[Originally posted Dec 8th 2024]

I've played around with OCs and story concepts for most of my life, but have never crystalised these into an end product. I really want to make a finished "work" that others can engage with, and after picking at this small scope idea off and on for a couple of years I have been getting stuck into development - this is going to be an exploration of my process and progress so far!

The concept is a visual novel about a rising star in the world of anti-gravity racing, Orion Cruz, as they reminisce about the romances from their debut year on the track. It's set in the future, around 2070, taking visual inspiration from turn of the millenium futurism and graphic design trends. There are two different romance interests that you learn about by making decisions in the race itself. This week I settled on the title - Slipstream Daydreams. I think the final playtime should hit around 2 hours at most - hopefully a reasonable goal for my first vn and first time using Ren'Py.

I originally came up with the concept of the character who would become Orion around three years ago. I had this idea about a racer who was thinking back to their romantic life during this big race as a sort of exploration of my ADHD, using this inherent distractibility and half focus as a narrative device but also to show their success regardless of this different way of working. They're much more casual and down to earth than the majority of AG Racing drivers having come from a lower class background, which gained them a big following in young adult fans and brought a new audience to the sport. They're the gossip rags' darling, regularly appearing in paparazzi photos on messy nights out and doing the walk of shame back from other racers' hotel rooms.

It took me a long time to get happy with their design, and even longer to work out who their love interests should be - I actually threw away a good few early character ideas before settling on Capital and Maxime. Capital is the first route I am focusing on writing - he's the star racer of the AG league, nicknamed the "Prince of the Chequered Flag". Capital is used to everything being decided for him, but falls fast and hard for Orion when they insert themself into his life. Under the surface he's struggling to find direction and a sense of identity outside of his celebrity.

Maxime is the most controversial racer in the league, usually placing around mid-tier in the rankings but infamous regardless for it's many controversies involving dangerous, combative driving and strong opinions on how the league is run. In his free time he is an expert hacker specialising in cybernetics - a fact that Orion, with their multiple cheap cybernetics may find out the hard way…! Maxime is my take on the yandere archetype, but also an exploration of the politics of the setting. A lot of Maxime's issues with the League come from the amount of money involved, inspired by my own observations when researching the world of Formula 1 for this story. 

Eventually I got over my terror of writing cringe and actually started the script - the file for it says it was created in 2022 but I don't think I actually put anything longer than a couple of paragraphs in there until 2023. At some point in my early artistic career I gained the (stupid) opinion that there was no point in trying to learn multiple creative disciplines and I should choose one out of art, writing and music. Joke's on me, I became a generalist artist who wears dozens of hats in my professional career - but this did mean I essentially gave up on creative writing after high school. Which sucks! Since then, the longest things I have written are my Honours dissertation for my BA Hons degree in 2016 (8k words), and an essay zine (4k words) about my favourite character last year, neither of which are fiction. Getting stuck into dialogue centric writing genuinely scared the piss out of me, and a lot of my early writing sessions I set wordcount goals for that were simply not realistic and then got stressed and frustrated about my literary constipation (and spent a lot of time whinging about this to my friends - sorry!). So, by the end of 2023 I had 5,300 words - more fiction than I have ever written in my life up to that point.

In 2024 I got quite distracted with a combination of creative block and being busy with other projects and didn't work on my script for months at a time. Eventually in the back half of the year I got back on the horse and vowed to reach my resolution of finishing the first draft of Capital's route by the end of December. Something has finally clicked and I've been able to bring it to near completion - as I write this, the last step I have is to write his ending, but I realised I need to expand upon the existing and write the last two of the common route (the race itself) scenes first.

So that's where my script is at now. I feel like I've come a long way even though in the grand scheme of things it's quite short! In the meantime, I have been getting distracted with working on sprite and UI design and functionality - but I will save that recap for my next entry.