I have always loved Ren’py. As mostly a text-worker, a GUI-based VN engine like Novelty had always felt too fiddly for me, and drag-and-drop interface feels slow and clunky. I don’t care for Unity and Unreal Engine, which always feel too much for the kind of small text games I like to make. Godot and RPGMaker? The dialogue systems are horrible unless I spend my time loading them up with plugins and configuring a usable workspace.

Sublime text loads everything blazing fast, so I can make changes and reload and add just one more line before bedtime with no friction at all. Anyone who’d dealt with inertia knows how important a frictionless environment is, especially in regards to adults juggling (sometimes multiple) full-time jobs with side projects. I love ink for the same reason and there’s a terrific template for micro VNs here.

Ren’py might not be intuitive to designers and programmers (I have always posited it makes the most sense to writers), but it does a hell of a job. Unlike many other VN engines, it’s still Python under the hood, so it’s very flexible and extensible. I have worked with Ren’py for more than a decade, a good enough time to learn its kinks and making peace with its shortcomings. The one thing I still hate to do, however, is when I need a quick adjustment on the visual side and it turns into a session of pixel-hunting. (Things are always changing! Check out the cool plugins by Brunoais and Feniks)

Enter Light.VN.

Veterans of Visual Novels know the legendary engine KiriKiri, one of the most beloved engine back in Japan. KiriKiri has long since been abandoned, but it’s so well-liked that people are still making games with this engine in 2024 (for a vivid experience of developing on KiriKiri, read this terrific series of blog posts). Over at this side of the pond however, information is scarce and a lot of knowledge had been buried under linkrots and defunct hosting sites. Light.VN employs a very similar paradigm to KiriKiri, with a lot of modern touch added over a solid base. It seems like a good fit for my needs, somewhere between ink and Ren’py so I have another option when the mood strikes. This is not a competition. I happily have space for both of them in my arsenal. I’d always wanted to try KiriKiri, but I can’t be hassled to do deep dives in The Great Japanese Internet Graveyard for my resources. The developer of Light.VN is surprisingly active and they are trying to appeal to the English-speaking world. It seems like just like Tom Rothamel and Ren’py, this engine is maintained by one core person.

Documentation is still largely in Japanese, though. And just like KiriKiri, modules don’t really come preassembled, so your first projects can be incredibly daunting. Either I succumb into this and finally brush up my dormant Japanese, or I gather enough to get by reading and parsing sample scripts. Either way, let’s hope that I do have a game by the end of this month. Spooktober is halfway through already and I’m only starting this on the 16th. I have previously failed to finish two jams owing to life in general (one day I’ll get to finish my piece for Decker Fantasy Jam), and it doesn’t make me feel good after the wins in June through August. So far, I have about 3k of scripts and a smattering of free assets. Plus ten minutes of slapdash promotional materials so this page doesn’t look like a barren landscape.

We’ll see.

Surely I’m not foolish enough to jump headlong into shaders and animations in my first foray with a new engine with only two weeks to spare and no team member.

Those who have read the devlog for The Butterfly Dreams may remember what finally gave me the time to finish the game. I’m happy to inform that since the completion of Butterfly, I have found myself a gainful employment. I’m sad to say that I might about to lose it again, because in the year of our lord 2024, job security is a myth. In response to the news, I decided to make another game. No, I’m not deluding myself that I can live off my cute little hobby projects. I simply need something to tinker with. I don’t even know if Awayuki Tasogare the full game will be free or paid.

Will this be an Avenue Q release?

Maybe, perhaps, if they like it. I feel bad for blowing our previous jam, so I enter this one alone to cool down. I’ll present them the demo and see if the others are interested. If not, I can always work on this again later.

Why is the title in Japanese? What’s with the clunky subtitle and this writing style?

In time of great distress, the human brain is a funny thing. It seems to bring yearning towards ‘the simpler times’, no matter how much of a lie that is (it’s never as simple as our brain would let us believe). I’m reminded of the early VNs we used to play and the charming, if characteristically clunky, fantranslation projects. I’m also incredibly rusty, so it may come off as being just…really clunky.

Postscript from the first day of development: I do like the main menu I managed to put together today, though sadly I don’t think I’ll manage to skin the whole game. Light.VN’s default template is cool and all, but it doesn’t work for Spooktober. However, reskinning the entire template is way more time-consuming than I presumed. Everything is image buttons! Even changing the smallest thing requires me to re-export the buttons! If I’m better at this, I may be able to put together a generator for the GUI elements or whatever, but I have no luxury. The time is better put to handling the scripts and sprites. I’ll be out of town for the last run of Spooktober, so worst case I might have to throw everything into the engine’s default template and end up with a clickable wall of text. Honestly though? Not a bad outcome.