Fixing Things

I've been making some changes to Fixing Things in my free time. Although, most of it has just been cleaning up the code. There's one route in the game I still need to finish writing. When I started this, my process was different and I didn't plan anything ahead of time. I just did what I always did and winged it. Somehow, that's worked out for me in the past but without having planned out a lot of this stuff in advance, it makes it a little difficult. The code being a mess since it was one of my first projects in Ren'py has also made me not want to bother working with it. But, I've been working on it again so hopefully it'll get done for real. Most of the backgrounds are from the same sources, but some are new and the music is mostly from the same places. Then, there are the sprites, which were made by NoranekoGames. Hope you look forward to the final version of this project.

This visual novel's been in development hell for a few years, but now it's in a playable form. The demo version was built off of what I had for the full version. I just copied the files I had, turned them into a new project and modified the script. So now, you'll only be able to see the demo's dialogue. The full version's dialogue has been removed from the files. Anyways, if you were interested, you can check it out now. The full version of this game will be out eventually and I'm planning to make some changes to how it looks and clean up the code since it's such a mess.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock or haven’t been following me, you know that I’ve been working on a visual novel. This is a project that I began working on late 2016, but what you may not know is that I was wanting to make a visual novel as early as 2014. Late 2013, I had just gotten into Ace Attorney and several months later I wanted to make something inspired by it. Several ideas went to paper and I told an old friend about the idea. He said he’d be willing to program it and I would be the writer. If we would’ve gone through with it, it would have been made with Game Maker. However, in the end we never actually made this game.

I’ve still got some of the papers floating around in my house and I rarely even look at them. I gave up on this idea along with our “partnership” that we had for the game development company we wanted to start. After a long time away from this project, I decided I didn’t want to make any mystery novels (not counting the Ace Attorney fan game I ended up wanting to make at one point). Unfortunately, a lot of my ideas from this time period were scrapped. I would eventually find inspiration from a visual novel called Sepia Tears which I played in summer 2016.

Not long after finishing the game, I started writing I script and eventually gathered several other people: a couple other writers, a potential composer, and some possible voice actors. It really didn’t help that I was very inexperienced at the time. I had to look around for what engine the game would run and in the end settled on Ren’py, which I was a bit hesitant on. At first, it was pretty overwhelming. But over time, I managed to figure out especially since the people from the Lemma Soft forums have been really helpful. I eventually got to a point where I didn’t know where this project was going, so I quit writing it.

Fast forward to the end of the year, I got inspiration from another visual novel called Homeward. This visual novel told a really good story that I could easily relate to so I decided to create a visual novel with a similar message and I immediately opened up Ren’py and started typing away. For the next several months, I continued to tease with little information about the project. Eventually, I got around to finding some images and music to add to the visual novel and before I knew it, I announced some actual details: the basics of the story, the main characters, and some screenshots.



I would be on and off with working on it. Sometimes I didn’t want to touch it but other times I would feel motivated to write a whole lot of lines for the characters. Over the years, I’ve gotten much better at programming so I used some of my knowledge from my Software Development classes in this project. I even changed the UI because I got tired of the original but even this one I didn’t keep for too long. At one point, I almost lost the whole project because my computer quit working. I ended up getting a laptop to use while my dad tried to fix my desktop. In the end, we got it to work again and I was able to recover the files.

When I got back to working on it, I just tried to make sure the sprites showed up at the right times but after a while, I saw a free GUI (made by Luna Chai) that someone was using for their visual novel on Twitter. I decided to try it out. I had to make a lot of changes to get everything to display properly which includes adjusting background and sprite sizes. After a lot of time spent messing around, I’m really happy with how it turned out. It even came with some extra features like a music player.



There’s even an option for a CG gallery with the GUI but I highly doubt I’ll have CGs for the final version of the game. I had to make adjustments to the GUI itself, like font size just so that it would fit will with the universe I’m writing. In the end, I am really happy with how it has turned out. At present, I’m unsure when it will release but I am aiming for the first half of 2019. If I make enough progress it will come winter (Q2) 2018. We’ll see when we get there.