I went and added the remaining LotE chapters to the navigation. The pages were there for a while, but needed a ton of cleanup. (To clarify, the chapters themselves weren't edited, just the page formatting on this site.) All those buttons are going to need to be cleaned up, though. I'd also like to separate the paragraphs into individual elements at some point. It looks like the navigation dropdowns have broken once again. I don't really know what to do about it at this point. Damnit Weebly! I'm also looking into Google Adsense for both here and Seven Tailed Fox, but Google turned down my application the because the Seven Tailed Fox website doesn't look like a complete site. I'll have to fix that at some point too.
I felt it'd be kinda weird if I kept posting updates on Call to Me on this site, what with the giant Pokemon fanart banner, so I've made a new blog for dev-related stuff over on the Seven Tailed Fox website.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to link the blog to a different Twitter account, so all blog posts are still going to my personal Twitter. This is just a temporary measure though. Once I publish the project page on itch.io, I'll try and migrate the blog there. I was kinda hoping to start putting out ads at the start of February, but... eh... I really dropped the ball on searching for background and CG artists in time. Stupid, stupid Sparkleaf! Do you want to make a game or not?! In my last post, I mentioned that one thing I'm struggling with is marketing. I was referring to my brand at the time, but the real issue will be how to market my game. I'm not even sure what genre Call to Me fits into. The setting isn't "fantastic" enough to be fantasy, there's not enough mystery to be called a mystery novel, and it's not really slice-of-life either. And even though it's a dating sim, I'm not sure if there's enough fluff to market it on the romance. There's also just marketing it as an otome game, but I'm not sure if it's the kind of game that the otome audience will enjoy. Will Inato's tsundere and Higa's kindness be attractive enough? Or will they come off as cliched and uninteresting? Will Ayumi be an unwelcome appearance? Or will she be so beloved that people will be upset that they can't romance her? I've lived a sheltered life and have no firsthand experience with organized crime. Can I still write a compelling story with yakuza in it? Will people be upset that they can't romance the fox...? On a side note, there's currently no plan to include R-18 content, because I'm not confident in my ability to write decent smut, and I also don't want Steam to ban me. I mean, sure, I might do better than Nasu's mollusks, but that's a pretty low bar. Haha, I suppose it's an adventure game. In the end, all visual novels are adventure games.
It's been about 13 months since I started working on my VN. I promise you, the project isn't dead. I'm not going to deny the truth. I got sidetracked too many times, by the news, by the pandemic, by politics, by Hololive. I shouldn't blame those things, though. It's my fault for letting myself get distracted so much. I wanted to release my game last June. I failed there. I wanted to update this blog regularly. I dropped the ball there too. Even so, I still want to finish this VN! I want to put it up for sale on itch.io and Steam! I want people to play this thing and enjoy it!
Today, I closed my WattPad account.
I was never particularly active there, and I hadn't touched my account in a long time. Over the years, it had gotten increasingly troublesome to update LotE on so many different sites, and with the last wave of LotE rewrites about a year ago, I skipped WattPad entirely. After finding out about the recent WattPad hack, I decided it was best to simply delete my account for security reasons. My deepest apologies to those of you who found me through WattPad. Though I didn't interact much with the WattPad community, there were multiple WattPad users who reached out to me over the years, and it was truly a heartwarming experience. Hi everyone! Staying well in these uncertain times? I just want to talk about the visual novel I'm working on. Previously, I think I mentioned wanting to an adaptation of aRiE into a galge, but that one's further off. Those of you who know me from my early fanfic days may remember that the first fanfic I planned was not WoV/LotE, but a story called Doomsday Survivors starring Shanala as a Vulpix in PC Storage. I reattempted it several times over the years, including once as a forum roleplay and once as a tumblr blog, but I never quite followed through. What I'm currently working on is a reimagining of that original story, combines with certain parts of Shadowed Path. It draws a fair amount of influence from shoujo manga, so I suppose it would be categorized as otome, but I'm trying not to worry too much about the labels it will have. I'd like it to be something that both male and female readers can enjoy. This project has been an eye-opening experience so far. I'm hoping to lay some groundwork so that I can hit the ground running for future titles.
Starting today, I'm going to pursue an old dream of mine, while I can still call myself young. For the last eight years, I told myself that creative writing shouldn't be anything more than a hobby. At college, I tried to find something else I was capable at. Math, science, even business. in the end I got a English degree, and took jobs in content writing. As a creative writer, "content writing" is a pain. Write unique pages about nearly identical prompts? Add paragraphs that don't need to be there? Make it interesting to read, but also keep using this word or phrase over and over? Get the customer's trust, but don't make promises you can't keep? It's fucking nonsense! No wonder half the Internet is gibberish. Anyway, enough of that. I'm going to be making visual novels. Yeah, I know...
The first two chapters of Exile's War: Anniversary are up on Archive of Our Own. Just click the button below. Also, it's okay to read it even if you're not familiar with my other stories. Please enjoy! I was hoping to get a lot more done before today, but this'll have to do. It should be pretty clear where the story's going: Slick is separated from his Pokemon and will have to look for each one. In a nutshell, this story is about if Slick was a better adjusted human than in LotE.
The site looked weird after I finished messing with it but maybe it's not so bad after all. It's definitely a lot easier to see the navbar buttons. Probably going to unload all the Exile Series stories into the navbar, it'll make two rows but it shouldn't be too bad. After I finish putting up LotE, I'm separate each story into a page per chapter. Mobile navigation also works now. Hurrah! Though the fact that the volume and chapter buttons are the same size bothers me. Oh well. Lastly, tomorrow is WoV anniversary. I'm afraid I didn't get as much done on WoV anniversary story because of crazy shenanigans in 5Toubun. However, I did get two chapters done, so I'll be sure to put them up here and on AO3.
happy thanksgiving everyone, i got the mobile navigation to work for a little bit but then the whole damn css just broke on me
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SparkleafSparkleaf has been writing fanfiction since 2009. He also enjoys anime, manga, and visual novels. CategoriesArchives
April 2021
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