Hi all!

The results for Velox Turbo 2 came out yesterday and I have (once again) been blown away by the response to my entry, “You’ll Never Catch Me Leaving.” I worry I come across as repeating myself, but it bears saying again: thank you to everyone who played and especially to everyone who left a comment. I would also like to thank my wonderful beta reader Naarel for his help in catching the many mistakes I made in the first draft of this game. 

Writing “The Eye of the Beholder” 

I was one of the voters who helped pick this theme for the jam and I’m still quite happy with the choice. Before the jam started I was thinking about the following question: What makes us, us? The main thrust behind “You’ll Never Catch Me Leaving,” at least at the time of conceptualization, is the idea that any one of us can only be defined by our interactions with others. We are, in some sense, what other people think we are. I wanted to play on this idea by having the main character be unrecognizable to everyone in their own existence, except for a strange creature haunting her (and, of course, the reader.)

From the start I knew I wanted to take a somewhat fantastical approach to this idea through the presence of monsters in the protagonist’s life. Initially I wanted to go even further, having the protagonist be a literal shapeshifter. In the final version of the VN, I didn’t make reference to exactly how these transformations happened as I didn’t find it particularly relevant to the narrative. Before writing, I also knew that I wanted the story to be told in first person where the main character directly addresses the impossible monster (the reader?) judging her. As of late I’ve been very partial to writing in first person as I think the access it gives to a character’s thoughts is fun to play with.

Velox Turbo is a 4 day jam, and 4 days is not a lot of time, so I went into writing with less of an outline than I have been using for some of my other projects (including my Velox Formido entry.) I knew pretty early what I wanted the first and last lines of the VN to be, so most of my time writing was spent bridging the gap from the first interaction the protagonist has with the monster to her final words. 

Ultimately, the rough draft of the story had 8 different scenes. This did not change when putting together the final draft of the script. Since the vision for “You’ll Never Catch Me Leaving” was pretty conceptual, I had to pick up some slack in how I wrote each of the scenes to keep it from getting too heady and boring. I had two main goals for each scene. First, they had to have some sense of narrative drama that moved the scene forward. I kept reminding myself that this was a story, not an essay. Second, I wanted each scene to feel like it served a unique and interesting narrative purpose. I recognized pretty early that this story would be told through a series of vignettes and the last thing I wanted to do was to have any of them feel too repetitive in their structure and contents. Each of the names the main character goes by throughout the story (Paula, Ronda, Angela, etc.) is associated with some unique character traits as well as a unique conflict. Paula had issues with her sister, Ronda had to cope with her partner passing away, Angela struggles to keep her secrets when under the influence, and so on. 

Due to jam constraints I was not able to write about each of these characters extensively (the rough draft of the game sits at about ~1.8k words), so I had to be pretty brutal and efficient when it came to getting across the ideas in the narrative. I’m very flattered by all of the comments who mentioned enjoying the prose in this piece. I think words and language are beautiful, so whenever I have a choice between developing the prose of a piece or some other element, I usually come back to working on the prose. I can’t help myself. Sometimes this is a source of anxiety as my recent works have de-emphasized other components typically seen in visual novels, such as interactivity, so it makes me relieved whenever I see positive comments about the prose of a piece.

Art, Music, UI, etc.

The UI for “You’ll Never Catch Me Leaving” was largely copied over from some of my previous VNs. This is a matter of personal preference, but I really enjoy scrollable NVL text that takes up a relatively small vertical slice on the screen (this may also be why I like to read a lot of books on my phone, of all places.) 

The first version of the VN only had 3 illustrated background assets. Onto these I decided to do a 4th and threw in a 5th as well. This was a mistake as once the number of art assets went above half the number of scenes in the story, it felt strange that they had not each received their own art asset. So I ended up making 7 backgrounds, + one more I only finished a few hours before submissions were due as I had somehow miscounted the number of scenes I had to do illustrations for. I think my highly saturated, somewhat abstract style complements the kinds of reality-bending stories I tend to write, so that works out well.

Unfortunately, I only had the time to put together two music tracks for the VN, one to serve as menu music and another to play on loop during the rest of the game. Both of these were composed by improving on a keyboard. I think this ended up being passable as my game was quite short, but a part of me still yearns for more variety, even if it’d only play for a minute or two, realistically speaking.

Up Next

As a small thank you for reading through my ramblings, I’d like to give you a new game announcement. For the past few months I’ve been at work writing, illustrating, scoring, and programming my next project, which is gearing up to be the largest and strangest I’ve ever released. It’s called Clarity and I am excited to share more of it soon. Until then, here’s a screenshot.

Happy Holidays and Best Wishes for 2025,

Sky