I'm very excited to have released my first visual novel today and look forward to seeing what everyone thinks about it. I woke up this morning thinking about my history with game dev and why I made this game, and decided to tell that story here.
I'm Paul. I'm 31 years old. I've been into games and interactive fiction as long as I can remember. I had Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid. In high school, I programmed text-based games on my TI-83+ and distributed them to my classmates (I actually got suspended for making an offensive game, but that's a different story). After I got into web dev as a career, I made online visual novel builders, mostly just for fun (I could never catch up with Ren'py). Over the years, I've gone through phases where I'd say, "I want to be a [writer/musician/graphic designer/programmer]" and spent a lot of time working on that skill individually, but I could never stick with just one. It took me way too long to realize I didn't have to.
Games put everything together. And this is what I've decided to do with my life. I, like anyone interested in game dev, have aspirations beyond my means. That is to say, I don't currently have $200 mil lying around to make the MMO I want (ha), but I can make a visual novel. This was the first step in my journey - something I could make with my own money and in a reasonable amount of time. I told myself at the beginning of 2019 that I was going to create and release a visual novel by the end of the year, in my spare time, and I did. While it isn't technically the first game I've ever made, I consider it to be, because it's the first time I've put more than a casual amount of effort into it, hired artists, and released in a marketplace.
But why this particular game? When I was doing research at the beginning of this project, I felt that VNs as a format had a lot more potential than is actually seen in the marketplace, both in terms of what can be done with them and who they can appeal to. I also found it interesting that there are so many dating sims, but few of them were even close to my own experience with dating, or even trying to be. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I want fantasy and melodrama, but sometimes, I want to be in a more familiar place. That's what Drinks With Abbey is.
DWA is a proof of concept for one type of visual novel I want to make on a larger scale and with more resources. I want to find out if anyone is interested in seeing more VNs like this, and if you are, I hope you'll follow and support me in my next endeavor.
https://www.facebook.com/ramifygames
https://twitter.com/ramifygames
Thanks to everyone who plays my game,
Paul