Fucking The Minus8 Pacman Ghost Gals: Blinky (Patreon)

Hey-hey, patreon friends. We’ve got another special update today, I took on a project I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. 

Ever since I first started dicking around with Honey Select a year or so ago, I’ve been wondering if I could use it to create sprite sets and CGs for a visual novel. This plan hit multiple snags so I kind of considered it a lost cause, but then when I got around to trying Koikatsu, I found myself thinking about it again.

I spent a few days just thinking about which of the many models I had to base it around (my original plan had always been for something based on Dead or Alive), but when I saw that someone had already made the Minus8 Pacman Ghosts the idea coalesced into my ideal mix of very cute and very stupid. I was legitimately wondering if it was possible to take such a silly concept and stretch it out into something substantial, and I decided I had to at least give it a try.

This was followed by much dithering over how to do it. I decided pretty early on to aim for something very much on the SHORTER side, since this was my first time taking on a project like this and I had no idea how much extra work and time it was going to blow out into. There's really nothing I hate more than starting a project and not being able to finish it. 

For reference, The Anti-Demon Club probably looks very simple on a first play, but even with all the art already done and ready to go it still ended up taking me around 20 hours to make! This is due in no small part to Renpy’s problematic documentation where multiple sources exist and all contradict each other, and plenty of outright wrong advice is dumped on you every time you attempt to google how to do something. The Necromonicon has nothing on the arcane understanding I have had to adopt in the name of learning how to make this program work.

Anyway, tldr, this ended up taking almost twice as long as the last one, and only around 5 hours of that was the actual writing part. This was probably mostly because I ended up deciding to make my first attempt at completely revamping the Renpy UI, which involved making a custom title screen, learning how to edit button locations, and making various custom UI assets, like the text box. 

So if it wasn’t obvious, this was all quite the big learning project, and I think I gained a lot of potentially useful skills in the process. I’d like to possibly add a chapter for Pinky in the near future - I even experimented with making some sprites for her, early versions of which can be seen here! I’ll have to redo them all to add proper lighting, but getting the poses just right for her sillier personality was a lot of fun.

Anyway, yup, this is my second complete VN, please check it out! And then let me know what you think and if you’d like more!