Toxic Yuri VN Jam: Week 1 and 2
Hi hi hi all! I'm no night owl, but I messed up my sleep cycle and got to see the clock strike midnight on June 1. I eagerly awaited the announcement of the theme, which was... TOXIC YURI!
...lmao jk. They trolled us. It's Psychosexual Trauma. Pretty in theme for a game jam where girls make each other worse. I overthought the theme waaaay too hard and, against my best wishes, exposed myself to Freudian psychology again.
Then my teammates reminded me we're already working within that theme.
As soon as midnight, I started furiously scribbling mind maps and concept bubbles. I did a couple sketches of the main characters, who had quite the evolution:
We figured it was good to give her a more androgynous design to make it easier for the player to self-insert onto her. Obviously, you'll be able to name her, but her canon name for simplicity is Ainsley.
We arrived at her final design, which I'm in love with. So much so that I got stickers of her.
We also talked about the different routes. In addition to doing different stories for each of our tastes, we're also doing different styles of visual novel progression; for instance, I'm doing mine based on a decision map, while another route is using a point system. We also decided that there would be three endings for each character, plus a "true" ending.
As for my route, I'm going with the tride and true Mean Businesslady (trademarked) (not really). We've named her Serenity, she's one of the most influential vampi-- I mean, businessladies in the country. She intends to train Ainsley as harshly as her employees; worse, even!
The dance our poor hero ends up in is run by a woman named simply The Duchess. She is at the top of the food chain with an air of elegance around her. She takes quite the interest in Ainsley, and goes to observe her...
This is proving to be a greeeaat way to improve my background drawing skills and lean into drawing expressions (one of my fav parts of drawing!) I'm already having a ton of fun with the art!!!
Anyways, we've got a story, characters, and a basic route map plotted out. I've made a ton of progress on the art, both character expressions and CGs, and have made a dent in the introduction and Serenity's script.
Hopefully this next week I'll actually do a weekly check in and not miss the very first week, lolz. Anyways, super exciting stuff! Can't wait to show you what else will come next!