of Love and Blowing Bubbles

[Applegate]

"of Love and Blowing Bubbles" is a very short story of romance, and of blowing bubbles in a rice field. It is a project I created in the past three hours, partially to cure myself of boredom, and partially to show to a friend that it is, in fact, possible to write a short story within a day, starting with nothing more than dialogue before adding on the description.

... To summarise, it's really short. I'm happy enough with the story to want to publish it, however, and I hope people will find their time spent reading to be time well spent.

The wordcount is precisely 1,125, so reading time is very brief. All the resources used are in the public domain, attributed at the end of the story.

The story details our nameless protagonist blowing bubbles with his friend, Dewi, on a rice field, right after school. Spurred on by a whim, the narrator asks Dewi if she happens to love him. The resulting conversation is what this short VN presents, a talk about 'what is love?' and 'how about you go out with me?'.


of Love and Bubbles v1.0 - for all OSes

[xelacroix]

nice anime..

[lordcloudx]

Perfect timing! I was in the mood for a short VN and your description fit the bill.

It was nice; competently written with appropriate mood music. The dialogue which carries on the entire VN felt quite natural as well.

My one minor complaint would be that I was expecting a story and this one felt more like a "non-story," if that term exists, with only that short conversation between the protagonist and Dewi. For really short stories like this, I prefer to see more focus on narration and kinetic storytelling rather than the heavy dialogue-laden style that most light novels and visual novels employ.

Edit: forgot to mention, nice use of bubbles in the story.

In any case, good job over-all.

[Applegate]

Haha, thanks, xelacroix, but I do not think "anime" was the word you were looking for.

lordcloudx, I am happy you enjoyed it. I agree that it doesn't tell much of a story - it does have the key component of a story where the ending changes the status quo, but other than two people talking about things a little, it does not tell much. Unfortunately, I am a heavy fan of dialogue-driven stories, as was evident when I created this by starting with the dialogue first, then adding narration later. I will, however, see if I cannot get the narration to be a slight more in the future, if I should write something so short again. (and given my previous release as well as this one, I think 'short' is one of my themes)

Thank you for your comments!

[Wright1000]

I am downloading it now.
The sprite looks nice. Is it original or did you get it somewhere?

[fleet]

Where there supposed to be bubbles visible? The text kept referring to people blowing bubbles, but I didn't see any.

[Applegate]

I am downloading it now.
The sprite looks nice. Is it original or did you get it somewhere?

Got it from here. Couldn't draw if it'd save my life!

Where there supposed to be bubbles visible? The text kept referring to people blowing bubbles, but I didn't see any.

There were no visible bubbles. Even if the text refers to them, I did not find matching bubbles to insert, and had no access to Photoshop or the like to create some.

[lordcloudx]

One thing I forgot to add is that this game uses a small widescreen resolution just like my game, "The Affair" and suffers from a similar bug when you enter the default save game screen in-game.

Basically, the save menu overlaps against the other menu items and makes them inaccessible.

[Applegate]

... well, at least it's a five-minute read, thereabouts, so I should hope you won't need to save.

EDIT: I just realised my other, longer project uses the same sizes. Whoops. Is there a way to fix this issue?

[lordcloudx]

@Applegate: I've posted this in the ren'py help forums before and no one seemed to have a solution http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... =8&t=10960. My game uses a slightly bigger resolution so I just did this: (basically took out the unneeded menu items so that they wouldn't overlap)

edit: wrong image

[Celestine]

I played your Kinectic and liked it. It was cute and short.
However your screen is small.
I enjoyed Dewi's honest personality and their slight complex relationship. It was a lot of fun to read.
It's too bad you didn't have any bubbles though. I kept getting distracted by that.

[DragoonHP]

The story was good and it felt real... but a small nitpick...

You use the same line many times in the story... which makes the story look repetitive...
In longer KN... it wouldn't have matter... but in KN's as short as this, the frequent repetitions makes the story loose it's charm...

[Applegate]

M'glad you liked it! What particular line was repetitive? I'm sorry, there's a bunch I can think of, so I wonder which one it is in specific so I can pinpoint it.