hiii. this month was long and i did a lot during it teehee. i made an ambient ep that's also a fake ttrpg. liner notes incoming, you know the drill. and a micro vn, idem, and a zine about an unreleased raising sim, ibidem. bit of a long artlog this month yay! and then you'll also want to check out my marrow writing, won't you?
new on the site: the steins;gate (2009) post, turning a queer gaze towards straight porn.
after rainfall on bendalfon is a 25 minute ambient / soundscapey concept ep i made for the "you cannot play this ttrpg" jam, so it also has a bit of paratext!
i'd been wanting to make some more music, but without a game or whatever to make it for. i used orbit. it runs really well as a standalone, and i recorded the audio with audio recorder ('grats on the seo), which is SO much simpler than audacity for this purpose. i don't have a midi controller (yet?) so i used vmpk with a bit of a silly setup: you can't play it while the window is unfocused, but playing the synth necessarily unfocuses the controller's window. luckily, clicking away from vmpk while playing a note with the keyboard keeps it playing forever, so i just picked one or two notes at a time and then went ham on the synth controls.
granular synthesis with orbit is very improvisational, so i just experimented with various samples from freesound and my previous music. i liked long "wobbly" notes like the singing bowl and oboe the best, but there's more soundscapey stuff too. i kept the sample palette pretty small to make the ep cohesive and simple. the inaction phase track (a veil between) reuses samples from the setting phase (and as we wash our hands) to kinda ground it in space-time, and the intro and outro are also mixing in the different phases.
and yeah for the game part i was really thinking about an album as a series of named time periods. and i thought it makes sense for a game that doesn't exist to be about the ways we don't do and say stuff. idk the subject of the fable of the sheep was also very fresh in my mind / being talked about a bit with friends. if it sounds cool i think you might like the echo of the unsaid, but i don't own that game (but i'd really like to check out that anthology...) so idk.
it was a bit hard to figure out how much of the scenario i'd give... my experience with ttrpgs is scant, and i wasn't gonna make a playable / playtested game, so i erred on the side of vagueness. but i'm gonna word of god some stuff here, my personal interpretation of both unsaid, unacted and after rainfall on bendalfon.
the stuff with tokens adds a tactile element to the game, and i think of them as probably symbolizing each character's "action points", or more accurately their initiative. the game's core is the push and pull of these characters' relationship: these are people that are hesitant to act, and in my mind specifically hesitant of coming off too strong. after acting (and remember, talk that advances character objectives is an action), you pass the token to the other person so things are "even". i'm normal btw. idk what the objects could be, they're for some extra flavor. probably physical embodiments of the conflict at hand.
as for this scenario itself... i'm thinking a rather melancholic high / dark fantasy. something of decay to it. a war or another disaster has happened in the past (how long ago, and what does that mean for elves with long lifespans?), and each character has been affected by it in some way (obviously). i suppose it's like a post-campaign epilogue for your cool dnd elves and their unresolved conflict... i see them kinda sitting on a field fiddling with grass or something, but that's not all. i picture euphrosyne's playthrough as being in a hospital of some sort as she sees to the wounds of someone she knew during the war, for example. but there's a sense of dilly-dallying too... just like the game is meant as a way to kill a little bit of time with someone else, the characters are having a bit of downtime.
so that's the concept part of the ep... in a soundscapey ambient album most of that can't really come through as easily as king gizz singing about venusian sickness and self immolation, but well it is what it is... i like the music, and the full fiction is a nice side dish ^_^
lastly there's the paratext. the bootleg aspect was kinda necessary so i had an excuse to not have a playable game, and it also gave me delicious freedom to just be kinda sloppy. well, the zine clipping is a bit fancy (though very little was put into proper verissimilitude), it was fun to make. but the other stuff is just my first pass at everything basically. i put a little bit into the timeline: the track list and first character sheets are made with permanent marker, like what was probably used to write on the cd, while the other two sheets are pencil and a bit more detailed (prepared before playing again), with aglaia's left barebones and incomplete.
as for the cover i really wanted something nice and definitely album covery because that's how people can tell what the project even is, and i had to show i put effort into this thing!! it is an album of mine first and foremost! i used a pic of sunlight on water from wikimedia commons and some water damaged surface from freepik. i really like the pale pink with almost illegible text... unseen... it's not really a dungeon synthy cover, which i thought would be a fun and evocative direction, but this isn't dungeon synth. it's a bit based on this cover i generated with artbreeder ages ago. i really love it...
so yeah. that's after rainfall on bendalfon. hope yall like it ^_^. i think the whole unseen, unheard thing also gives me room to play around with more things like this in the future, though no promises. i've just always known that if i had a Musical Project i'd want a proper nom de plume for it. though i don't like being bound to the english language for it... either way, it really had me wishing itch had some sort of pseudonym system. i definitely wouldn't make a separate account for music stuff, since there's minimum amounts to get paid out and i'd probably end up with two dollars stuck in limbo over there and shit. and ofc bandcamp would be better for music anyway, but that's its own can of worms and payment shit.
this is just 400ish words, so read before continuing ^_^
ok so i made this one for the make literally anything jam, and i really almost didn't. i struggled with the theme a bit, but i figured what the hell, it's a week long jam and i was just talking about unsexy porn or whatever, lemme make something more of a sex comedy.
but like. it kinda went its own way. i think this is three ideas in a trench coat, and i like it for that. the victorian theme arose naturally because the arsenic wallpaper was the first fact i thought of, and then came the spanking idea which is very victorian, so i leaned into that. it morphed into something of a remake of that one segment from the metafic porn story, and that morphed into this background theme of violence, a violence that is reenacted much like the bottom has these historical replicas etc. it ended up tying itself together well.
oh and the anticlimatic / anorgasmic ending was something i've been wanting to write for a bit... it was pretty convenient since then i didn't really have to transition out of the spanking, which i found rather tough since i have no proper experience in the matter or other media to pull from lol. but also i'd like to do it again sometime, and then incorporate more inspo from soren häxan's ornament works; i really love the cut off compositions.
brief talk about the audio: i keep getting so much use out that one exhale clip lmaooo i hope you aren't tired of it because it will keep coming back. i thought of using something moanier but it just felt way too literal. same for the spanking, i think the soundscape would lose a lot by taking such an obvious route. the music is granular synthesis sampling the hit sfx, which i made in lmms.
finally you may or may not have noticed my use of some stuff that love letter didn't originally have... i've updated the engine a bit while making this. originally it was just the accent color, but having that system in place let me finally implement the faded history text. also fixed a couple bugs with the comment syntax. i think now i'm hopefully actually probably fully content with the engine. meaning i can direct my energy to how much i HATE lovejs. i don't think it's enough to rewrite makelove and lovejs both though, so i'll just fume and do all the manual edits every time. i guess.
yuuup, another embed. click to flip pages.
fullscreen here, printable on itch.
wooo i've been rotating this since january. i thought of this for / during the queer vampire jam, because i was thinking about vampiric transition. "could a vampire get breast implants" and "if i were to forcefem dracula what are my options". it obviously depends on the framework. in bertha i did the interview with the vampire thing where the bodies are kinda metaphysically tied to their state at transformation. but there's no reason to be bound to specific laws with vampirism, that's not the point of monsters. so while vampires who cannot medically transition (and who cannot age) are my darlings for reasons surely unrelated to my current life situation, giving a vampire hrt is fun! this would be a mostly lighthearted game. the hormone simulation might be numbers-crunchy though. make players go to r/transdiy for strats. i also started reading ranked competitive breast growth around this time btw.
but a raising sim is crazy work and a genre i haven't really played (i played a bit of mushroom musume but i kinda lack the patience). that is for someone else to accomplish. but even once i reduced the scope to "ok i'll make a silly little zine, no stakes (ha), a treat once i finish the vn" i got caught up in the "more or less accurate pc-98 style" and "somewhat passable game manual" and completely lost steam. this ended up as a project i exorcized so i could stop thinking about how it'd been all but abandoned. i could return to it some day, because there's still a lot of room there. i wanted to put more dracula in pop culture stuff. the cover is from bela lugosi's, the back cover is ofc symphony of the night (there'll be another reference to that down below lol). i wish i could have included a nod to dracula a.d. 1972... speaking of references, the interface was just plundered from princess maker (specifically this ost video, i just looked the game up on ddg images and scrolled).
and to go back to style a little bit, i do really like the final look, though it's a different direction. the really fuzzy look came from drawing at a much too small resolution with my trusty no-antialiasing brush and then upscaling and hitting it with the newsprint filter + blur. i did the same thing for the machzine but the end result is pretty different. paired with the barebones typesetting (which i've seen on archived stuff) i think it just makes it look quite old school, i dig it. what i like about the format is the freedom to get kinda raw and crusty with it, i shouldn't lose touch with that, the side of me that likes to make art fast and rough and just kinda scattershot it out into the world. since art is kinda all that i do right now, i find that i put myself into more pressure to be A Good Artist. and i think there's merit in that, obviously, but there's gotta be a balance to strike yknow.
another comm for daarvibonelicker. sooo cute.
also some esks as i get back into the arpg...
i also worked on a set of really fun badges for earth's father's day push, but those are under wraps until next month since the push is starting as we speak. but trust me they are really fun.
i saw a couple things about sinisistar 2 (2025) and it put alucard ryona game into my mind. ofc i transed her gender, but as i said in the tags, i think this hypothetical game could and maybe should have a male alucard because i am a bishonen enjoyer and it'd be fun to have a male ryona protag. it'd be fucking carnage. smiles.
also sinisistar 2 is an interesting game. not like. a game that's particularly interesting but it does some cool things, which make its boring ass gameplay so sad to me. i'm not well versed in this type of game, i haven't played any, but i have read a couple of the adult analysis anthology essays (coincidentally, either way, what bliss came out this month) and a 2d side scrolling game where you are supposed to fail simply screams platformer. mandatory masochistic maiden aria mention. i watched speedruns of both, and that neither of the sinisistar games has a crumb of verticality makes me insane. why does this even have a metroidvania tag. not to dismiss the amount of work that goes into platformer level design, it's a different kind of game, but what a missed opportunity.
so uhh yeah konami do the right thing and remake symphony of the night with alucard getting erotically battered by the skeletons and such? you'll be reborn as a beautiful lotus flower. i don't know.
still vaguely reading brief interviews with hideous men... also the bloomsbury handbook of sex and sexuality in game studies.
as always, i hope something very lgbt happens to you in june okay. even if you're cishet. see you then!