of Love and Watching Films

[Applegate]

Previous installment: of Love and Blowing Bubbles

I've been really happy with my progress on my chief project, but every now and again I feel slumped and without inspiration. They say the best way to get inspiration is to work, and so I present another short piece that was mostly used to fuel my inspiration.

For a different work method, I've arranged this piece by writing it without any dialogue at all, using nothing but narration. Afterwards, I expanded and worked things out, and managed to complete this work in 3 hours.

All the resources are, again, Public Domain and freely available throughout the internet.

So what is "of Love and Watching Films"? For one, it's a direct continuation of "of Love and Blowing Bubbles"─our nameless protagonist had invited his friend Dewi to see a film with him, an though she initially rejected him, well... the two end up at the theatre after all.

What follows is a back and forth between the two, touching on Dewi's philosophy of living life, and the protagonist himself─it's perfectly fine to read it as a stand-alone, but as the length of both works is only five minutes of reading (around 1,000 words for both), it's easy to read both, one after the other.

More than real stories, these are attempts to take two people and build character out of them─in this case, while their actions are mundane, I hope the characters themselves can tell the story, and make it interesting to read. I'm not so great a writer that I think I've achieved it, but I like to think I gave it my very best, so that it should count for something.


of Love and Watching Films v1.0, All Platforms



As a note: in this release, Dewi's eyes are recoloured black. Someone asked me why she bore an Indonesian name while at a rice field, but had blue eyes and red hair. While the lighter skin fits perfectly with her background, and the red hair is just dye (work with the tools you have, and such), the blue eyes couldn't really be explained with anything other than "I was lazy"--and thus, it has now been rectified.

[lordcloudx]

Aww... that kinda cut off before it got really interesting. Nicely written. Not much to say except that you seem to really know your stuff when it comes to crafting a tale. I see you also fixed that issue with the save/load menu this time around. Good job.

You hinted at a couple of things about Dewi and the protagonist's shared past. It looks like this story might have some potential to be quite an intriguing, semi-serious piece. Why not compile all the parts together when (if?) you finish writing this series into one complete VN? If you ever need an original sprite for Dewi, give me a PM and maybe we can work something out .

It seems as if the protagonist might not really as boring as he claims to be.
Over-all, though. I'd say "Of Love and Blowing Bubbles" had more closure to it than this one.

[Applegate]

Haha, I am sorry for the abrupt ending. I thought it ended on a nice note, but looking back at it I agree it might feel like their talk should continue a little. The save/load menu problem was fixed by going into screens.rpy and removing the "Help" option, as well as setting the Save/Load Rows to 2. I can keep both a small screen and provide the same functionality a standard Ren'Py game has.

All my writing are serious pieces. When I actually first write "of Love and Blowing Bubbles", I didn't invent these characters off the bat─I have a small depository of characters, whose backgrounds and personalities I've worked out a little. Originally, these two come from a failed idea for a VN with a bit of a more numerous cast─I thought if anything, they'd be interesting enough to write as a stand-alone.

Should I ever write enough in this series to compile an actual VN of it, I very well might─as is, I feel they're loosely connected snapshots of scenes and inadequate to work as a real VN yet. If I ever decide otherwise, I'll let you hear. I'd probably aim high for full-custom everything anyway, because that's the kind of person I am.

The protagonist claiming to be boring, but being less than boring (I should hope his conversations with Dewi hint that he can be pretty fun to talk with!) is part of a small theme─for the same reason that Dewi refused to see a film with him but went after all, a little contradictions feel to me like part of human nature.

Thanks for the comments; I appreciate them greatly. Sometimes I read my writing and think I am an absolute hack job, but when people say they liked reading it, I feel more confident.

[Celestine]

Funny I like your characters.

Hopefully you'll do a series on it.