Dev Blog - The Making of Summer Term
24/11/2025 - Utter Development Hell
| That's what this has become. Just because it took way too long and I couldn't strike while the iron was hot and shit out a whole game in 2019 when the ideas first hit. And now I'm a way older, completely different person trying to finish a game in a style I can't naturally write any more. And I'm not even sure what the fuck this is trying to be right now to be honest. It's become a little more involved, a little more carefully considered and put together to be a silly shitposty game (as it was first envisioned). But my writing, drawing, compotisional skills are nowhere near enough to make this work as something more. Writing character driven drama is playing to all my weaknesses. I work best just knocking out silly narration and dialogue - writing about nothing but in an entertaining way. But to stretch that out over the course of several 50k+ word routes just creates inane meandering slice of life type bullshit that doesn't really work. Doesn't allow for meaningful choices, character development, or even giving the characters any kind of likeability or personality. Which, for a dating sim, is kind of an important thing. And I'm reluctant to try and 'turd-polish' what I've got too much at this point either. The more I tidy, refine, hone and polish, the more it nudges what I'm making into a sort of uncanny valley. Instead of a joke visual novel that has suggestion of something bigger than the sum of its parts underpinning it, it just looks like a 'serious' visual novel falling embarrassingly short of the mark. Makes the sloppiness look ambiguous as to whether it's unintentional. |
 Fig. 1: Something akin to this. |
Still writing Natsumi's Route, and sort of stuck quite far into it realising there's not been any tension to resolve in the last act(s). In fact, for the last several thousand lines of dialogue it's just been nutty hijinks which while they are kind of funny, just seem a bit pointless and go nowhere. An editor who could actually edit could easily chop practically any scene out of the route so far and it wouldn't make a lot of difference. There's a few scenes that establish things like the school's Canoe Club, but that's just sort of background stuff that has no bearing on the actual route either. There's no canoe-based intrigue threatening the relationships of the newly-forged couple or anything like that. So whatever turns I write into the story from here in are going to seem shoehorned in last-minute unless I roll up my sleeves and do some serious refactoring. And I'm, if it wasn't already apparent, somewhat averse to hard work.
And one more thing. I'm 99.93% sure the e-mail address at the bottom of the page is broken, and has never worked. If anyone is actually reading this ever, if there's anyone out there, you can sling an email to grandshitbastard ]at[ gmail ]dot[ com (I have no idea if it's still necessary to obfuscate email addresses like that, especially borderline throwaway ones, but what the hey). Just to say hi or something, even.
I also have no idea how to go out onto the big proper internet and self-promote without feeling like a colossal bell-end, but maybe I should just so that someone other than me will read this bastard game when it's finished. I don't know where the kind of people who'd give a shit about a project like this would hang out though.
05/03/2025 - It's still happening...
Progress on this thing has been ticking away, just sloooowly. Writing up the last of the six main routes now, and then there's little things like SFX and a few missing art assets (which don't take that much time to make for obvious reasons), but overall it's taking shape. I was, for the longest time, sort of in a mood where writing things (or indeed doing much of anything creatively) just wasn't happening. Excuses, excuses. But the past few weeks I've been slapping down a bunch of scenes into Notepad++ for Natsumi's route - and actually making myself laugh while I did so, which is something I haven't done in a while. So, depending on how much soundtrack we want, I could see this being on course for completion by the end of the year.
Having it finished for summer would be nice (and fitting) but that feels a little too optimistic somehow.
Also, for God's sake someone send me an e-mail. I want to see if my super special summerterm email address actually works, because all this website stuff isn't my forté. I think it works, because I e-mailed myself once ages ago, but I can't say for 100% sure.
09/04/2023 - 'Nother Update
...and another (draft) version of a route all written - four down, two to go. It needs a few illustrations, some SFX and things like that, but they're all smaller jobs compared to just getting the main bulk of the ideas down there in the .rpy file.
Taking some time off writing proper before I tackle Natsumi's Route (because I get the feeling that's going to be nothing if not an ordeal) and focusing on the second draft of Act 1 - the big introductory bit at the start of the game that all the other paths branch away from. Because I wrote it in 2019 and it shows. I know the whole idea of the game isn't to be 'polished' (obviously, look at the site you're on) but often this was just bad in a way that wasn't even funny. And with it being the first thing a player would read, I just couldn't leave it be. So I'm going through that with the finest of tooth combs now, getting rid of all the insecure wackiness that leeched in back when I saw this as closer to a parody than an affectionate homage to a misspent adolescence.
Then after that, it's going back to Yuki's Route (also a vintage of 2019) and giving that some of the old literary napalm too. It's not as bad as the common route parts; there's some great bits in her route, but my god is there ever some shite too.
Oh, and trying to write these updates more often than annually too. Not that anyone but me ever reads them, but hey ho.
23/02/2022 - Three Bastard Years
...give or take a couple of weeks, anyway. I always quote this as having started on the first of February 2019 but I don't have any proof of that, any timestamped notepad files or anything. So I can't know for definite.
A big problem that I'm beginning to encounter is this: a lot of the stuff I wrote in that first year is of a markedly lower quality than the later stuff. And looking back at Yuki's path (the first one I wrote a draft of), revision isn't going to involve some typo fixes and minor tidyings up as I'd initialy hoped, but instead full-scale chopping up and rewriting of large sections. I guess in one way it's a good thing, it means I'm getting better at writing and the final product will be of a (marginally) higher quality. But on the other hand it's so much more work. And this game has already taken approximately two and a half years too long as it is.
There's also a perceptible tone shift too, between those early parts and the more recently written paths. The early stuff was a lot more silly - filled with intentional typos, gratitous TL notes, needless swearing and random phrases in block capitals for emphasis - a bit more 'shitposty' for lack of a better word. And certain characters just don't sound like themselves - I'd maybe brought them in for single scenes before fleshing out their personalities in other routes and now it feels really weird. Especially when it's characters who have a distinctive style to their speech - hearing Jun talk like a normal, respectable citizen just doesn't scan right.
So that's more work.
I've decided that most of the art can wait until I've got written drafts that aren't going to go anywhere. No fun in drawing an elaborate graphic specifically for a scene, only to have that scene hit the cutting room floor in six months time. Worse still, the otherwise sunk cost of drawing it might encourage me to force it in somewhere, write a shitty filler scene to include it. Which we don't want.
Music, SFX, all that jazz (not literally jazz though), that can wait until later on too, for much the same reasons.
19/06/2021 - How Not to Write a Visual Novel - Part 1
Right now I'm coming up just shy of 200,000 words, with another route (Erina's, for those of you who give a shit) pretty much in the bag. Or at least a fairly rough version of it. This thing is going to need so much proof-reading it's unreal.
With a project of this size, there's of course a bunch of things that were sort of 'set in stone' really early on and it's a bit late to change now, regardless of how much I'd like to.
Firstly, I stupidly allowed the player to pick their own name for the main character. Which is irritating because it suggests that the player is the main character to a degree, and then when the character does things the player wouldn't necessarily want him to do it's a bit jarring. Player Car (as I refer to him in the notes for whatever reason) has a distinct and slightly odd personality of his own but the first choice you make in the game suggests the opposite. also, having the name a free choice but the gender set in stone feels inconsistent too - that was done just to avoid the headache that would be dynamic gender-dependent grammar and makes the name screen all the more glaring.
I could just hard-code a name and be done with it, but then I'd lose the daft gag when the name field is left blank. It's a toughie.
Second gripe is the fact I set it where I did. Because every other visual novel is set in a high school in Japan I did the same for this, back when the idea of the game was still half in 'insecure parody game' territory. Then I established character names, places and drew a bunch of backgrounds that fit that setting so it was a bit late to just undo everything. But I know a grand total of jack shit about Japanese culture and daily life. So all the food, the items, the characters' turns of phrase are modelled after generally British things which clashes really glaringly with the rest of the setting. It's an awkward hodge-podge of things from all over, and I wonder just how much better this all could have been had I just set the game in a British 6th form college or a university to begin with, and given everyone names like Rebecca, Kate and Abigail. Hell, there's always the possibility of a second visual novel, further down the line...
The other things are just minor gripes in comparison: calling the college "St. Barthram's" was just a family in-joke that's sadly not funny to anyone else on the planet and doesn't make a great deal of sense either. Putting in the achievements screen, while fun, feels kind of pointless given that there's not enough player freedom in the gameplay to allow for meaningful achievements to be unlocked. And of course, branching the route so heavily in Act 1, back when I had no idea how much time it would take to complete a route, and inadvertantly making so much work for myself. But you live and learn.
05/05/2021 - The Story so Far
This all started back in January of 2019. I think the original goal was just to knock out a daft joke visual novel in a week or so, draw a few MS Paint characters and backgrounds and slap together a little script with like two endings for a joke among friends and family. But once I got started two things happened. Firstly, I realised that making a comedy visual novel whose entire punchline is 'lol its a DATING SIM HAHAHA' has been done before loads of times and it wasn't even funny the first time. And secondly, despite being shit at drawing, writing or doing anything in Python, what I had made so far was (to me at least) better quality than I'd expected. It had that kind of endearing crapness to it.
And so began the journey. I naively drew out a road map of sorts with ideas for the various routes and endings, not realising just how much writing, drawing and general fucking around I was taking on. It was only by about November '19 when I had a completed first draft of the script for Yuki's path (pushing 60,000 words, with a shitload of sprites, backgrounds and other drawn objects) that I sat back and realised I'm going to have to do that again, four times over at the very least. Then proof-read, tidy up, rewrite, draw more stuff if necessary, put the sound effects in, actually make the sound effects... Whatever delusions I had of this being a quick and dirty project were gone that day.
Right now, there's still no end in sight. I've done drafts of Yuki's path, Tomoko's path and about two thirds of Erina's path, as well as a couple of shorter 'joke ending' routes too. But there's still like three entire routes (at least) barely even started. And each one will require a whole heap of new art to go with it. I know what you're thinking: my art is absolute shite, surely it doesn't take that long to scribble a few wonky trees and buildings into Paint and call it a day? You underestimate the extent of my shitness. It takes time and effort just to get the art up to the shoddy state it's in currently.
And there's the soundtrack. I thought this would be the easiest bit, because making music was kind of my thing before I started making this. But soundtracks are a different beast. The music I usually make is loud, dense hyper-compressed stuff. (Check out my mixtape bro for examples.) And that bombastic, in-your-face production does not lend itself well to background music - it's impossible to even think with it playing, let alone try to read. So that's coming along a lot slower than anticipated too.
In short, this thing's a long way off yet, so don't hold your breath.
Any comments, feedback, hate mail (actually no, not hate mail)? Send 'em to:
... actually don't, the e-mail doesn't work because I'm stupid and can't set e-mail addresses up. If you've tried to email in the past, a.) sorry, and b.) hard cheese.