hey! how's it going! i finished my newest vn, blood drips from the mouth of sappho and this is basically what this month's log's gonna be about. sniles sneetly.
new on the site: flowers -le volume sur printemps: go girl give us nothing
yes that's a mouthful. as you all know, i'm bad at names so i fell back on one of the possible titles for four fangs. it doesn't have as nice a ring to it when shortened though -_-
anyway, this is my entry for this year's queer vampire game jam, and it's time for my usual post-mortem thingy.
so the main thing about this game is that i wanted to Apply The Lessons learned with baby's first commercial eroge, yu-no (1996). i didn't discuss its more "technical" aspects on my review because i knew i wanted to make a vn inspired by it and talk about them then. which is now.
blood drips is 640x400, the pc-98 resolution, and i also lifted the image resolutions from yu-no — they're 512x300. actually the game uses 512x288 but those 12 pixels arent't making all that much difference since i'm not using a frame (which would clutter things somewhat), and a round number is easier to remember. all individual images are under 15 colors (plus a transparent "color") but i make no guarantees on color count when you take everything into consideration... with the name tags being colored especially i'm sure i'm off for the most colorful cgs. i'm at peace with that though.
also my linework / style is very distinct from "period" because i have never managed manga style in my life and i'm using a graphics tablet (and wow working on this much art, sometimes three cgs per day, really made me glad i upgraded to a larger size... very comfy). i have not been able to find conclusive evidence on whether or not the pc-98 could take tablet input. on one hand, tablets have been around since the 80s, but there isn't really anything on r/pc98 and the historical nonfiction text 16bit sensation explicitly has them as a novelty of the windows era... so yeah, my art could not pass as period really. and that's okay because i like my messy linework ^_^. i did consider working on paper and scanning in just to see the process but maybe some other time; i don't even own an eraser. somehow.
but ok enough about that. other than the technical limitations, there were three things i wanted to incorporate into the art for this game: pinup cgs during "regular" exposition, dutch angles to fit more of the body in a landscape oriented canvas, and like. dithering. these were all more challenging than i anticipated... well. there are a lot of nude cgs, of course, but it's a bit of a different vibe than the suggestive stuff in yu-no. damn i didn't even draw a panty shot. or cleavage. and as for the dutch angles i didn't really make use of them either because i seem allergic to putting entire characters in frame; i like closeups! overall the thing is that when i think very cinematically about my vns. when i think lesbian vampires especially.
but the dithering! that i did manage — hell, how would i even make pixel art otherwise. i did all the art on aseprite because it's thee pixel art software ever (and free! and linux native!). and it did have a bit of a learning curve but it wasn't nearly as bad as it seemed at first. because while it's weird and complex and has different shortcuts, it's still closer to paint tool sai than it is to photoshop when it comes to ux. understanding the dithering brush plugin took some work though, because i didn't immediately get how the brush engine works. once i got used to it, the program really did get out of the way and stopped feeling like self-surgery, and the thoughts of using multi paint system via emulator vanished entirely. i do wish i had this beautiful blur tool though.
i'll be honest, i didn't look at my study screenshots all that closely. lemme bring back ayumi and compare her to one of my cgs real quick.
these might be annoying to zoom in because every browser and image viewer on earth hates pixel art and i apologize. but you'll notice ayumi has a lot of anti-aliasing going on, as well as colored lineart. it's quite soft. the skin also uses multiple colors: there's the white highlights, a base color, and three (!) darker tones. if you look at her calf, it dithers between three shades, with the darkest shade reserved for the deepest shadows. on the other hand, i've used a single shading color throughout (well, it's not the same, but i'm always using just one color) and mostly relied on denser dithering to get darker shades. it all comes from my experience with cell shading i think. especially apparent on the darker cgs like this one, where i filled the whole area with a 50/50 grid and erased the highlights, using different densities to soften some edges. i really love the effect, but i also want to study the other approach more! i need to get clever about reusing colors and stuff.
also yeah speaking of colors i really loved working with an indexed palette... i've always wanted to give that a shot, and it's soo nice and fast and practicadl to be able to change colors throughout an image like that. i shall be using aseprite casually. probably.
what else... i also explicitly avoided transparency by using dithering instead, of course. i didn't use it all that much — only with zeno's shawl and the text box. oh yeah the text box. a fourth trick i pulled from yu-no was the full resolution cg for the ending, which is necessitated the transparent text box. yu-no saves the fullscreen for the climatic h-scenes, as you can see on the aforelinked review, but i was working with a lot fewer words and it made more sense to save it for the very end, since that's what's the actual climax. and that's a cg i really loved... "painting" with dithered brushes was very interesting, i think backgrounds / landscapes really deserve my study attention...
oh yeah backgrounds were public domain photos from wikimedia commons. and a couple are from old magazines off archive.org. whenever i could i tried to keep large flat areas of color, i thought the simple look was better than having a ton of noise via dithering. some photos lent themselves to that better than others, but i think the end result is cohesive enough!
um yeah that's my art ramble... it was cool to get back to a cg heavy vn after kinda purposefully avoiding drawing in my past three games. i like the abstraction and i'm really happy with how those look, but i have been gently pressured irl to draw more, and who am i to deny my public their porn. so i've got 10 cgs and 3 variations in this bad boy. and also sprites! my first time working with sprites! overall this probably makes for the highest art count of my games, but it really didn't feel that intense. i enjoyed the process, and i really allowed myself to be imperfect and not complicate things too much.
oh yeah this is a narrative game.
ok so i was initially really stumped on what the hell i wanted the game to be about. i wanted to revisit the silent body horror of vampirism — i always feel some sort of way when i notice how much everyone arounds me becomes more themselves as time goes on, while i just... don't... i haven't been able to grow up in any way that matters. hm what a bummer i thought this was a fun porno?
as i said back in 2022, the thing about the body horror being silent, that stasis itself is the horror, is that it doesn't really lend itself well to a story. that's not quite true, because if i picked up on the theme it's because it exits in other stories, but i've never quite been able to figure out how i'd like to explore the theme in my fiction. i think i'd just end up making a brood fest.
so i settled on the tried and true tropes of my beloved dubious 70s movies.
minor spoilers follow. feel free to jump to music.
zenobia still has some of the broody vampire to her. she's been turned ages ago, so she hasn't been able to medically transition — i have put some thought into vampires and hrt btw which i mostly oppose thematically but gave me the beautiful idea of dracula forcefem simulator, a mini zine i will be working on soon —, she feels stuck, all that. but she's reasonably self actualized, isn't she? she tends towards codependency but she has been living her own life and stuff. and that's not really what the story is about.
there's the ever classic past lives trope, though come to think of it i don't really remember that being on any lez-v movie? and la fiancée de dracula (2002) gave me the sunset ending lol. but my big influence here was vampyros lesbos (1971). one of the cgs is pretty much a screenshot redraw. i'd have loved to have started off with a self indulgent weird strip tease as well, but that's tougher in a vn. it's also why zenobia has a red shawl, and i guess why we have the pool.
it felt a bit weird to make another water-heavy game after a machine walks on the beach at night. the author's poorly disguised enjoyment of the seaside. but i think the vampire's weakness to running water is severely underused. other than dracula adaptations, i only remember seeing it once, in daughters of darkness (1971). since i already wanted the greek setting so zenobia could make the sappho joke, leading me to vampyros lesbos, i just figured i'd lean into that. and it turned out to create a nice contrast: zenobia's pool is enclosed, safe but claustrophobic. change is impossible to zenobia — though i can't tell whether that's just her perception of things —, so the open sea is all she can never have. and it's what really washes away her enthrallment on iphigenia, because yeah, vampire powers, but also she can see a future for herself that's not just an eternal today.
and it's still a fun porno so of course there's blood, tit and cock sucking action in between all that. yay!
ok so you might remember that last month i went to a mini theremin workshop where i obtained a mini theremin to make weird and off putting sounds with. i won't bore you with the details of the ordeal that was trying to capture its sound with my laptop, i'll just say that i couldn't even make it work. with each passing day i get more and more tired of the laptop lifestyle. though movie in bed slays. anyway in the end i used The Family Computer, since it has a dedicated audio input jack which is much better behaved.
honestly my approach here was fuck around and find out, i didn't really have a vision. i recorded some 20 minutes of weird and off-putting theremin action (the electronics are all exposed so i could do what i think is technically circuit bending maybe? i touched her innards). went ham on audacity to make it less high pitched — it's aggressively so when unfiltered — and slow down and whatever else other effects, and layered that over some kinda dark percussion reverbed to hell. i love making a percussion heavy ost it must be said. i think the constant pulse really gets things dense and atmospheric...
honestly i have no clue what tone the end result strikes. i think weird and off-putting synths is a thing in some sexploitation movies i've seen. idk.
also i wanted to use silence as part of the soundtrack so originally it was just the drums and the drums + theremin. but i got kinda scope creepy when doing the last proofread and shit and put together the ambient track from a few samples i had downloaded for other projects. lmms hates dealing with samples btw, that's 100% a job for audacity. but yeah, slowed down tibetan bowl from amphigeum, two slowed down hits on metal from maintain'n'fuck, one of them with waves too. it's also quite off-putting i think... but i really like it. i love getting droney with it...
but uh yeah not much to say about the music, just that the theremin is fun if tricky to use. in multiple ways.
yeah i'm quite content with the game! it was definitely a project where art was the point, and i got to try a fair bit of new things. including some real explicit stuff yay ^_^
and as i said somewhere up there — btw this post-mortem is as long as the game — my treat now is a low stress low stakes project, a mini zine about forcefemming dracula. i got the idea while struggling to find this story but i held strong and didn't stray, because if i executed it as a game it'd be wayyyyy too big in scope to fit in the jam (god i'd have to program, which i really didn't want to for some reason — that's why no music room or cg gallery), and not really something i want to do. the whole thing is already planned, and now i'll start working on the art. i'm gonna stick to the pseudo pc-98 style: it's meant to be kind of a raising sim a la princess maker, obviously. and it's been fun to draw like that!
also rabbit and steel update! which accounted for at least half my gaming time this month... the new mechanics had me feeling like i never played a videogame before in my life, which i love. not sure if the extra levels will get as cozy as the base game — especially on 4p... that's hectic — but i'm fairly decent at them now. the final boss' spinning lasers trip me up more than they should though.
and we did get another layer of ultrakill, but i only played through once. it's a very cool technical and artistic achievement but also kicked my ass. i'll get back to it once the secret level is added (hopefully with some performance improvements too; it wasn't too bad but i did put a 30 fps cap to help with stutters).
next month: i finally play danganronpa: trigger happy havoc. also the queer vampire jam games. and the ryona yuri jam made for a bit of a whale fall. everyone stop making new things for a bit okay.
in fact, if we're talking about new games, this steam nextfest turned me into a bitter caricature of myself because i made the mistake of starting off with the worst possible categories: coop (it's all bland), lgbt + adult-only (it's basically all futa) and shmup (i have finally snapped and blocked the action roguelike tag). truly 90% of everything is shit, and the other 10% is already on my wishlist. between that and soaring specs even in indie games i think it definitely is gonna be a visual novel year here in sol world. well this only happens because i'm looking at steam to begin with instead of being on itch and also receiving properly curated reccs from the transfems i follow online. nods sagely.
bye-bye :)