It has been a week or so since my last update! I had a busy week so I don't have a tonne of new things to share...
The progress I have made mostly came about last night when I decided to go ahead and lock in some big changes to the story. Not so much for this Visual Novel in particular, I just have to change a sprite and switched up some dialogue. Moreso, down the line if I do anything major with these characters it will give them some more motivation for things I want to explore, which is great. However, it will require even more trigger warnings now so that's a bummer but what can you do!?
Music
I have been redoing the soundtrack to be more consistently electronic and 8 bit game sounding. Basically just by replacing the instruments with really basic synthesizers that I'm cooking up myself. I do own Serum from years ago when I was a wee lad but I've been using Vital because I found it through a tutorial 😂 It's free!
I started a Soundcloud specifically to share the Love Theme I'm really proud of!
I love messing around with modulation and making weird sounds but it is something I can get carried away with. I originally got into music production during the Dubstep times...so I own NI's Massive too of course 😂
Story
I won't get too into the nitty gritty of the story since it's quite a short visual novel (only about 10-20 minutes long) but since this is my blog, I want to share my process. I was kind of stuck for a while, the story tackles some dark themes even though it's a silly sexy game. Things I would love to explore in something more fleshed out some day.
I love the old nunsploitation movies from the 60s and 70s, anything that goes into corruption, abuse and hypocrisy in the catholic church. So, my real goal some day would be to do another story showing Johanna's time living through that in her monastery, with multiple paths and different "love" interests.
This story can't explore that too much without becoming reliant on a lot of exposition, so it needed something else, some other topic I find interesting to dive into. A few days ago, I saw a painting of two women who really remind me of Shoshana and Johanna with an infant. Writing about motherhood has never interested me before because that's not something I want. I think it can be a sensitive topic for trans men in general, but speaking for myself I've had so many occasions where I've had to defend my stance that no, I don't want children to no avail!
But, lately with the rise of Christian nationalism (in the US mostly but I feel it brewing here too) always being on my radar I've been watching a lot of video essays about women slowly but surely losing their rights to choose whether or not they give birth. Alongside that more and more women are risking at home births with no midwives or check-ups through their entire pregnancies. It's all very medieval, at least in the popular media way.
So, Johanna's story in the future is going to deal with unwanted pregnancy. That's going to turn a lot of people away but I think it's relevant now. It's not all gloom and doom either, I have no interest in writing about women suffering incessantly. She has a woman who loves her, and who does want a child but can't conceive herself. She has a new mother figure in Shoshi's mother to reconcile her and help her through what she's facing.
Since I no longer identify in a personal sense with womanhood, it feels a lot more doable to explore this topic now through my artworks and stories.
(Shoshi's mom^)
That ended up pretty rambly! Hopefully it was at all interesting, I still have a lot to do but my goal is to finish this for the Queer Medieval Game Jam on Itch.io!