Hello, friends. Putting this one up for free since it's been a while, plus it works for the future of this page. (I will also be reposting it on my newsletter later in the week, as a result.)

According to here, the last time I updated here was in October of last year. That tracks because that's when things went to, excuse my Spanish, utterly and completely shit.

I am being quite serious. Several personal circumstances piled up at once in October, which made my VN plans go kablooey (more on that later) and then right around November or December, I was so tired from everything already dealt with, I took a small break. Then the Universe thought I needed more shit, so around some point in January, a family member had a terrible, terrible thing happen and I ended up having to be the sole caretaker of most things for a while. It's a whole lot better now, but I'm still having to basically assume I can't have stable things for a loooong while.

So any sense of professionalism I ever tried to do in the past few years with my work is moot now. I give up lol.

Especially because during all this time, my children went on vacation (I blame Magnus) and I had just started to catch up on some movies I missed during 2020-2024 (wonder why), and one of those movies awakened the nostalgia bug in me in the form of unhinged fanart time...and that's what has kept me sane all this time. I don't know why; you'd think drawing my original characters and doing original work would do that. But maybe playing in someone else's sandlot makes it better, because I'm not having to worry about making sure I forget 80% of the established details I gave to my stories? I don't know, someone smarter than me can figure that out.

I haven't posted all of that art on here because I don't believe in charging money for fanart, and this page is more for my original work. If anyone thinks they would like to see it on here as early access stuff or something, then please comment and say so! At this point, I'm desperate for backup plans involving money and my future on this planet lmao.

With that in mind, I did mention a VN.

Waaaay back in...March 2024? I think? I no longer remember, my memory has become that bad recently. Anyway, I found out about a game jam called Monstrous Desires, where you had to create a romantic VN that "heavily focuses on a monster may it be original or from classics, folklore, modern media, etc." Since what kind of monster was left up to us in the original realm, naturally, I decided to then use Astemar as the main character of the planned VN. I've been wanting to a) do something with Beast!Astemar (if you didn't know, uh, quick summary is last resort option where she becomes a monster); b) test out Renpy as a viable thing for ages; c) do something new, because I wasn't exactly having the juice to create comics or write prose for a bit. Apparently this should have been a clue to how 2024 would go.

Since the jam would start in August, it was also perfect. Life has a tendency to crap things up for me even with pre-planning out the wazoo, but since this was a jam where we were allowed to do pre-planning, it meant that I could enjoy the rush of doing a jam while also being wholly prepared. So I wrote out the story. My original plan was to have it be a two path romance visual novel: one with a path for Magnus (with varying branches inside it) and one for Max (with also other varying branches). Some of the branches were funny, and some different endings. One ending was the long, "proper" one though and you had to try to get it.

I still have that in mind (especially with finding out *this* year there's a genre called transhet? yay, it's your time, maxastemax sickos! ♥) but I realized very quickly (good skill, yanno?) that for the purposes of THIS jam, it was better to downsize a lot. Make the VN easy enough for me to include the Max path later, but give it more of a focus for now. The easiest then was Magnus and Astemar then, for many reasons. Magnus is often easier to write when it comes to Beast!Astemar lol.

Thus, a story was written. All branches planned out. All dialogue done. Then the logo and the title, which I still think rocks and I will likely not change it whenever I get to this VN again. it's hand-written and by that, I mean that I took out my brushes, tested a few, scanned the thing, edited and cleaned it up in Photoshop and Illustrator, and lo and behold:

After this, I started to look into assets, backgrounds, and designing some stuff and sketching some scenes. If you saw my Oriana The Gold post a few months ago, that was also part of the process. But I had to leave something for the jam, after all, those were the rules. I really liked what I was doing, especially since I had to learn how Renpy works and how the code in it works. I don't know if I'll have to relearn everything again once I touch it again one day, but it wasn't as difficult as I thought. The more difficult part was pretty much once again the eternal Viy question of "why is this working for everyone else but me?" Mostly with effects and transitions.


There were some minor ideas I had that I had to discard because I didn't want to confuse people too much or the idea wasn't panning out very well. One was having Astemar's claw be the cursor instead of a normal cursor. It worked really well, but in testing it, I had to click where normal people wouldn't in order to use the menu or go to the next scene. Therefore, I shelved it for another day. Here's the test gif:

Now the closer the jam got, the more I was finding myself once again apparently (not really, see above for the Universe) running out of time--despite having planned well enough that if September and October hadn't gone badly for me, I'd finish on time. if anything, I actually did--but so much stuff happened and it affected the CGs I was working on. I've been trying to curb down my perfectionist streak these past few days but I still struggle with "quality vs crap" compounded with "people deserve good product, not shoddy ones."

Here's one CG that I rushed a little bit but I still liked how it turned out. It shows what it needs to show. (Well. In static form. It's meant to be animated in the VN itself.)

I'll probably now fix it up to look even better next time I open the file though:

The punchline in the end is that I never finished it. Because of course I didn't. Again, near the looming deadline of the jam, real life started to go bonkers like a pinball machine and I ended up having so few time, that I never even submitted anything to the jam. I have enough of the game for a demo build...but do I really want to release it? That was my question to myself, and I know myself: I hate releasing anything unfinished and while a demo would be a great way to gauge interest, I also know my ego and my ego would hate it if I released a demo and it was a resounding no, along with negative response.

I already struggle with getting any eyes on my original work beyond, I don't know, 5 boosts on a post on a very good day every 10 months--and that's before I even talk to you about the responses to my prose (also in the extremely low numbers of maybe 1-3 comments, if ever.) I knew that if I released a demo build of this visual novel, I'd be releasing it to the void, waiting probably ten years before anyone even deigned to leave a comment, positive or negative. Trust me on this.

Therefore, I feel much better releasing it as a whole finished product (with possible bugs unforeseen) rather than a demo. It wouldn't be any different from the rest of my work if the VN received no comments or fanfare.

Now...uh, what now though?

Well, the future of this page is unsure. Luckily no one has given me money on here yet; I haven't "fooled" anyone in that regard. But things as they continue as they are, like I said waaaay up above there, I've been fixated on creating other things. Like I said also up there, if folks want early access or something, then I'm willing to acquiesce and post them as I make art, comics, what have ya.

Otherwise I've been considering pausing this page or putting it on vacation or something because it might be a long while before things stabilize once again. And I really mean a long time. I don't like leaving things "open" if I'm not contributing much to it or providing good enough "services" to folks. I'll consider some more in how to pause this page but I don't expect much use of this page in the coming months.

As for the VN, well, I did keep saying I would come back to it one day. When? I'm not sure! I was actually hoping to revisit, refresh my mind and eyes on it this month a bit before working on it to finish it for October! It would still be the same plan: only the Magnus path with everything for now, fully finished and published. Then work on the Max path slowly afterwards.

But I found some online events for December that I think would be fun to join with stuff for the aforementioned unhinged fanart above, so uh. Now the VN plans are in danger lol. 

We'll see. One thing I've been trying to curb for years is my attention span style flakiness but my forgetfulness this year has also been in full 500% force (due to all the personal circumstances, see beginning of this post), to the point where I might just forget my own schedule despite the sticky notes. I would love to try to finish the VN but maybe once I take a look at where I was at at one point this month, maybe something like refining the CGs will take less time than everything else.

That's after I deal with all my other actual priorities IRL, though.

Anyway, long post, phew. But hopefully I've listed all the pertinent updates I needed to get to you all. Thanks for sticking around.

Howdy dowdy deedlee doo, another design post! This one's different, because it's also an ulterior moment time where I get to ask YOU to help decide on some things lol.

As the headline indicates, this is about a character called Oriana--if you've been reading my stories, you may remember her mentioned in relation to Astemar. She's basically Astemar's giant robot, called a Maschine (named after the hardware, since Astemar's a singer--but also, selfishly, a loophole as well to have similar pronunciation to Mashin of Rayearth) (it's all connected to Rayearth). For the longest time, I've struggled with her design, as I generally made joke of her in the SITA page that she's meant to evoke a Mamoru Nagano look--as I love his mecha designs a lot.

Unfortunately, and obviously, I am not Nagano level. That's a once in a generation talent.

I needed to make the mecha design easier for me, especially when Oriana is not the only one featured in Astemar's story/stories. But she is the main one for *now*, so of course, I needed to figure her out first. I came up with an easy solution, partly due to constant deep dives into mecha history, thinking on the evolution of simple to complicated (super robots to real robots and then eventually, design vs design of the two), and wondering if I should go for the simple robot one--there's a great deal of memorable robots that are not Masami Obari-levels of details, and much more easier to draw. It's only until I watched Bravern and read about how supposedly it's about that same dichotomy of real vs super robots (more narratively than design, as it's still a Masami Obari joint), that I...kinda nurtured the idea too? I think it fits Astemar's own evolution of her magical girl alter ego to have her own mecha go from super robot to, well, not real robot (real robots are meant to be military/real world!), but certainly from simple to complicated.

As complicated as I made it for me, anyway.

Here's the basic lines for all of Oriana's forms. 1-3 takes place along the years where Astemar is 6 to 14, and 4 is from 14 to present as it's meant to be a "final" form. However, and I haven't designed this part out, Oriana also has a "portable" form and this portable form remains the same in both cases, design-wise.

Oriana The First:

Oriana The Second, later getting a fancy cape! (To match Astemar's eventual cape)

Oriana The Third--where I decided to try being Nagano while also going "how about no." I always loved the design aspects found in OVA Iczer-1's robots, where there's "hair" shaped into the helmet. You can see I did it above, but for the final form, I really wanted it to look like hair flowing. It wasn't working out and after I took a look at Maria of Metropolis fame, it's where I changed gears slightly to mayhaps call back to her a bit. (See wrists.) Apparently about give years before the movie was made, Tutankhamun's sarcophagus was discovered and supposedly the face plate was an inspiration? I don't know, dudes, all I know is, I tried taking a look at the face plate myself to kinda get a 3D idea for Oriana's new "hairstyle."

Now...the colors.

You may have noticed the header says Oriana the GOLD. Astemar's image color is gold and that carries from her past life as Astraea to the present day in all her forms in some shape, manner or form. I still haven't really decided if the gold image color comes from Oriana or if it was always there with Astemar and it's all just typical plot conveniences...or maybe leave it a mystery, who knows? Point is, Oriana in all her forms should be some form of gold.

I hadn't had as much trouble for 1-3 in terms of colors, but it's 4, the final form, where unironically the colors from Astemar's final Astraea form fit her much better than gold. But you'll see what I mean eventually.

Here, the polls are...well, I guess I'd have to pick and choose who I want you to vote for in terms of colors. I was about to make this overly complicated for you (and I'm running on fumes here, be thankful I didn't xD) but instead I may have to either do three polls with their respective separate posts or one poll here, and then the other polls on social media when this post becomes public. (The free tier should be the public one but something isn't working out in the backend, so I'm gonna try to make *this* post public after early access has passed.)

ANYWAY, again, fume typing here. I have here some color choices for Oriana The First, all of them with minor changes between all of them. You might notice a basic general palette intended, but what I really want to know is which one WORKS. Because I have my fave but I also am generally sleep deprived, so who knows if my taste is even normal anymore.

I'm only doing Oriana The First for now, because the Second's colors will be based on that one partly. So let's gooooo--

CHOICE A

CHOICE B

CHOICE C

CHOICE D

Now...(please) vote! Especially when this one won't make or break democracy for the free world!