Wrap Up 2023
For posterity’s sake, here’s everything I made this year (okay, not everything, but the big releases, y’know?):
A Circle Of Charity
A visual novel about 3 women and how their fears and desires help and hurt each other. This has become my most popular work and I think it is probably my best. I was in a real creative dry spell last year, working on something that had similar themes to Charity but that ultimately ended up being too ambitious. (It also had too much gameplay. The worst thing you can do as a game developer is add gameplay.) I took the main themes from that story, which I had been thinking about for a long time, to create this instead.
It’s no doubt obvious that trans women are deprived from womanhood. Many of them wish to be a safe, nurturing, caring presence. Obstructed from the usual social reproductive work, they try to fulfill that need in other ways. Unfortunately, that also becomes a great locus for mental illness to form. All of the characters of Charity are haunted by these desires and it manifests in different ways. Despite everything they try to take care of each other.
Well, if that description intrigues you, you can play A Circle of Charity here.
Kitten Milk Replacer
Another visual novel, this time for VNCUP #2! After Charity I thought I was basically done with depressing transgender games but VNCUP pulled me back in… I spent most of my time during the contest drafting and redrafting KMR, mostly unhappy with it, until I had something that was workable. Foto added some amazing music and visuals which helped me feel a lot better about it. Speaking of, we have a seperate site and itch account for collabs now! You can expect more releases from us over at Middle Sea Software.
KMR covers a lot of the same feelings Charity did, but the main idea it centers around is that while many trans woman have a personal online brand of being a horny dominant top etc, in real life they are often just disabled NEETs with bad life prospects. The theme of VNCUP #2 was yuri so there’s also more focus on love and lust.
If that sounds up your alley you can check out Kitten Milk Replacer here.
Tear Ripple
Another visual novel from Middle Sea Softare! Wow, two in one year. That’s great for our stock evaluation. This time Foto did all the writing and I did some auxillary stuff like helping with Ren’py and taking background photographs. A very mysterious story presented in a distorted way. Maybe you can puzzle out the truth? You should give it a try.
Please play Tear Ripple at this link (download recommended).
S*ssy Caption Aesthetic
A small zine about random trans thoughts that wouldn’t fit anywhere else. Just something I made on a whim. I was slightly annoyed by random discourse I had seen on the internet, as well as this modern notion that zine readers should expect high quality professional art. The only way I could expunge these random thoughts and fight against the gentrification of zines was to, well, make a zine. Enjoy!
Read S*ssy Caption Aesthetic here.
What’s next?
Some things I plan to work on in the New Year:
A game about Mahjong!
I started playing Riichi Mahjong this year and it’s been a great fun exciting and healthy activity. Let’s all recall that famous quote from Fukumoto’s Atsuize Pen-chan: “Mahjong causes great damage to the human spirit without a single benefit”. But I think it would be interesting to write about for another visual novel.
An RPGMaker game with Foto!
We’ve been working on one, kind of a Yume-Nikki-Fangame-esque thing but with some twists. We’ll see how that goes!
Mindmapping software!
I’ve been slowly creating Domingo, a mindmapping tool inspired by Domino 2. I use domino a lot for sketching out and designing my projects, and I wanted to make my own version that focuses more on my use cases.
The End
Okay, that was my 2023. Happy new year everybody! My resolution is to find a nicer toilet to take photos in. Bye~