Hi all! 

Let me start by thanking everyone who played my visual novel, A House of Endless Windows, and to everyone who's left a rating/review. The response has been genuinely overwhelming, thank you so much. My visual novel, which was made for Velox Fabula 2, came in 1st place in the Narrative category, 2nd place in Theme Incorporation, and 3rd place in the Sound and Overall categories. I am so happy to hear that so many people enjoyed their time with their project.

Since this project was made on a reasonably strict timeline, I've organized my thoughts on it to (mostly) reflect the order in which it was put together. I hope you enjoy reading.

The Writing

The theme for Velox Fabula 2 was "You Shouldn't Be Here." I felt lucky, this had been one of the themes I was routing for throughout the voting process. My initial thought was to take a horror angle, which the "you" being some person or creature or who's presence terrifies the player character over the course of the story. I figured, possibly incorrectly, that this would be a popular choice, or at the very least that it would be a bit too obvious on its own. Thus, I softened some of the horror elements down and the concept became much more about mystery and family drama.

The planning process proper started with me outlining all of the characters in Pierce's family, and what I thought they'd be like. Abbey, Pierce's mother, was the most consistently translated from these initial plans. I wanted her and Pierce to be very driven characters. Abbey frequently acts in ways that appear harsh or erratic to Pierce, but my goal was always to tie these back to insecurities and fears that, while largely kept out of the script, could always be felt around its margins. Pierce was similarly written to be sharp and logical. He was always quite good at lying, even when it wasn't strictly necessary. Pierce's thoughts were always going to be limited by his specific way of thinking, which deals in material absolutes and things that can easily be quantified and/or proved. I grew attached to the idea of him getting sucked into mathematics due to the overlap in how his brain worked and how math is expected to operate.

I wrote the first two sentences of the story before planning the rest of it out. I wanted to limit the scope of the narrative as best I could to a reasonably short period of time for an arc like this to have taken place. Unlike most of my previous works, the scenes were planned out with some level of meticulousness before I had really begun writing the script. I knew at this point who Jane was and how she had come back to life, but the specific order of events ended up being a priority to this story. There were also some stylistic notes I wanted to figure out early on. For example, Jane is always referred to as "you" throughout the story, as if Pierce was talking to her.

My primary inspirations for the script came from novels that would be classified as "literary fiction." The biggest takeaway from these pieces that I wanted to explore was the idea that, to paraphrase something I probably read in a tweet: "good fiction should feel difficult." The difficulty of A House of Endless Windows comes up in a few places. First, it comes up when Pierce pushes everyone around him, including his only friend, Avery, away. The moment when Pierce stops listening to Jane's recollection of her memories was also quite difficult, partly because of how it denies a proper sense of closure. After this moment, the difficulty of the narrative comes through in what it takes to try to heal these situations. Pierce's mother becomes quite ill at the end of the story. Despite their incredibly rocky relationship up until this point, I wanted to see what would happen if these characters gave each other a second shot. It's not easy, but they try.

My biggest trick in A House of Endless Windows was doing a kind of narrative sleight of hand. The story presents itself as a mystery about Jane when, at least in my humble opinion, it's much more about the difficulty of inter-generational relationships. In some way, maybe I think growing up feels the same way, like a sleight of hand.

The script was written in roughly 5 days and ended up being about 7.5k words. I would like to thank my beta reader, dhanae, for providing some very helpful feedback on a very tight turn around.

The Art

A House of Endless Windows includes 11 digitally painted background illustrations that were all painted in one day, and perhaps quite shockingly, in one photoshop file. This was a bad idea and almost certainly not worth it. I made heavy use of gradient maps throughout all of the illustrations. Initially I had hoped for all of the illustrations to be within the same color palette, but I scrapped this idea when I realized how limiting it was. Similar scenes did end up sharing color palettes, however. Gradient maps helped speed up the illustration process while also making the final backgrounds feels cohesive and undistracting.

The Programming

To indulge myself a brief moment, I did code a custom NVL gui into ren'py that allows the player to scroll up on the text itself without rolling back choices. This was initially done for my last visual novel, RIPARIAN HEART. I still think it works quite well!

The Music

I composed 5 tracks of music for this project. Each was initially performed on a keyboard I picked up for $10 (not all of the keys function, but I make it work!) and arranged using free software and digital instruments. While writing, I had spent some time occasionally recording little improvised chord progressions, which served as the base for each song. The final arrangements were mostly done over the course of a day. I'm still quite happy with all of these tracks, you can download them off bandcamp or stream them through youtube if you are interested. My favorite is "Remembering You," which plays during all of the flashback scenes. There's a dark echo-y chord progression playing throughout the track which eventually gives way to the same progression being played in a higher octave on a wind instrument. I think this one in particular came out quite haunting and pretty.

The Release

I was thankful to have a healthy window of time (roughly a day) between when I considered my piece done and when the jam ended. I spent this time getting the itch page to look nice (I still think it looks pretty good!) I'm quite proud of what I was able to put together in just a little bit over a week. If I could do it again, I would try to spend a little bit more time polishing the UI, specifically for when the game is paused.

I've been very thankful to have a lot of people post comments and leave kind reviews on A House of Endless Windows. I've tried my best to respond to each of them. The results of the voting came out a few days ago at the time of writing and I am still blown away by the response my visual novel had gotten. Thank you again so much for playing. Please make sure to check out all of the other Velox Fabula 2 submissions as well.

Upcoming Things

I have started development on what I'm aiming to be a pretty long project (at least ~1 hour of reading time.) Things are still too early for me to talk about them, but I can say that it'll probably be the weirdest thing that I've written. If you'd like updates on my future projects, you can follow me over on twitter or on tumblr, or here on itch.

Thank you for reading,

Sky