payment processor situation

Hi! I wish the opening to this post mortem could've been different but I just have to address LONER_DOG being delisted from itch. The "good" news is that all of my shit is still online, yay. I currently have a talk proposal for GodotFest 2025 in their talk submission form, so maybe I can show off LONER_DOG and talk about censorship and queer art in front of a bunch of Godot people lmao

By now, itch even pushed out an update that allowed me to get all my stuff reindexed, provided it's completely free. So donations are now disabled. Still hoping I'll get my payouts cleared again at some point, but for now, it'll just exist in itch's aether. If you wanna support me financially, this entire debacle has prompted me to finally dust off my Patreon. I'll start to be active there now, so stay tuned! (Or you donate to my SFW projects :3)

Now with the obligatory topical preface out of the way, onto the actual post mortem! (Contains spoilers)

The UI

Technical Gushing

I think the UI is easily one of the most notable features of LD, technically speaking. The opening scene actually always was the tech demo for the dynamic dialog box system, and I'm glad it stuck around! Overall, I got the system working within like 1 or 2 days, including the movable windows themselves (+ a few bug fixes later & changes down the line), and I'm really glad about that. Sadly this added complexity meant I had to cut rollback, but at least the history is there.

The UI just... working the way it does makes me really proud of DIISIS. [Side note for those that don't know; DIISIS is my own dialogue plugin for Godot that I've started programming in 2023 with When The Sea Received The Sky. It's grown into a super fucked up piece of software by now and I love it for that. It's still in active development but you can get it in the assetlib hehe]

Visual Hierarchy

Text Boxes

Obviously, the text boxes communicate both electronic communication, and spatial relations. I put active thought into the styling of text boxes. PADS & BARK are completely angular and with instant text speed, and embodied / irl text is more rounded with scrolling text. That's why - as opposed to my other VNs, there is no "Instant" text speed option in the options menu. It'd obfuscate the visual language that differentiates spoken from written communication! Additionally, I use a monospace font for digital comms, and a non-monospace font for embodied comms :3

CGs

Furthermore, CGs communicate the proximity to the immediate action within the arc of the story. That's why Xelia and Leah for instance don't have CGs; They're much more on the periphery / background of the story, whereas Maya, Roaches, Argo, and Nessa get several CGs. They're where the action happens hehe

storywriting

Things I learned

I learned many things about more complex storywriting in this. The core tenets I discovered were:

a story is better the more it relies upon itself

introducing new characters should always be the last fucking resort 

Let me elaborate; At one point in development, I was toying with the idea of introducing another character that would've fucking exploded the story in major ways. A man. He'd be horrible and fuck everything up but then I cut him both because he undermined the vibe, and he was too violent. (Think of it as Lalo in Better Call Saul, who feels like a Breaking Bad character in a show that has a much more subdued tone. It works there but I didn't have confidence it would in loner dog) 

As development went on, I came to love LDSPCS as a love letter to community. Well, it kinda always had that energy, but eventually it grew so dense with themes that I couldn't stomach ruining these girls even more.

Also, new characters add mental complexity, which was a big consideration considering how big the cast was always envisioned. I started out with the proto versions of Argo, Nessa, and Haley, and as the story took shape, I added more characters and adjusted arcs to mold the script into what you know.

Much much furthermore still, the story will feel denser the more it feedbacks into itself. The very early throwaway comedy line about Harsh Noise trashing its toilet becomes the reason why it's there with Xelia when they discover the body. Audrey's initial swooning over Argo becomes part of her meltdown in the canyon. Argo is hurt over Nessa being distant and runs to Xelia to cope, who (because she lives by the shore) now has a body at hand, escalating to the run-in with Maya. Etc etc. You have to watch out to narrate all this in a way that actually feels like it flows into one another, but generally there is great payoff to showing your reader "hey btw this all has persistent effects on all other events in the world."

In the context of the story, it was important to me that all the dynamics and drama come from established / integrated characters so that nothing feels deus ex machina.

Finding the ending

The ending wasn't finalized until like half the script was already done. With almost all my games, I always know what the ending is supposed to be. That wasn't the case here. I knew I wanted to have the puppy rescue scene happen as *an* ending  but as I wrote the story and characters I was really unsure where and how I'd resolve the rest of the story arcs / leave the rest of the cast.

I think having an ending in mind is a good and useful benchmark to have when assessing if a story worth telling. Is the final feeling you impart on the reader something you wanna convey? This mostly comes from my background in game design, where I come from a fairly empathetic school of thought and I think about player emotions a lot. This goal-oriented apporach also alleviates a bunch of complications during writing because when you're stuck you always have the fundamental question of "does this build towards / serve the ending".

I didn't have that during ld for most of the characters and there's several drafts of other series of events I was considering. Ultimately I put a lot of blind faith into my own characters and my ability to organically have them grow and coalesce in a satisfying and sensible way, and I am so glad it worked out. This was the first time I did this intense level of discovery writing, but it was really fun! [Another side note, I first learned of the outline / discovery writer dichotomy from a series of lectures on youtube by brandon sanderson. Basically, some writers prefer to outline all the events top down and then just get to detailed writing, but don't touch the macro plot structure anymore. I tend to fall on the other side of the spectrum, where as I write my stories, I learn new things about my characters, which in turn feedbacks into future writing and edits of previous writing.]

Audrey's meltdown in the canyon was a fucking lighting in a bottle type idea, as was the character of Xelia as a whole. Those two drove so many of my underlying story deliberations actually (ﾉ*･ω･)ﾉ

On Scars

A small detail I felt worth pointing out, philosophically. At one point, Vanessa goes "I like being the most fucked up looking girl of the group", when Maya also has a bunch of scars. This is deliberate! Maya's scars are implied to be from her time in the shelter, she's never mentioned as actively cutting except in severe distress (after Haley's suicide). Her scars are not part of her, they are part of the world acting and imposing itself upon her.

In contrast, Nessa's scars are more deliberate and an actual part of her. This matches my own personal scarification history and philosophy. At the beginning of the year, I spoke about some fresh scars along the lines of "yeah dw these arent part of me I'll be fine", a relationship to sh that has changed by now and now other, newer scars have become an active aesthetic choice and I like them.

Development

Okayyyy now let's talk actual material game development hehe

Project Management

Teambuilding

Building the team was fun and basically happened automatically. I knew I wanted to hire Blood Machine as artist again, and I knew I'd be doing all the code and writing side of things. That only left music open once more, but I already had a few potential collaborators in my sights. red_kino did some great work writing the sex scene music in SWSBTS, so I asked him again and he was down. I also asked my friend Henni (who also makes her own visual novel in Godot atm) if she wanted to make some tunes, and she also agreed. 2 composers locked in, that's plenty enough, so that was the entire team assembled.

I think one thing I have to work on in the future is maybe working in a way where I don't end up with 30 tracks for a single VN. This is a volume that's simply untennable for an OST, so about 2/3rds of the music is still licensed, despite me having 2 really awesome composers on the team. At some point it'd be nice to have a VN that is fully-bespoke I think.

This team was still a lot to manage, especially because I have fairly little experience actually directing & producing a cracked fucking team such as this. I mostly just let them work on stuff and then course corrected when things were *wrong*, but that's it.

On the visual side, Blood and I did a small retrospective and agree that this development process went much smoother than SWSBTS. The scope creep wasn't nearly as bad, and overall it felt nice collaborating like this. She did all the character designs too, which lifted a bunch of work from my shoulders && she's super talented and good at visual design anyways and did a better job than I probably could've ever done. I love these goobers so much >.<

TLDR LET PEOPLE DO THEIR OWN THING

You may have noticed me being hands off with my collaborators. Blood had free reign over character designs, and the music was basically all composed blind and then I'd work them into the story whereever they fit. I've come to really enjoy this style of... directing. (Wow that feels weird as a description of what I do.)

imo, it's important that your artists know and understand your vision, and then you can send them off to do whatever. Blood knows the mood well and has so many lovely creative ideas always, especially with shot composition. And my composers also are just talented.

When what any of them would squarely go against my vision for the game, I'd consider which was more important, and in some cases would ask them to change things yk, but I think it's also a fun and important part of the collaborative creative process to be able to be influenced by the art of others on the team. Fuck one-directional hierarchies. Blood gave me the character designs fairly early, and the mental & real images of the characters heavily influenced how I'd end up writing them. 

And that leads us to a small anecdote that's relevant for all your aspiring project managers I think:

Communicate updates to the game to your team

Lesson! When you, as a discovery writer, learn new things about your characters, you need to communicate that to the rest of the team (or at least those team members that directly work with them, e.g. cg artists).

Roaches and Noni got mixed up 3 weeks into development.

Literally on the day of first draft completion, Blood and I notice we've worked with wrong characters in our heads for 3 weeks. As I mentioned above, you can't just swap character sprites. They live in symbiosis with character writing. So I explained the pains of rewriting stuff, and thankfully she was chill about it. That was like the one major hiccup in the dev process of LD.

If you wanna see how underdeveloped the characters were at first, here's the moodboards for these two I had at that first point. These early moodboards were all blood had and then the characters in question changed so much i the writing process that their moodboards became completely pried away from that original vision 

TLDR: Vision sync meetings are crucial if you're a discovery writer working in a team. Maybe once a week, just tell people how the story is coming along and where characters are.

Android build

For any aspiring gamedev out there, absolutely do consider an android build if possible. If I had one at launch, who knows where those numbers would be. It's easily the biggest or second-biggest audience next to Windows in our circles I think.

Getting into obsidian

LONER_DOG also finally represented the project with which I migrated to obsidian. Up until now, I just used a monstrous Figma frame that originally started out as the workspace for When The Sea Received The Sky but had since mutated into a horrendous mess that became so unstable it'd sometimes not even save my shit. Fuck cloud-based architecture. Get Obsidian.

Here's the size of my loner dog workspace / canvas lmao

Moodboards are on the left (grey), story scraps and writing fragments on the right (red) :3

RIP figma frame "myopia VN"

Song Credits, btw

I maintain a google doc with all the tracks I use for my games. In case you wanna check it out, click here.

Mixed media rules

anything can be sampled if you're deranged enough. for the subheading in the logo (right at the bottom. also I attached the logo files to this post nya), I literally just scrawled a base color with acrylic marker on an envelope, then scratched into it with a box cutter until I got the words out. Scanned it, extracted the words, boom.

Word count doesn't matter

LD is big. The biggest VN I've ever written (46k words. SWSBTS was 30k) I'm genuinely surprised at me managing a game of this size in just a month of writing, but I somehow did it. And I just wanted to mention that word count doesn't matter, ever. There's important and impactful works in all shapes and sizes. Even some of my own games, Nowhere Belonging and Growing Up, are really intimate experiences that take about 15 minutes to complete respectively.

Similarly, I also wanna encourage you to stop thinking about word count in any context other than "this is your estimated time to read". During the jam I saw some chatter on the discord akin to "oh I wanted to write 10k words but only have 3k." or "fuck I wanted this to be 5k words but already just cracked 12k". whatever. something like that.

And honestly, who give a shit? The point of a story is to work and elicit emotion and express something, and for that to work, just give it whatever shape it needs. Let it grow organically until you feel it is done, and then you slap the word count on the page afterwards to give readers an expectation for how much time they should invest. I include word counts because I value the time of my audience and I personally have so much shit going on in my life, that not being able to estimate how long I'll spend with a work of art makes me less likely to engage with it. (That's the good thing about physical books and videos heh)

Wrapup

It is difficult to understate the emotions I have surrounding Loner Dog. Within our little corner of the internet, the reception has been glowing, to say the least. The numbers also don't lie and this is my most successful game by far. (Currently second behind SWSBTS on some metrics like download & collection counts but that's a matter of time I think.)

Publishing this VN also represents an incredibly healing part of my own... life? Fuck this is messed up. 2025 has been really intense for me, mentally speaking. Without my struggles, loner dog never could've been this potent. But working with and through my trauma for over a month, really grinding it into a fine paste to arrange into a VN-esque shape, did things to my brain. I kinda unfucked my mind. I'm gonna elaborate on all of this now.

inundation, regrettably, maybe

As with SWSBTS, this post-mortem has been assembled over weeks. So these next paragraphs are ~1 week after release:

These are some insane problems to have but I... have grown dull to community engagement. I remember when I first got started on itch years ago. Getting one comment was enough to make my heart race and be all giddy and excited, regardless of which or how many words hid behind the notification. Now I can just let itch rot with 11 notifs over a weekend and when I read some of the highest praise anyone could ever get, I feel... barely anything. I mean ok depression definitely plays a role in this. I say this because when I think about what does elicit any joy in my emotional world I also just draw a blank lmfao.

But I think the other part is what I already touched on in SWSBTS. My work philosphy is fairly ruthlessly "done. onto the next thing." I am so so sooo fucking happy with how many people are touched by LONER_DOG. Genuinely, I wish I could communicate this level of love and then double it for each and every one of you. But for me, the project itself is largely done, and I still have more-or-less self-destructive friends in my life, I still stare down a barrel of mental health issues myself, my body is just getting ground up by time, I have more projects to work on, and wallowing in glory isn't conductive to any of those topics to me.

Being there for yourself and others is never done. It's a continuous labor of love and that's why I'll go back to trying to keep a few more queers happy and alive and on the side work more on DIISIS and then make more things with it (hopefully).

- me, a few weeks ago

Looking back, I was in a depressive episode when I wrote this. ily all <3 Still gonna keep it here because I think it'd maybe help someone who also is depressed as shit sometimes. Yet I still maintain the latter parts of it. I did some work. Now I get to do more work.

Anxieties about the future

CW for self harm, and general life struggles for the this heading.

Will I ever be able to make something as moving as this?

When you first press "New Game" the first line of text that you see reads "one stupid animal kept harming itself during the making of this visual novel". Shortly before releasing LONER_DOG, in a bout of insanity, I decided to try and cut (heh) back on self harm. Maybe by the time I publish this postmortem I'll have been clean for over a month for the first time since the start of the year. On most days I struggle to articulate why that's a good thing.

Because clearly it makes me really really good at art. And I am a prime philosophical and practical candidate for "faggot that wants to die for its art".

Maybe I can learn to enjoy this newfound peace. We'll see nya

Cultural Reception & Reactions

The acid scene. People getting their brains rewired with regards to their own relationship to their self-destructive behaviors and their communities. The really taboo kink mentions. All the different character dynamics. People feel seen and loved and that's the best thing I could've ever hoped for. 

I've made new friends and gained new cred (lol) and reflected on so many parts of my own life. Loner Dog is a game that heals people and while my brain diseases bar me from experiencing genuine pride, I feel warmed by being part of the cultural canon we call the fucked up trannyfag yuri vn community

A look into the future

No fucking idea. I always try to make things better and innovate on what I made previously but realistically, there's gonna be a ceiling, and I'm fairly confident my next thing will be *different* (or represent some internal technical advancements you don't get to see directly heh). I mean ok, I already released Liber Liberationis in the meantime as a really small thing but I'm talking about bigger VN projects here.

I actually submitted LONER_DOG to the trans rep jam and IF showcase. It feels like a cultural thing I can show off to people, maybe. I'm still really torn because part of the philosophy behind writing LD was a sense of intracommunal communication. Fuck what cishets and patriarchs and genocidal imperialist fucks and the liberal conservative types that enable them think. Does me showing this off to people that are not part of our community undermine that goal? Is the potential backlash worth it to maybe get it seen by one person that needs it? Ok that's a yes but yk. I try to only speak in language that addresses those I care about. If someone doesn't Get It I will not waste my time with them. I'm too awesome for that.

[Actually a small aside because I've seen no one mention the credits yet heh. The "politics of visibility will get you killed" line is a reference to Lily Alexandre's video Trans Day of Vanishing. I genuinely believe we as a trans community need to radicalize even more and do so fast. Build parallel structures. Betray your country. Love yourself and your siblings. Shape your flesh.]

That's it. I don't know where I'll go from here. My life is a lot, always. Thank you for being here <3