My name is Kayleigh Van Overen. I’m the creator of the Death of the Video Star. It's been a month since the demo has come out, and I'm super grateful for everyone who's played! I wanna do monthly updates on how the Video Star* is going, and also a bit about my process making it, my #thoughts, etc etc etc. When I was getting started, I had a really hard time finding documentation about what’s it’s like to actually *make* a visual novel, so if I can add a bit, I’ll add a bit.

Some baselines: 

• I’m programming in Ren’py. 
• I do my drawings in Photoshop**, using a Cintiq. 
• My background (degree) is in illustration (and gender studies, which, lol). 
• I’m pretty much entirely self taught in regards to programming, and am very aware that if someone who knew what they were doing looked at my code they would be horrified at how inefficient it is. Frankly, even in the process of making this I learned about 20 new things about how Ren’py works. Did you know that when you establish where a character is at the beginning of the scene, you don’t have to re-establish it every time their sprite changes? Did you know you didn’t have to spend so much time writing “show turquoise neutral at midleft” when you’ve already told the program where Turquoise is?
• I do my writing in Twine, which is the first program I learned; there’s other ways to write branching narratives, but I like this one because it’s free and I can arrange the blocks how I like. I am a very visual person so Twine just happens to click for me.
• Pretty much all my playtesters are personal friends of mine doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. I’m blowing them all kisses.
• I have a day job I really like, so I’m extremely fortunate to not have to rely on game dev for an income. If this ever gets big for me, that’s neat, but I will be perfectly fine to keep this as a hobby if that’s how it goes.

CURRENT PROGRESS: About eighty percent through the second act! 24,491 words total. There are four acts (sections???) overall. I’ve written VERY SMALL parts of the other acts, but I tend to write linearly. The entire thing is pretty much outlined though; I know what happens, I just gotta write the damn thing. I’ve started making sprites for some of the characters in this act, but I probably won’t really get into it until I’m done writing.

Anyways, that’s about it for the first devlog - is there anything in particular you’re curious about? I have a few things I want to write about but I’m more than happy to discuss whatever.

Talk to you soon! <3

*Video Star is how I personally refer to it, I don’t tend to do acronyms? I have no beef with them, I just tend to use phrases instead.

**I use Photoshop because I’m not willing to let go of Adobe Suite for other reasons. There are other, better, cheaper drawing programs, and you should take advantage of them.