Bug Gods

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Bug Gods

#1 Post by Startlefish »

Bug Gods
Updates every other Monday(ish) Updated whenever I remember, lol. Reach me here or on Discord if you dare.

An exceedingly ambitious cyberpunk visual novel about bugs, gods, and bug gods, conceptually laid here so I can be paranoidly motivated that someone might see my progress (or lack thereof) on this passion project. I want to be the best it could be so any questions, ideas, etc. are more than welcome. Otherwise, I'll mostly use updates as a brain dump in between concrete progress.

Why bugs? There are too few fictional works about bugs in a mythological sense and much less about bug-related Gods. Understandable, because bugs are majorly considered to be gross and weird. Nevertheless, they are still neat, everywhere, and important.

Why Cyberpunk? Because you know what else is gross and weird? Corruption exacerbated by heedless technological advancement!



…mostly kidding. Cyberpunk is cool, to put it simply. There are still some connections, such as insect populations threatened by environmental concerns. Environmentalism in turn often shows up in cyberpunk. It works, I promise.

8 routes, 7 main and a finale. The 7 main routes will be each divided into 8(ish?) chapters each. Naturally, each route corresponds to a particular character or set of characters. Each route’s chapters will occur simultaneously with the other routes. Chapter A1 occurs roughly at the same time as B1, and so on.

The routes and their respective chapters can be played in any order, consequentially influencing the other paths. Of course, you would have to play chapter A1 before A2, but in between any chapter you could start or continue another route instead. At its simplest this system will provide different perspectives and at its most complex it will change possibilities and endings across the board depending not only on one's choices but the order those choices are made.

The idea is to give significance to player choices and weight to favored characters, even while playing through other routes. As a plus (though a secondary priority) this also means greater replay value,


  • Research (92% complete) - Several months’ worth of research accumulated into a comprehensive document of bug-related symbolism, myths, references, and pop culture. I have been thorough, but there is always something more to find. .
  • Conceptualization (74%) - Planning the routes, plot, solidifying the characters. I have great sheets of paper affixed to my walls where I have physically drawn out the routes and choices.
  • Drafting - (7%) scripting out the whole thing. Inevitably time-consuming, but getting the research and difficult planning out of the way first should pay off.
  • Review - Cleaning up the first draft before shoving it into Ren'Py
  • Programming - (3%) this may take awhile as my programming experience is minimal, but as long as I am inspired I can learn quickly. With placeholders and a script ready it will at least be straightforward.
  • Placeholder Assets - (50%) scavenging together resources. Not difficult, just accumulating building blocks I can swap out later. Will make it easier to plan/budget for commissions.
  • Demo - to be worked on in the midst of drafting, commissions, and programming.
  • ($) Sprite commissions - I can’t draw, and the art is a VN’s first impression. I can conceivably manage just about everything else (eventually) but I know my limits. Best leave some things to professionals.
  • ($) (3%) CG commissions - Naturally
  • ($) BG commissions - Not as high of a priority, but still important.
  • (?) GUI - Can probably figure this out, but may hire someone if necessary.
  • (?) Music commissions - Not strictly necessary, I can find something somewhere, but it would be such a nice touch.
Positions Needed
  • Again, best to leave some things to professionals, but I'm in no rush. If interested feel free to reach out and otherwise I will just find people when needed.
  • Artists: Sprites, GUI, BG, CG
  • Composer
  • Editor/Proofreader
  • Social Media Specialist / Community Manager (because I don't want to worry about it)

1/14/22 - First post. Already done with research, 25% done with planning and 10% placeholder assets.
1/23/22 - Another chunk of planning done, roughly 31% complete. Better elucidated necessary positions. Bee.
1/30/22 - More planning, overcame a hurdle and may ramp things up. 36% complete. Butterfly.
2/6/22 - +8% towards planning, +40% to placeholder assets.
2/20/22 - 60% done with planning, Beetle
2/28/22 - Moving updates to Mondays, slight overall progress after replanning a route.
3/7/22 - Length, absolute basics of programming.
3/15/22 - 72% conceptualization, general planning. Snail.
3/28/22 - Now updating every other week. 2% writing, problem-solving, routing-making. Misc. other progress.
4/11/22 - +5% towards draft, poor estimates, resolve.
5/3/22, persistence, progress, duality, etc. etc.
7/12/22 - coming back to updates woohoo.
Last edited by Startlefish on Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:52 am, edited 17 times in total.

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Re: Bug Gods

#2 Post by Startlefish »

Bee

Bees seem to be the second most popular bugs of myth, second only to spiders. It is readily apparent why. Most bugs/insects have invaluable ecological purpose but these purposes tend to remain in the background, at least from a human point of view. Mosquitoes, for example, are apparently pollinators and a key source of food source for many animals, but humanity is majorly of the option that they suck so very much. I hate mosquitoes. Most other insects are likewise devastatingly annoying at worst or interesting at best, but their true value is often difficult to notice.

Bees are among the greatest exceptions. Bees are great, everyone should like bees. Honey, pollination, wax. Very stylish, very cute, will leave you alone for the most part. Anaphylaxis sucks though and you probably don't have to like bees in that case.

The ancients of the world really liked bees though. The San peoples (Bushmen) of Africa hold that a bee carried the hero, Mantis, across the water-covered Earth, ultimately sacrificing itself to do so but managing to plant the seed of humanity within Mantis. The Egyptians and Greeks kept bees, among other peoples. Respectively, the Egyptians considered bees to be the tears of Ra himself while the Greeks devoted a number of deities and figures to bees, including the beekeeper Aristaeus, the Thriae triad of nymphs and seers, and Artemis, Aphrodite, and Persephone to varying degrees.

Incidentally, you remember Eurydice and her husband, Orpheus? Yes, that Eurydice and Orpheus (Hades is a fantastic game btw). Most of the time people just skip over the whole dying part to get to the good stuff of Orpheus' tragic inability to rescue Eurydice from the underworld, but the whole thing is mostly Aristaeus' fault. Aristaeus was chasing Eurydice for entirely innocent purposes, Eurydice stepped on a snake, and boom: dead. He lost his bees because of the whole affair, but a quick slaughter of some cattle made everything alright again. (Except Eurydice and Orpheus still being dead)

Additionally, you can find more bees across the Earth and time from Hinduism (Bhramari), the Hittite (story of Telepinu), the Maya (more beekeeper Gods), European heraldry, Chinese symbolism, Catholic saints (including St. Valentine for some reason), and both the Bible and the Quran, for a relatively brief summation. Honey has been greatly valued for millennia as food and medicine, at times to legendary degrees. Thus, bees have been equally as popular.

Bees are largely not handling the modern world well though. Pollution, harmful chemicals, etc. Even honeybees, normally great, can be considered an invasive species and a threat to native bee populations. Interesting things to consider from a cyberpunk perspective. There are surely artificial means of pollination, but (banally) at what cost? Would they even be as effective? Alternatively, to bring in the mythology, assume a bee god's honey is as miraculous and powerful in a futuristic setting as it was for the ancients. Could the substance be industrialized, or should it? What lengths would people take to obtain it? What consequences could an overdependence on one resource have on the larger world?

Next week idk. Butterflies, maybe.

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Re: Bug Gods

#3 Post by Startlefish »

Practical update: another roughly 5% towards completion of our planning stage. Honestly more than I expected since I had a bit of a hurdle to overcome. The first 3/8 chapters of each route are almost entirely planned out. These chapters have been fairly straightforward as the routes up to that point are mostly independent. There are hints towards other events but naturally few game-changing decisions at these early stages. As things progress the routes increasingly converge and it is harder to wrap my head around the possibilities. Thus, to keep it simple, I am planning chapters more abstractly. This will translate to an increase in work at the writing stage but is much more manageable now. Plus, I think that when I am actually writing things out it will be easier to identify and fill in any blanks. Anyways:

Butterfly

but only a little bit, I must admit. There are not a lot of mythological butterflies. A lot more moths, fascinatingly, which we will certainly get to at some point because my moths are my favorite.

Many many cultures have consistently associated butterflies with the soul. Given complicated sentiment on the human soul, this translates to some mixed symbolism and, to put if simply, they are variably a sign of anything from fortune to death. They are very seldom connected to any distinct personage, with a couple of the few exceptions being the Greek Thanatos and Psyche. Thanatos is a personification of death. Death being associated with souls means that one of Thanatos' symbols is a butterfly.

Interestingly, "psyche" is the Greek word for both soul and butterfly. The proper-noun goddess Psyche began as a typical mortal whose first mistake was being too hot: the source of many mythological problems. People started worshipping her instead of Aphrodite in fact, so Aphrodite sent her son, Eros, as a kind of love-assassin. Instead of following the plan and making Psyche fall in love with a monster, Eros himself fell in love with Psyche. Eros whisked away Psyche to his heavenly domain with the caveat that she cannot know his name or see his face. Predictably, she did just that (another major source of mythic problems). She redeemed herself via a series of tasks imposed by Aphrodite. The most famous of which is probably sorting a mountain of seeds via the help of ants. Psyche actually failed the last of these tasks, but Eros came to the rescue and Psyche becomes the goddess of the soul. Their union (love+soul) created Hedone, goddess of physical pleasure.

Again, beyond that butterflies are rarely personified and carry more of a symbolic intent. Fairies are often associated with butterflies, but I feel that is rather out of scope for the themes and stories I want to present unless as DLC or an addon far down the line.

Psyche could make a great character, but as I am already giving focus to moths I am in favor of leaving her presence somewhat ethereal. As the true masters of the world are distracted, Psyche can act as a guide or provide hints to desirable paths. Suggestions after bad ends, for example, or maybe bursts of colored butterflies after decisions to give hints towards their consequences. My planned structure will be more choice-heavy and thus more complicated to chart out than most. It would be nice to give some kind of direction as readers journey through it.

Beetles next week.

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Re: Bug Gods

#4 Post by Startlefish »

Boring Update

Next week for beetles, I'm fleeing sleepy. I was able to make a lot of planning progress, especially for the ending. Interestingly, I will probably finish planning out the final route before all of the others even though it will ultimately be the most complicated to write given all the variables. The broad strokes will be relatively consistent so I have a good sense of how it will be organized, while the rest of the routes I am working through more organically.

Otherwise, organized a bunch of reference art for placeholder sprites and commissioning.

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Re: Bug Gods

#5 Post by Startlefish »

Bleh, I got a cold and unrelated stuff came up, excuses, excuses, etc. Apologies to my (probably 2, at most) many fans.

But progress! Over halfway done with planning! Almost running out of reasons to procrastinate and do some actual work! Exciting stuff. One of you even messaged me about writing, which is rather heartwarming. I always doubt myself so I will take what I can get. The fact that someone read these silly updates with little work to show for it on my part and spent a little bit of time to ask about it is fascinating. Will anything come of it, or this project in general? Who knows? But: another reason to keep at it is all I need.

Seriously though, if anyone wants to help, provide feedback, or ask questions then fire away.

Anyways, the long promised beetles. Again, there are not many Bug Gods and of those not many are incredibly famous, but Khepri is certainly one of the famous ones. Scarabs, specifically Scarabaeus sacer, the sacred scarab, are dung beetles. Dung beetles use poop as food and incubators, and often roll said poop around in little balls as they find suitable places for doing those things. The ancient Egyptians looked at these poop rolling beetles and said, "Hey, that poop is round like the sun." and figured that the the sun was similarly motivated by beetle.

Khepri is that beetle, and an aspect of sun god Ra. He is often represented by a beetle, but amusingly he is sometimes depicted as just a man with a beetle for a head.
Image
Khepri is specifically the rising sun, emerging towards the end of the nightly journey through the underworld and referring to the incubating part of the scarab's poop use. Alas, while I will Entirely avoid poop in my VN, Khepri is still a big deal and it is only suitable to place him in an important position, and there are few higher positions in Cyberpunk than corporate executives. Additionally, a subgenre of cyberpunk is solarpunk, which takes a more optimistic view on human progress, pollution, and climate change than the usual haze that characterizes a majority of cyberpunk. Khepri, solarpunk, renewal. It's a perfect fit.

Corporations are usually antagonists in fiction, big faceless affronts to humanity and so on, while protagonists tend to be heroic individuals fighting for individual freedom and pushing back against the status quo. I feel that giving the player some corporate authority would be unique and create some natural choices. Would a player use their corporate authority to change things and make the world a better place despite the inevitable opponents and challenges, or would they enjoy their turn to abuse that power just as so many businesses have done before? Is it too late to change things, or is it worth trying regardless?
Last edited by Startlefish on Tue Mar 15, 2022 11:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Bug Gods

#6 Post by Startlefish »

Another boring update. Evidently I am still sick, which has somewhat limited progress, but I was able to move past another barrier. 1 step back, 2 steps forwards so to say.

I had not been sure quite what to do with one of the routes, Scorpion. I was initially thinking a cyberpunk heist which sounds pretty cool in a vacuum. Upon reflection, it would not mesh well with the broad goals and themes, in addition to some more practical issues. I'll perhaps talk about it more in detail later, but in short I replanned some of the initial chapters slightly to allow for some weird stuff to happen later.

Some of the most personally memorable works of fiction are those that take things in a completely unexpected direction. There may be hints and warnings early on but the first and second halves might as well be separate stories with their tonal dissonance. It's jarring and sometimes it works, sometimes it does not, but it is difficult to forget. I'll see if I can pull something like that off, even if only for the fact that it would be fun.

Anyways, it is not as if mythology is consistent, predictable, and ordinary to begin with. I still need to talk about the Sazae-oni, after all.

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Re: Bug Gods

#7 Post by Startlefish »

Now healthy again!

I have begun the absolute basics of figuring out Ren'Py and hey, it it much easier than I thought it would be. I took a couple of programming classes years ago and apparently some of it stuck with me after all this time. Bug Gods now technically exists! In a faint, primordial state, but it is there. A small part of me wants to just squash it while I still can and delete everything, but fortunately the greater part still wants to see what it could become.

So, length. Evidently complicated to figure out. I have assumed Bug Gods would be relatively long. Not FSN, Clannad, etc. long but still fairly long even if just by virtue of my scope. I want to write a story with specific themes in however many words it takes to write that story, with my only plan being to adjust as needed. Accordingly, I never bothered to figure out exactly how long that story would be.

BUT, as previously mentioned, if this thing is ever to see the light of day anytime soon then I'll need help at some point. To get help I'll need to be more specific with my scope, though it turns out that estimating length is difficult when you are barely in the midst of your first project.

Nevertheless, to skip over my time spent agonizing over hypotheticals, we'll guess 25 hours for a very rough estimate. Around 3 hours per route (8) and round up a little bit. For another rough estimate, we'll say 10k words an hour, 250k in total, and we actually have ourselves a fairly hefty novel. Might be longer, or more likely a bit shorter, but it seems like a nice target to begin with.

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Re: Bug Gods

#8 Post by Startlefish »

72% conceptualized. I don't know how quick future progress will be on that front, it could either take a while or I may have a burst of inspiration. Either way, no real rush. Next priority is continuing on basic Ren'Py programming lessons and writing to give myself something to practice on. I have an idea of at least the first 1/5-2/3 of each route as well as the ends, and if anything it will be the remaining escalations and climaxes that will change the most from now through completion. It is truly time to start getting into the thick of things.

I will treat this week as warmup for writing and attempt to write as much as possible the next so I can get some general idea of how long it will be to fully script. I now realize that "fairly hefty" and "a nice target" fail to articulate the sheer quantity of time required for writing out a 250k word script. I am motivated though, to say the least. (optimism!)

Snail

Snails are slow, their singular foot gets them nowhere quickly. They have naturally been used to represent slowness and sloth, in addition to other traits depending on the culture.

Yes, Snails are not really bugs. Snails are gastropods. Spiders can eat snails though, so I have a lore reason to include them as honorary bug gods.

To begin with: The Maya. the Mayan calendar works around three calendars, a "long count," Tzolkin (a 260 day ritualistic cycle), and Haab, a 365 day cycle. The Haab was the civil calendar, lining up nicely with the solar year, but it is difficult to divide 365 evenly. They still tried, dividing 365 up into 18, 20-day months, but this still leaves 5 ill-fitting days which practically demand someone to blame. Wayeb, snail-god, was determined to be the god of bad luck, misfortune, and already odd days. Additionally his period seems to be associated with the end of the year, introspection, and reflection.

The Aztec's creation myth described four previous worlds and suns before the current. One proposition for the current formation of sun and moon involved Tecciztecatl and Nanahuatzin. Someone has to be the sun after all, and Tecciztecatl was the popular choice. He panicked at the last moment though, giving the relatively poor and humble Nanahuatzin to courageously leap in first. Tecciztecatl, to his credit, followed soon after but the gods noted his cowardice and only allowed him to become the moon. Also, they slapped a rabbit on his face for some reason. The snail association (well, sea-snail) comes from the moon itself (shell-like) and perhaps his hesitation.

Snails are also associated with lust for some reason. Some say they are tasty and an aphrodisiac, though I admit I have not tried. Some species of snail stab one another with a "love dart" as part of the mating process. A literal stab with a literal dart, and a potential inspiration for Eros'/Cupid's arrows.

One of my most treasured myths is that of the Sazae-Oni, a snail yōkai. A young woman was rescued from the sea by pirates. Pirates, being pirates, had less than virtuous intentions but surprisingly the woman was really into. After doing the deed, with everyone, she literally took all of their balls. Understandably piqued, the pirates lobbed her into the water where she revealed her true form as snail yōkai extraordinaire, and offered to trade the family jewels back for pirate gold. The pirates took the trade. There is a punchline in Japanese as those bits of the male anatomy may be called kin-tama, golden balls, so they traded gold for gold.

Anyways, a choice-centric VN is made meaningful by consequences. Unwillingness to commit to a route or a complete failure to choose are bad endings. The snail-god route will not necessarily punish for choices but it will demand a response to the consequences of your actions. Owning up to those decisions may be risky and difficult, but hesitation is defeat.

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Re: Bug Gods

#9 Post by Startlefish »

Now updating every other week. Progress will be consistent but if I have the urge to write I will want to put that towards writing the script. Also, progress in these writing stages will be uninteresting for the most part, at least to begin with.

~2% towards a complete first draft! I feel I could be faster, but to be fair to myself most of these two weeks has been figuring out a routine and identifying solutions to problems.

First problem: consistency. Consistency seems to be one of the most important qualities for writing anything, especially a very long thing. Whether you write a little or write a lot, as long as you keep writing then theoretically it will eventually be done. I'd like eventually to be sooner than later, but life happens and I am easily distracted. To mitigate distractions, get back on track, and maintain at least daily progress, I found a site, Pacemaker, to track daily words. Not 100% necessary but thus so far I have found it helpful. I like the bursts of confetti it gives when you make an update, too. Just don't pay too much attention to end date, daily goals, etc. I have been tweaking those constantly as I determine possibilities.

https://www.pacemaker.press/users/Start ... s/bug-gods

Another problem: Elden Ring. I beat it yesterday, finally, after a glorious and ponderous 100 hours. Probably plenty I haven't seen or done, but for the time being I am more free for being productive.

Another: computerless time. I write majorly on my computer but there are times in which I am inspired but I don't have access to my computer. I always have my phone on me, but hate typing on my phone. To bridge the gap I'm getting a small wireless keyboard so I can just type on my phone when the mood strikes me.

And a couple of other misc. thoughts/problems. There are certainly formal formatting rules, but I am ignoring those. Faster just to get out as many words as possible in whatever way makes sense to me. After drafting I will review and edit as initially needed, plug it all into Ren'Py, and then proofread from there (demos, professional assistance, and so on at this time). Programming I will continue to learn and practice, though priority is writing. It will be easier to identify what exactly I need to accomplish that way.

Initial plan is to focus down one route at a time, though I'll bounce between 1-2 others if I run into writer's block. Once I have the first route down, or at least most of it, then I'll start to seriously pursue some initial sprites, assets, and so on to make a demo. We'll see from there, but I may likely release episodically as things get done. At the very least I'll keep updating under this ideas board until I have something to show for it.

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Re: Bug Gods

#10 Post by Startlefish »

Another 5% towards the draft!

It's still very early, but now that I have a bit of writing out of the way we may as well see how our initial estimates were looking. As a reminder, 250k words in total, ~30k words per route with a 10k cushion. By progress is rather vague to measure in anything but wordcount since this is a first draft, but it feels like I have completed about 1.75 chapter's worth in 13000 words, so about 7500 words per chapter.

Oh no.

So that would give us 7500 words per chapter, *8 for 60,000 words per route, *8 for 480,000 words in total. Turns out that I suck at estimating scope and I better start writing more. My hour count was not too far off though.

Anyways, it's not all that bad. A lot more manageable when considered route by route. 60k words is not at all insurmountable. If I continue at my current pace that will be ~8 weeks, or even less if I really do pick up the pace. Yeah, I better really start thinking about doing this episodically...

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Re: Bug Gods

#11 Post by Startlefish »

Oops, missed a week entirely. It's just as well, nothing terribly exciting and I was sick for part of it.

I now have well over 30k words down, continuing to make steady progress. As always I'd like to be faster, but in the end this is still a hobby for me and I have the rest of life to deal with. That usually ends up being more important.

For the relatively close future, I'm not worried about social media management anymore. When it comes time for that, I'll just do it since it really would not be that complicated. Everything else should be as expected. Draft, proofread, program by myself, find people for extra proofreading and feedback when I have something concrete, finalize art assets as I approach completion, worry about other stuff when it comes up. Disorderly, but I'm sleepy. All of my extra energy, such as it is, goes towards writing. That's the best place to direct it towards if I'm ever going to release anything.

100% going to release episodically. Moth first, probably the most grounded of the routes. Just normal people trying to live a normal life while weird crap starts to happen. After that, probably snail as their actions, good or ill, can easily mess with the moths. Bees after, slightly more complicated and somewhat related to the previous routes, likewise with the Mantises. Scorpion or beetle afterwards, ideally in that order but it depends on whether or not I actually have a sense of what I want to do with the scorpion by then. Worm will be after or in between those two as their route will be the most unique. Finally: spiders. The concluding route will be at the end.

I've realized that I have a theme of duality throughout all of my planned routes. Part of it was intentional, the rest of it just turned out that way. The beekeeper has their bees, beetle has their aide, scorpion has whatever supernatural nonsense they will have to deal with, snail with have a monster of some kind of variety, two mantises with opposing goals, and two moths. Worm is the exception, but worm isn't supposed to be there in the first place like a proper computer worm, so it's rather fitting. Accordingly, I think it would be interesting to eventually do a secondary, B-side route as a bonus, showing things from the other perspective. Not critical to the plot, but just extra content. I believe this is one of the strengths of VN's as a medium, multiple routes providing perspectives on the story and world, so it would be a shame not to capitalize on that.

But emphasis on eventually, you have to have an A-side before you can have a B-side. Finish one route, work on B-side in the interlude while working on next A route, something like that.

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Re: Bug Gods

#12 Post by Zelan »

This idea is really, really cool :D I just read through all your update posts, and I loved reading your pieces on each of the bug gods you researched. I'm also really interested in the route structure you mentioned in the first post - it's unique, and I like the idea of being to influence other routes based on the choices I make and the order I play them in.

Best of luck with this! I'll look forward to more updates. (:

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Re: Bug Gods

#13 Post by Startlefish »

*Just posting to let anyone looking know that I am not dead, just very distracted. Progress is steady! I'll edit with more ramblings in the next couple of days.

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Re: Bug Gods

#14 Post by Startlefish »

More like weeks lol.

In short: still writing. well over 60k words now, woohoo! It is slightly annoying and mostly amusing to watch GoogleDocs slowly break down as I make progress. It refuses to give me live word-count updates and struggles with grammar corrections. Fortunately, there are extensions for both though they have their struggles as they try to process the sheer bulk of the effort. Regardless, GoogleDocs is still the most convenient way for me to work on it even despite some minor hiccups.

Progress is slow, primarily due to multiplying real-life shenanigans that keep popping up. I'm getting back on track, and will likely update more frequently again (for realsies(?)).

Music! Low on the priority list right now, but it's been a little bit on my mind. There aren't a lot of cyberpunk VN's, or at least I haven't heard of a lot. VA-11 HALL-A is the most notable that I have encountered, though I wouldn't wholly call its music cyberpunky, with a couple of exceptions. To further expose my lack of musical knowledge, I would call it jazzy and traditional for VN's. It's great for VA-11 HALL-A, but for mine, I would prefer to go for something more ambient and synthy.

I hope that adds up to at least 1 coherent thought.

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