entire project before casting VAs. And that goes for all of my current and future projects.

Trying to release stuff episodically would be disastrous if I start casting people, release an episode or two, and then can’t get ahold of them to record future episodes >.< It’s already happened before, and it sucks. So I want to do everything I can to avoid that ever happening again.

This means I no longer intend to make episodic releases for this project. I will finish writing for all (or most) of the character routes I have planned before I find a cast and start programming everything. This means that the next update to the game will be when the game is essentially completed. And that isn’t going to be any time soon, sadly.

I know this probably isn’t what anyone wants to hear >.< But I think it’s the best way forward for me as a dev. And probably the only sensible way to proceed in order to (hopefully) avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes I’ve made in the past.

There is a chance that I might be able to do something sort of in between episodic and full releases. For example, possibly finishing writing for a group of characters whose routes intersect, and release those together in one update before moving on to a different batch of characters. The problem is I had initially hoped for each character to have shared routes with at least 2 other characters and not necessarily share the same pairings. 

I could reduce the number of connected routes and characters overall I suppose in order to help speed things up. That’s something I need to give more consideration to. The main thing though is that I’m not going to release updates until character routes have been fully written.

But Why Not Just Release It Without Voice Acting First? Then Add Voice Acting Later...

I have no doubt that almost any other dev would definitely go that route because it would be the best compromise! Unfortunately, though, it wouldn't work for me personally for a couple of reasons >.<

The main one is, as a dev, voice acting is a huuuuuge motivator for me. If I know that a script I’m trying to write won’t have full voice acting, I essentially lose all motivation to write it at all >.< I have one project where I tried my best to plough on despite finding out I wouldn’t be able to get it voiced, and I truly believe that the game is awful for that reason (among a couple of others) x3 It’s the Love in Lockdown ones. They’re just reeeeally bad because my heart wasn’t in it in the end >.< I don't want any of my other projects to turn out as badly as that did, haha.

This will probably sound kind of crazy and somewhat pathetic, but I can’t stand my writing and my characters always feel so hollow without voices >.< For me, it’s the talent of voice actors that gives the characters a soul and allows me to actually begin to accept them along with the rest of my writing x3 Without voices in mind for the characters, I want to scrap all my writing and throw it in the bin, haha. I guess a lot of that is probably down to me being autistic, BUT, I think it's also because a lot of my writing is very dialogue-heavy, so having voicing makes everything flow better than if it were just being read silently.

So even if players would rather a project had no or minimal voicing in order to get it out faster, it wouldn’t work because I wouldn’t be able to finish the project at all T_T So yeah, it’s more of a personal thing I guess. Even when I manage to finish all of the writing, I don’t think I would ever be content enough with it to actually release it without VA, regardless of what players might think >.<

Mental Health Minefield

(please be aware that this section contains mentions of suicide)

It’s no secret that my mental health has always been terrible x3 but last year it decided to take an even greater nosedive. 

In October 2023, after being on the waiting list for 5 years, I finally got an official ASD diagnosis. Despite being pretty much told I was autistic all that time ago, without a diagnosis, I was denied access to help and was too afraid to seek out much in the way of information on the small chance people were wrong and I wasn’t autistic after all.

Having the diagnosis has been a bit of a double-edged sword. In some ways, it’s helped me to better understand why I am the way I am, but in others, it’s kind of cemented my belief that I’m just totally and utterly screwed for life >.< haha. The advice of the psychologist who diagnosed me was to keep going with my dev stuff if it’s still bringing me joy, and that someday, I might be able to support myself with it instead of having to live off of government handouts. I don’t really believe that will ever happen because I’ve been trapped on the benefits system for so long, and unless it’s reformed drastically by a different political party coming into power, I feel like I’ll be stuck on it for life since it doesn’t allow for you to even start trying to become self-employed without immediately losing all your aid money.

Game dev is more than just a hobby for me. It’s a coping mechanism for life. I use it as a thought blocker so that I'm not sitting there thinking about suicide and other grim thoughts all day >.< It’s one of the few things I can do to distract myself from the crushing reality that the world isn’t built for people like me, and while progress is being made when it comes to understanding neurodiverse people, it probably isn’t going to change fast enough within my lifetime for me to be understood or accepted by the society that surrounds me.

That realisation is soul-destroying. As much as I adore game dev and trying to tell the weird stories that I do, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stuck in a state where this is the only thing I can do >.< There are numerous other things that I’m passionate about but can’t access out there in the world. Game dev is one of the few things I’ve been able to get into because there were no barriers preventing me from getting started.

Still, there are barriers. I used to think that if I was lucky and I worked hard enough, then maybe, just maybe, I might be able to make a living doing this dev stuff. And despite all of your support, which I’m immensely grateful for, (it helps me carry on even when I feel like I can't sometimes, and it's because of you guys that I can afford to add voice acting and CGs to projects and make them better overall!!) I’ve come to realise that path probably just doesn’t exist for me. To ‘make it’ in game dev, as with a lot of things, you need to be able to shout about your stuff on social media, be competent at promotion, and make regular updates and content available to players. 

Anyone who has followed me for a while will know that I can’t cope with any of those things >.< and I think being autistic probably has a lot to do with that :( It doesn’t mean I’ll stop doing what I’m doing, it just means that I’m stuck in a place where I find it difficult to do everything that I’d like to be able to do. Social media just feels far too overwhelming for me. I like to just make stuff and then release it into the wild without the stress of having to try and promote it x3 Because it’s a level of stress that causes me to completely shut down, and if I shut down, I can’t make games >.<

Some days, I can wake up with all the motivation in the world to get some writing done, but after being awake for a couple of hours, I’ll somehow be completely drained of energy and feel like I need to crawl under my duvet and escape the world. And the smallest of things cause that change, like having to answer the door to the postman unexpectedly or having to go out and get food shopping for the week >.< There’s a whole host of different things, big and small, that can drain me ridiculously quickly, leaving me feeling overwhelmed and unable to cope with even basic tasks like remembering to eat!

I pretty much struggle to function on a day-to-day basis >.< Sometimes I look at all the projects I’ve released over the years and begin to wonder how on earth any of it was possible, haha.

Some people wrongly assume I’m super productive because I can create a finished game from scratch within a month for a game jam, but that’s not a sustainable way of working on stuff long-term or representative of how I work for most of the year. That laser focus that I’m able to harness during jams leaves me completely drained afterwards and needing a lot of time to recover because it often involves hardly sleeping for the duration of the jam and repeatedly forgetting to eat and take care of other basic needs or irl tasks >.<

With any luck, now that I have my ASD diagnosis, I can hopefully at least get some therapy that might make some difference! I’ve had all sorts of therapy in the past, same goes for anti-anxiety meds and antidepressants, but nothing has ever helped. I now know that’s because my depression and anxiety were caused by living my entire life as an undiagnosed autistic woman x3 I’ve spent most of my life trying so hard to fit in, but nothing ever worked. It’s like trying to force a square peg into a round hole >.<

The person who actually gave me my ASD diagnosis said that she thinks starting therapy again with the knowledge that I’m autistic means that the therapists can take that into account and try to focus on different things that might actually help me. 

The problem with the therapy I’ve had in the past is that they were trying to understand and treat my anxiety and depression without knowing I was autistic. Every therapist I saw would hone in on events in my life as being the sole causes of trauma and my subsequent difficulties. First, they would try to pin it all on my parent’s divorce when I was a kid and the way my mum treated us after that. Then, they’d move on to the sexual abuse I endured for years when I first moved out of my family home at the hands of a ‘friend’ who was supposed to be taking care of me out in the big wide world. Or backtrack to the bullying I put up with in silence from the moment I started school as a little kid.

While I have no doubt those events had some kind of negative impact on me, I tried to tell the therapists at the time that they were in the past, that they weren’t the cause of my pain and difficulties in the here and now, and that everything started to go wrong with my life the very second I left the safety of home life as a young kid and went to school. None of them listened >.< It was mixing with other people for the first time that made me realise something wasn’t right.

So yeah, that sucked because the therapy was essentially a waste of time >.< The person who diagnosed me with ASD said that, sadly, it’s quite common for women on the autistic spectrum to fly under the radar as girls and not get diagnosed until well into adulthood. She thinks trying to survive in the world undiagnosed will have left me with layers and layers of different kinds of trauma that will take years to try and reverse.

Unfortunately, the waiting list to begin therapy again sits at around 1-3 years x3 This is because the NHS here in the UK is underfunded and overwhelmed >.<

I’d be lying if I said I don’t think about killing myself at least once a week. Sometimes I think about it every day.

Please understand, I don’t actually plan to do it. I even promised a few people I won’t do it as long as they’re alive because I don’t want to hurt them. I’ve lived with suicidal thoughts for many years now and have been told that I suffer with something called suicidal ideation. It’s something I find comforting in a really weird way. It’s just nice to know that if things do get to a point where I can’t cope at all, there is at least a way out so this doesn’t have to go on forever. I’ve kind of accepted that it’s just a normal part of my life at this point! 

It’s not like I’m incapable of being happy or having good times though x3 It’s just that depression is always lurking under the surface waiting to strike >.< It’s hard to describe but I live with a form of constant depression that’s sort of dulled down, and I also get bouts of depression that are much more intense and crippling. For example, after releasing Sapphire Snowe, that combined with the prospect of a whole new year ahead rendered me largely useless for the first month of 2024. I’ve been drained and very depressed. It’s all too easy to fall into a dark place where you start thinking everything is pointless, and once you’re down there, it’s pretty hard to pull yourself up and carry on with anything, even the things you know you like doing.

Anyways, I’m not saying all of this so that you feel sorry for me or anything like that. There are a hell of a lot of people on the planet who have things waaaay worse off than me! At least I have an amazing dad who doesn’t mind me living with him and who supports me as best as he can. That alone is more than what many have. The point is that progress on long-term projects like this will be slow partly because of my mental health problems.

I’ve tried to lead an independent life more than once, but everything always winds up falling to pieces, and I end up back home x3 Which brings me to the next part about my living situation.

The Write Frame of Mind

Yeeeeah, I spelled ‘right’ incorrectly on purpose as a pun there and I can only apologise x3

This is something that applies to my long-term projects, Clarity in Qualia, Darling Duality, and the BxG version of Solipsism Reigns.

When I started all of the above, my living situation was very different to what it is now. I was living with a friend in a house that we shared. He was employed and paid the mortgage, I paid the bills with sales from my Etsy store at the time. This was all pre-Covid pandemic. Once Covid hit, I had to give up my Etsy stuff because my sales dropped off entirely >.< Back then, Etsy and creating handmade goods was what took up the majority of my time, and working on projects came second. When we went into lockdown and I couldn’t make sales anymore, my friend was luckily able to continue working from home and completely supported us both, allowing me to spend most of my time on projects instead!

As strange of a time as lockdown was, it enabled me to really get into making visual novels. My friend had his laptop for work set up downstairs, and I essentially had an entire room to myself upstairs that I spent most of the day in working away on projects. I had a lovely comfy office chair that my friend allowed me to use, and plenty of time and privacy. 

This is soooo different to the workspace I have now that I’m living back at home with my dad, haha. My PC that I work on is stuffed into my childhood bedroom. The bedroom is so small that a single bed touches the walls at the top and bottom of the bedframe and takes up more than half of the floor space in the room xD In order to fit my PC in there, I can only have a child’s gaming desk chair that is small enough to tuck under the desk when not in use. This is extremely uncomfortable >.< I can’t even sit comfortably on it when using it and I get a hell of a lot of bad neck and back strains and pains when I work on stuff for more than an hour since it doesn't provide any support for an adult >.< But I have no choice because there is no room in the house elsewhere to have my PC since it’s a pretty small house in general.

Since I share the house with my dad and my brother, my bedroom is the only place I can go to work on projects. There are no spare rooms for me to occupy like I had when living with my friend. It’s not the nicest feeling in the world to get out of bed, grab breakfast, and then spend the rest of the day working in the same tiny room I woke up and will go to sleep in >.< I feel like it massively contributes to general brain fuzz! I was far more productive when I had a proper separate dedicated workspace at my friend’s place.

As much as I love making VNs, I really don’t like spending all day in one small room. It can get quite claustrophobic and depressing >.< On top of that though, because my brother is also unemployed, he is in the house all day, which leaves me with very little privacy as he has a habit of just walking into my room and talking to me when I’m in the middle of working on stuff, which I find extremely distracting. I’ve asked him if he could stop doing that while I’m working on things, but he doesn’t take my VN project work seriously and still thinks it’s fine for him to keep interrupting T_T

Living with family also means I end up with a lot less time to myself to work on projects because unlike when living with my friend where we would just knock up quick meals for the two of us and then go back to our individual activities for the evening, along with sharing most of the housework, at home with my family, I generally have to do all of the housework since my dad is at work all day to keep a roof over our heads and my brother just straight up refuses to help >.<

Understandably, my family also find it disturbing if I eat dinner and then go straight back to working on projects x3 They sort of beg me to take a break for the evening and chill with them, which is fine and I do like doing that, but it often means I then just carry on working on projects once they’ve gone to bed, leaving me staying up until like 3am on many nights just so I feel like I can get more done. My friend didn’t really care if we ate dinner together and then I went and carried on with VN stuff, haha.

Aaaand, when it comes to Darling Duality specifically, I was in a very different frame of mind when I began writing for the project! I had just started becoming closer with someone who eventually became a long-distance partner for a while, and I’m pretty sure I was swept up in the craziness that is falling in love xD I feel like that shows with how casual of a game DD is compared to a lot of my other projects! Most of my projects have some kind of romance in them, but it often comes tied to an overall story that takes precedence, whereas DD is much more like a dating sim than my other games I guess. 

While I don’t feel as though it’s 100% necessary to rediscover that lovey-dovey frame of mind in order to continue DD’s writing effectively, it definitely helped! The relationship came to an end because my depression came back with a vengeance as if to prove that love definitely doesn’t conquer all x3 And ever since then, I’ve been writing much more melancholy things again. I haven’t really felt like writing for DD much of the time because it’s something I started when I was in a happier place mentally >.< I’ve felt like anything I write for it won’t come out right unless I can somehow get back to a happier state of mind. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try though x3 It just means many rewrites might need to happen before I can be even remotely content enough to put the writing in-game, haha.

Starting Over & The Future of the Project

Alongside needing to finish a hell of a lot of writing for the project, whenever I return to coding, I’m pretty much going to have to start from scratch >.< I can use the current code as a template, but so many things have changed with updated versions of Naninovel now that a lot of my old code won’t function in the same way. Things like mid-line expression changes to match voice acting will have been completely messed up, requiring me to split up pretty much every existing line of audio in the game. On the bright side, if I do end up having to cast new voice actors, I won’t have to bother splitting up existing audio, but I will need to recut and reimplement every line of dialogue all over again, haha. That in itself is a task that will likely take a while.

I had also previously planned to use purchased tracks from music packs for the majority of the game’s soundtrack, to the extent that I had the entire soundtrack planned for every single character route before even starting writing for most of the routes (because I find listening to relevant tracks helps me to write if I stick them on in the background :3) However, since teaching myself how to make original music tracks, I think I’d like to try and make more original music for the project while still keeping key tracks from music packs to cover areas I don’t feel confident with musically! This is something else that will add more time to the overall completion of the project, but like voice acting, I feel like it’s more than worth the extra time and effort.

I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear if you’re anticipating the full game, but DD will take 2nd place priority this year in what I hope to work on >.< This is because Clarity in Qualia (a long-term project I started before I began DD) has been hanging over me and making me feel guilty for far too long T_T I released the original concept for it as a short demo back in 2018! I then put it to one side for a while, and I think it was around late 2020 that I fully finished the writing for it.

CiQ was supposed to be my 2nd longer game release after Solipsism Reigns, and my first commercial game. The full script is roughly 120k words. There was a Kickstarter planned and everything, but it all fell apart because of my situation with being on government aid among other things >.< That then made me put it on hold once again while I made short jam games instead.

I cannot even explain how much guilt and pain I feel at having a completed script of that length just sat there gathering dust for the last few years >.<

I personally think it would be insane to try and finish DD before finishing CiQ when CiQ is 100% written and DD is only like 10% written. I’ve sat on CiQ for far too long, and I just want to get it finished and released. If I'm extremely lucky, I might be able to achieve that by the end of 2024, but it's honestly too difficult to say because there's a hell of a lot of coding to do, art to be commissioned, and other stuff required to complete it. Especially considering, like with DD, I wanted to give players the option for the protagonist to have different pronouns, and for the romance options to have both masculine and feminine versions.

That doesn’t mean I won’t work on DD at all until CiQ is finished. I will likely need to take breaks and swap projects so as not to go completely insane while coding CiQ x3 So I will use those times to try and work some more on DD!

Once CiQ is completed, DD will become my main priority long-term project as it’s next in line going by order of projects started. 

In order to try and make more progress with these longer-length more long-term projects, I will be trying my utmost to refrain from participating in game jams this year!

I adore game jams, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t upset me somewhat to know that I’ll be forcing myself to miss out making brand new short games this year for jams x3 But it’s reached a point where I feel as though a break from jams is now necessary in order to make some decent progress on my longer projects. I might join other jam teams as a composer if they’ll have me on one or two jams, but I’m going to try my best to not start any new projects out of being tempted to join jams, haha. (Besides maybe a tiiiny something to contribute to the new yandere jam that's running this year because I want to support it in some way x3)

So yeah, I’m sorry that it’s still going to be a loooot longer before I can get this game finished >.< but I want you to know that unless I happen to die or something goes drastically wrong to the point that I’m physically incapable of working on projects, this will be completed eventually! It just isn’t going to be any time soon still. 

To those who have stuck with me, thank you so much for your continued support and patience :3 I hope that you’re at least able to enjoy some of the other projects that I’ve made since the demo for DD was released. It’s a long road ahead, but with any luck, things will come together in the end ^-^

I hope you are well and that 2024 turns out to be a wonderful year for you!