29th of November, 2023.
This morning, we had our first snowfall.
The previous days had been dark and rainy. My kind of weather.
I’ve always liked the rain, much more than snow.
I remember walking home after detention each day, trudging through the quiet rainy streets.
But it’s not like I hated snow. I definitely found time to appreciate it.
I used to live next to a beach, at that point in my life.
In Summer it was packed. I used to hang out in a cafe/bar thing owned by the rowing club.
I didn’t know anyone there, I don’t think I even learned their names, but they liked me.
Some of them played Yugioh, which was nice.
Some gave me free drinks, which was just as nice.
I got sick of Lemonade pretty quick though. I still can’t drink it today…
I’d rarely step on the beach itself. Too many tourists. Too many people.
But in Winter, all that noise would go away.
The streets would grow quiet, but there’d still be some hustle and bustle during the day.
The beach, however…
When snow lay upon the sand, no one went near. I don’t know how many people even checked.
Deep down, those people must’ve thought… “it’s snowing; why would I go to the beach?”
And they missed out on seeing that crystal-white site.
But the beach was where I grew up. The beach was where I lived.
When the tourists had gone, I’d take the route home that involved walking across the shoreline.
The water looked dark in the night.
The snow-covered sand was bright.
And far off in the distance, a red boat would linger.
I saw that landscape day after day, but never another person.
That, to me, was quite alright.
Deep down, those people must’ve thought…
“It’s snowing; why would I go to a beach?”
An obvious question with an obvious answer.
Because it’s snowing.
Doesn’t that sound like a marvellous sight?

As you may be able to tell, my desire to write goes unquenched.

Normally at the end of a year, I’ll have written so much that the competition for which paragraph was my favourite to write is fierce.
This year… not so much.
The one game I released this year was light on prose. My other main focus has been 80% art and programming.
Not to say Yoshioka didn’t have some great storytelling in it, but nothing beats a paragraph of poetry, does it?

But my favourite line of the year would have to be this simple little triplet from Yoshioka’s future.

Like the sun.
To my blurry, drunken eyes,
you shone.

Let’s start by talking about our year’s idol.

Yoshioka

This year, I launched ‘Yoshioka’. It was my March-long project, if you haven’t read the progress reports, definitely give them a check. There’s some fun stuff on show in there.

Last year I spoke about how I was looking for ways to reduce the amount of assets required per game by implementing alternative techniques, and the engine used for Yoshioka allowed me to do just that.
I may not stick with Kirikiri specifically, I definitely want to check out some of the successors that have released first, but Kirikiri is the home for Yoshioka, and I appreciate it for saving me from Ren’py’s clunkiness.
Moving Aious over to a KAG-based engine certainly seems like the best way forward, so I’m happy to say I solved my biggest questions from 2022 in just the first three months of this year.

It was 2018 when I created the character named Yoshioka Aoi. Part fan-character, part symbol of the infallibility of a modern teller of past memories that Aious naturally has to grapple with.
When incorporating the Sentou Gakuen newspaper articles into Aious’ script, Aoi became a crucial mechanic.

My original run of articles involved concepts such as living statues, sentient trees, and a force that linked all things. My second run of articles explained what this linking force was, and questioned what would happen if one were to become unchained from it.
This theory was named the ‘World of Darkness’, as an empty world populated by lights.
Throughout the story, these lights are used to uncover lost memories and to switch perspectives from Taka to the living statues, the sentient trees, and all the strange things the school has to offer. Lights that join the chain of connections.

Those mysteries were first written by Sentou Gakuen’s writer, Vendo, and handed off to me to extrapolate upon. I was incorporating someone else’s work into my world, a world which (at the time) was inarguably fictional.
Sentou Gakuen wasn’t a real place, the person ‘Taka’ didn’t really exist, and yet that is my history. Fiction that is real.
Aoi was made based on the work of someone else. With her, I incorporated someone else’s work into my world. So… her nature is no different to Vendo’s mysteries, and like them, she’s purely fictional.

The comparison is obvious… How much of me, of Taka, is real? Is he a fictional character like Aoi, someone that I made? Or is he someone that I was?
It’s like… I exist to make real what’s fake.
What I want is to make.

Aoi is first and foremost her own person. The fact that I created her and I am the narrator of Aious means… they’re inherently linked, however, her story is standalone, disconnected entirely from Aious.
She has her own story, and I’m glad I got to show a bit of that off before Aious’s release.
She was a shy rock vocalist with short hair and some family issues. To match Taka’s eye colour, she’s represented by the colour blue. To match Aious’ narrator, her older brother is red. The same was true of By Your Side’s Protagonist and Heroine.

But at that point, Aoi was just a short story listed on this website with some artwork to match… and in 2019, the film ‘Sora no Aosa o Shiru Hito yo’ was released.
The protagonist, Aioi Aoi, was a shy rock vocalist with short hair and some family issues. Represented by the colour blue, her older sister’s boyfriend in red…
Uh oh. That sounds kinda similar.

They were a different kind of shy from one another, but… they looked a bit similar, had similar backgrounds, used the same symbolism, and had the same name.
It felt like someone had made the story I wanted to make, but changed some little details here and there.
Since it wasn’t quite right, I continued on with writing Yoshioka Aoi’s story, slightly worried that people would think she’s a ripoff of someone else’s character.

I wasn’t fast enough.
What I made wasn’t good enough.

In 2023, the series ‘It’s MyGO!!!!!’ released. I wrote a big ol’ analysis of it, even made a video version, and the fans seem to like it! But…
The protagonist, Takamatsu Tomori, was a shy rock vocalist with short hair, though thankfully no family issues this time. And yet… she’s so much closer to my Aoi in personality and style.
Represented by the color blue, her best friend in red, Tomori has the exact same hairstyle, the exact same fashion sense, and she writes lyrics that thematically mirror ones I’ve written for Aoi.

Noroshi – Tomori:
Like a fledgling standing in a wasteland
(With these hands)
My chest trembles
(I’ll make your chest tremble)

Indulge in This – Aoi:
Hold your ground,
feel it shake.
Feel your heart, cold and dark,
start to break.

Noroshi – Tomori:
It’s like I’m actually the only one from a different planet
Even so, it’s okay, if we can resonate with each other
(It’s okay, so play with me)
With that sound
(With your voice)

Indulge in This – Aoi:
I can scream too
Be a person too
We’re all people together.
Let’s be one.
Speak to me.

Overall, she’s a bit meeker than Aoi is… but if you merge Tomori with the protagonist of Sora no Aosa, every element of Yoshioka Aoi is there. Again, Tomori isn’t quite what I want to write, so I’ll go on making Yoshioka content, but… now I can’t help but feel like I’m ripping off two stories that were released after I began posting my own.

This time, I was fast enough…
But it wasn’t enough.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course. Aious, initially named Aliez (inspired by the French pop singer Alizee), needed a prompt name change after ‘Aldnoah Zero’ launched with an opening song titled aLIEz. I renamed the game to Aious.
Earlier that same year, a film named ‘Harmonie’ released that used the exact same metaphorical language I’d been using in my articles back in 2012. It felt like a film I would have written, that someone else had made.

In 2019 I released the game ‘By Your Side’, whose protagonist was often named “Darling” by the heroine. This prequel to a big story I had planned—set after the heroine’s death—was soon predicted in 2022 by Porter Robinson’s Everything Goes On.

I told you to forget me, but you stayed by my side
When I said
Don’t try to make yourself remember, darling

That’s just one of many that match ‘By Your Side’ in one way or another. It wasn’t that long ago that Youtube served me up a random <500 view video with “darling” in the title (the algorithm is scary!) so maybe this stuff is bound to find me.
Or… maybe I’m just too compelled by a desire to make connections. I’m a writer, after all.

Part of the reason I launched ‘Yoshioka’ in 2023 was that I wanted to test new methods of game development. I’d been stuck working on the same game for such a long time, I hadn’t had many opportunities to see how technology had evolved in the time since.
Part of the reason was that Aoi is intimately linked to everything I write, and getting her introduction out of the way early means I don’t have to worry about panic developing a game for her before Aious is set to launch.
But… a big reason for why I took a break from the rest of my projects to get Aoi’s story introduced was, to put it plainly, to get ahead of things.

I had beaten ‘Sora no Aosa o Shiru Hito yo’ to the punch by a year, and yet I had done so via some tenuous web pages that have no date attached unless you dig into file names and upload dates. It wasn’t satisfying, and it wasn’t reassuring.

This time, I beat ‘It’s MyGO!!!!!’ to the punch, just barely. I did so with a game that has a clear upload date and lots of date-stamped blog posts about the development process. Even then, it was only by half a year…

It’s just not good enough.

If I don’t get these ideas out of my head now, someone will eventually beat me to it, and the things they create will never satisfy me the way my own works do.

There are millions of people out there, all creating things. Many of them have more money than I do, more resources, better connections.
Sometimes, once in a blue moon, one of those creators will unknowingly create something that I was hoping to make.
And sometimes, when the stars align, they’ll make something that I’ve already done.

A broken clock is right twice a day, and every thought I have will pass through another human’s brain.
But the things they make will never be what I want them to be.

What I want is to make.

Aious ~Proof of Concept~

To date when this line is written, Halloween just passed.
Every time one of these holidays comes up, I chip away at Aious’ equivalent. “What did I do in 2012?” I ask myself. I relive those memories, write away what details come to mind, and do the same the next holiday…
Not long ago, it was the end of Summer. For 2012, that was the Summer Festival. I remember it well.
I helped Hooves and Ereve with their yukata, sent them off for the day, did the same with Nic, and then… I mostly hung out with Claudee.
I say “hung out”, but the reality is, she wanted someone to spend time with, and I felt somewhat responsible that the “someones” she’d otherwise be spending the day with weren’t there.
But let’s recap the events that led up to that day briefly.

taka “Oh come on! We’ll be fine! Where’d the usual Lucy energy go?”
lucy “There’s no such thing. You imagined it.”
taka “If my imagination was that good, I’d have no need for people!”
lucy “So you’ll be happy to leave. I’m doing you a favor.”
taka “Okay but seriously, what’s wrong? You knew it’d end like this, right?”
lucy “I never meant to force you into a lost fight…”
taka “Lost? Ahaha… So that’s what you see?”
lucy “I’m sorry…”
taka “You’ve been crying too much.”
taka “Look at me. This is what victory looks like!”
lucy “…”

At that time, the war had been over for a few months.
The burnt-out DC had all been replaced (though the replacements were… questionable. Honoo liked to take bribes.)
The missing staff had all returned, and Vendo was even writing again.
Lucy was long gone. Furumi too. My club, OT, had died and been reborn, but it was quieter than before, chiefly due to Nic’s absence.
I’d lost most of the people I spoke with, struck up a new friendship with the then-shy Mica, and then I’d gotten banned for 30 days.
Those 30 days were mostly spent with the Sentou Rock Squad, the very same group who destroyed OT to begin with. Them, and a lot of literature talk with Yuki, who suddenly became the person I spoke with most often. Maybe that too was due to OT’s quietness… or maybe the fact we were the only writers in the writer club was what caused that. Who knows?

So, 30 day ban. Returning after that, I felt like I had little more than the old reliables. Sena was always there for me as my oldest remaining friend in SG.
Aregura too, despite our timezone difference and school-life schedules forcing us to wake up early and stay up late to chat with one another. I think this was exam study period too, when Raysena was going hard on studying—yeah yeah, it definitely was. I remember that clearly.
And then there was my new friend Mica, who had since gathered a strange friendship group.
Actually, just before the ban, the four of us: Sena, Aregura, Mica and I, formed a group on Sports Day and had some fun. I was the only member of the group who had high stats, so Mica was a bit hesitant to join at first, but we ended up having a nice day.
Oh, the new newspaper chief Kyo was our group’s mascot. I had a good run with the old newspaper team, so Kyo was trying to get me to write a new series for him at the time.
To a lesser extent, Astin, Kanna, Mizami and DeltaAlpha were there too, but… only in short conversations.

taka “Come on, it’ll be fine! Where’d the usual Mica smugness go?”
mica “Am bad at this kind of thing.”
taka “Me too, but it’ll be fun~ Don’t worry about it!”
are “Let’s have fun!”
mica “I don’t think I’ll win anything…”
taka “Win? Ahaha… So that’s what you’re worried about?”
mica “…”
taka “I know they’re calling it a competition, but that’s not what this is.”
mica “It isn’t?”
taka “Look at me. You think I care about victory?”
taka “Honestly, I just wanna have fun with the people I like. That’s all that matters to me.”
taka “So… let’s have fun together, okay?”
mica “….okay. But don’t get angry when we lose!”
taka “Ahaha, welcome aboard! I’ll expect great things from you.”
mica “Don’t!!”

Mica’s new friendship group was an eclectic bunch. It had formed while I was away, so I didn’t get too involved, but… Claudee was a powerful pesterer.
That group was: Mica, Akimune, Adashi, Akemi, and Claudee.

Akimune was the new girl everyone hated. Lucy was out, Aki was in, and somehow I had gotten involved with both. She was such a public menace that ex-menace Yuka logged in just to tell her to shut up.
Nic was on a bit of a power trip as a DC at the time, somewhat spurred by a rivalry he had with another power-tripping DC named Shrade, and somewhat a result of his attempts to charm a girl who didn’t like him. He vowed to “become someone else” for her sake, disregarding his club in the process.
He threatened Aki a lot, and since he was hard-committing to his bad-boy phase, I was definitely on Aki’s side for that one.

Adashi was, to put it plainly, a creep. I never liked the guy.
He was the guy who played the feminine role, which isn’t inherently bad, I suppose… though how nice must it be to be able to choose that role rather than have it foisted upon you by everyone you meet?
But he was manipulative about it. He’d feign interest in feminine topics to get girls to open up, then try to build up dependence with them so that… well, they’d be dependent on him. Real skeevy type.
At one point, he tried to get Aki to stop speaking to anyone but him. Even though the ask was ridiculous, and Aki hated men quite a lot at the time, she was a fragile type with few friends… so instead of immediately cutting him off, she asked me whether she should consider hearing him out. Duh, of course not!
…but that’s what dependence does to people, and he knew what he was doing. We dropped that guy from the group in a heartbeat. Reason 1 for why I spent the summer festival with Claudee.

Around me, the gasps and cheers of students enthralled by the show resound.
As if their emotions have gathered in the sky.
Amidst that noise, my eyes go fuzzy. My focus fades.
As if their emotions have gathered in my mind.
As if my mind has grown ever distant from my self.
I too stare up at the blurry explosion of blue and red above.
They fall so far away.
…
What is it that people find so fun about a bunch of pointless pyrotechnics?
I gaze beyond the stars and wonder…
Why are these humans like this?

Like summer, I wish them away.

Akemi was the bookish girl. Not the cute shy type like Mica, more just… plain. But she was very pleasant, and had a very calming presence that mellowed out Aki’s anger and Mica’s smugness. We didn’t speak directly much, but… like I said before, this was exam period.
Akemi, like Nic, wanted to change herself. She did it in a less destructive manner though; she committed to her studies. She had a dream planned out for herself, a career she wanted to chase, and… she never told anyone.
Except, for some reason, me. She was much closer to all the other members of this friendship group, but… one day she started up a conversation, explained her ambitions to me, and asked if I would let the others know why she was leaving SG. Reason 2 for why I spent the summer festival with Claudee.

Finally, Claudee was the chatty girl who made friends with people quickly and kept the group on friendly terms with one another. Two shy girls, an angry girl, a creep, and a distant 5th in me.
So, two members down, Mica’s making other friends, Aki isn’t around, and some personal home-life issues threaten Claudee’s ability to be online for much longer.
I felt bad, because Akemi had told me she was leaving without saying anything to the rest of the group.
I felt bad, because Aki was constantly under threat of being banned by someone who was supposed to be my friend.
I felt bad, because my plan to make Mica popular had… led to Mica being popular, pulling her away from Claudee.
I felt bad, because the guy I personally didn’t like was the one we ousted.
So… I spent that summer festival with Claudee. We had our usual group call the next day, only Aki joined us, we played some games, and then… I don’t know if we held a proper conversation ever again. Life took Claudee away from us.

Around that same time, someone else was making their leave.
Yuki, whom I’d been chatting with quite a bit in the prior months, had lost trust in me. In the Aki vs Nic war, I was against Nic, and Nic was friends with Yuki, so… there’s a natural conflict there. I would say bad things about Nic in a public place—while he was present, of course—and that wasn’t good for my image.
Yuki actually went incognito for a bit to try and figure out how I truly felt about what was happening to OT at the time, and I like to think it repaired our friendship, but… I think the DC burnout, the arguments with Nic, and the absence of Yuka were too much.

I know how disrespectful I must appear, from the outside, and from the inside.
But at the very least, I won’t lie to them.
If I can’t find my fun here, then I’ll go somewhere else.
With each step I’ve taken so far, I’ve lost a friend and made friends anew.
It may seem, right now and in times passed, that I was the first to move ahead.
That I was the one eager to move on, to let things pass.
But, in my eyes, I’m always late to leave…
The people I once knew already left this school a long time ago.

I had returned from a ban, made and lost a new group of friends in the blink of an eye, made an enemy of two of my best friends, and now one of them was leaving. My run in the newspaper during that period—I’m sorry Kyo—was a bit pessimistic as a result.
‘Why do people cry?’ and ‘When do we care?’ are really influenced by the context of the time. I had no reason to stick around anymore.

So finally, it’s Halloween. What did I do that day, in 2012?
…I helped Tiami, a volunteer librarian, collate every result of the Halloween event’s RNG encounter system. That’s right, I nerded it up in the library all day.
What an exciting way to end that trip through memory lane!
And that’s the way I’ve been working through the game’s script.

This world is one of invisible barriers.
And yet, this screen is all that remains…
Staring at the laptop, memories of old suddenly come to mind.

So… To close out this rambly section, I’d like to reveal that… I’ve been writing updates all year, I’ve got a big backlog of other Aious-related rambles to share, and I’ll be posting them once the game becomes my main focus again. We’re not missing out on any of that 2023 goodness!

I suppose I’ll end this with an excerpt of one such update…

After it offered us salvation, we realized that there was no difference.
A fake life was no less genuine than a real one. You’re no different when you’re playing someone else.
It wasn’t a better life, nor was it a worse one. It was just another.
That was the internet.

Aidos

It feels like it’s been forever since I spoke about Aidos with anyone, but I guess it’s only been a year.
After a couple years of crippling wrist pain, I’m finally able to consistently draw again… if I take breaks.
I took upon a self-imposed task involving drawing that… was meant to be a short hobby thing, but I massively underestimated it, so I’ve been splitting dev time between that project and Aidos. It’s safe to say, my familiarity with the Aidos artstyle is touch-and-go. I have to relearn a lot each time… but the art is definitely coming along.

Other than that, we’ve got lots of boring stuff, hot off the press! New SFX! New VFX! New expressions for characters! Redone lighting for some backgrounds!
And of course, what would a Visual Novel be without a little bit of story?

The broken home still smelt of flame.
In the smoke, she felt it reach her. Seep into her soul.
The panic and misery and pain. Her brain too broken, too twisted, too maddening for her to believe.
It lured her in. Her dreary feet dragged under the weight of it all.
Compressing her down into a single moment, crystalline memories denser than diamond.
A refracted light warping her reflection.
Her face twisted into one of disgust.
The boy she had left behind yet lingered there.
Silent at first, through croaks, he cracked.
“Nonono-notme-no-itwas-nononot-“
Flinching at the slightest gust of wind. Countless emotions bubbling up through his throat.
As if the flames still burned, he sheltered himself from the world.

…I should’ve probably chosen a fun section of the script instead, huh?

◇　◇　◇

When we started the game, we used a lot of stock code to quickly implement features on day 1, so that our writers could employ them immediately. While this is nice and convenient for a short project, once Aidos became a full-length title the stock stuff had to go. One example of this is the game’s text message function.

The code we used originally for sending and receiving messages (sourced from the lemmasoft forums) served its purpose well enough. The way it essentially works is that it creates a bunch of boxes that can receive and display text. Give it a who and a what, and it’ll display a name and a message. Very simple and lightweight, very easy to mod, but it had some awkward limitations and was a generalist piece of code.
These limitations were built into the core of the system, so rather than work at changing it part-by-part, I decided to make an entirely original version that was built to do exactly what we needed.

This is older footage before text and font changes were made.

My messaging system’s a lot less generalist, so it’s not something you could plug and play into any game that needs text messaging, but its a lot more visually-minded. There are multiple textboxes fit on-screen at one time, four position slots, text takes up 1 slot, images take up 2. They all have pop-up animations upon being shown, and when the other person is sending a message to you, a “person is typing” graphic will display where the next message will appear.
The time it takes to send or receive a message can be modified, and the types of message boxes can be changed beyond just the two initial colours of red and blue, in the case of group chats.

The way it works is that… basically there are, like I said earlier, four slots for boxes. Similarly, there are four stored values for text that you can change at any point. Set messagename1 to “Taka” and messagetext1 to “Hello” and when the first message displays, you’d see a hello from me~
Push messageboxred to boxposition1, and it’ll show up in the top left. Show message1_text and message1_name, and it’ll display whatever values you had stored earlier. A studious character may even edit their message mid-conversation to fix typos!
Each box can be displayed whenever you want, and naturally, the text won’t change until it is overwritten, so you can bring up the last conversation with ease without having to set and display each message 1-by-1 again. You can always start from where you last left off. Unlike the stock system, the text displayed on the phone will be saved into the history screen as any normal textbox would.
Also, the whole phone has a dedicated display layer, so you can easily show things behind or in front of the device, making it a more dynamic object. Want a character to butt in and snatch it straight off your screen? Easily done.

Oh, also for choices, it’s very simple. You set the phonechoice1 and phonechoice2 flags to whatever text you want, then “call screen phonechoices” and the choice buttons will display.
For my own convenience, I have it structured so that when a choice is selected, you tell the game to remember what scene you’re in, then boot the player over to a response handling section of the script where every phone conversation is programmed. Once the conversation is done, the player goes back to where they came from. This means I can store all my branching phone conversations in a dedicated text file and trigger them whenever I need.
If you wanted to though, you could very easily just place the whole thing in its chronological position in the script. It’ll look kinda messy and ugly for any other programmers or scriptwriters, but I can understand why some would prefer to have everything programmed in order.

Something this custom code allows that the stock code didn’t is… group messaging! Group messaging is actually super important because it’s intended for all three heroines to be familiar with you and each other, enough to have contact with one another regardless of which route you end up on.
Since our routes branch early, and our script has a limited size, none of our writers worked on this aspect of the game at all, so it falls to my feet.
To put it simply, including in-person events to build up this relationship isn’t realistic. So instead, we can chip away at it day-by-day with a group chat and imply some offscreen events that the protagonist simply wasn’t present for.

But for things that the protagonist is present for, there’s an important feature: the notes screen! Upon meeting a new character, the protagonist will dedicate a page in his notebook to them. The same is true of the items he collects. Whenever something major occurs, he’ll update his notes on the relevant pages. In game terms, it’s a quick way of tracking what route you’re on: the heroine and related side characters will have far more populated entries than the others. In non-game terms, it’s like… he’s writing a report or something! It’s a fun little touch that requires far more work than I’d like…

Part of that work can be seen in the sketch. For a character page, the character’s appearance will be included. It started out as a way to incorporate concept art into the game, but this doesn’t just apply to the heroines; it’s true of the side characters as well. This means… every character needs a drawn design, even those who have no in-game sprite.

And then of course, we need to write and program in all of the character and item notes, make sure they’re triggered at the right points and updated when intended.

◇　◇　◇

Something you may have noticed if you kept up with my Yoshioka posts is that I was able to put together backgrounds quite quickly. I’m very familiar with the process now, particularly with the type I named “pannables” in that series of posts.

You want floors? We’ve got floors!

Or maybe you’d prefer to stare at a wall.

That story about watching paint dry I told during Yoshioka’s development? The culprit is this game.

As I mentioned previously, I also redid the lighting of a few backgrounds, which was… an involved process. One such background can be seen here, in this video that also handily features a bunch of the visual effects work I mentioned before.

Scripting this stuff takes a lot of time in Ren’py. I miss working with the Yoshioka engine…

Aaaand that’s it! It’s a big ol’ update, and boy did I hold back. I’ve got so much more to say, but… there’s such a thing as too much text. I need to learn to shut up.

So for now, I’ll leave you with a line from Elisabeth’s fragile mind.