my vn slowguts has been out for a bit now. ive been considering doing a little postmortem about it so here's that, i think!!

first of all i cannot believe this thing released in february and we are now in april!! i had to go lay down and die for a while after finishing this thing (despite its fairly short length) so i was out of commission for a good while after finishing it.. part of me def wanted to dive into my next project(s) basically instantly after, and to an extent i sorta did? i started planning them, at the very least. im planning to really lock into finishing the draft for my current project basically as soon as i finish this little writeup so that'll be that!! it'll be a little story about making art, because i think about that sorta thing all the time.
what i also always always think back on is how many people ended up telling me they read the damn vn too.. frankly i was hardly expecting anyone to read it, but hearing that people liked it made my day for a while. i did always have the feeling that, once i finally got something OUT, id be really happy if anyone told me about reading it AND I WAS VERY RIGHT!!! i heard a lot about people sorta catching what it was i was trying to put down here, and that made me feel super whole, to a shameful extent.. if u ever feel like talking to me abt my stupid work this is an open invitation to do so . im a very lonely girl :,) just kidding kinda idk unless

"but ame, what IS IT you were putting down?" i'd be surprised if a lot of people reading slowguts asked this. i feel like its sorta in-your-face, which i dont really consider a flaw, at least not for this text lol... but at the same time i sorta think about a lot of angles when it comes to anything im writing, to a point where it cant even be called "subtext," in fact id be surprised if these ideas were easily picked up just from the main text of slowguts by just about anyone...
to get the obvious out of the way, slowguts is inspired by my real life experiences with dissociation. there couldnt be a better time and place to go into detail about it than a post about slowguts but i still feel pretty hesitant to go fully into it lol . well if you read it itll probably be obvious, to anyone who'd get it anyway. heard a lot of people relating to it from this angle too, to the point of it maybe being too raw at times? lol.. but thats not a quality im ashamed of neither. sorry to anyone affected tho

from that angle, one of the central statements i wanted to give off was.. the idea that you can't so easily cast off parts of yourself as easily as it seems sometimes. that seeing something that came out of you and thinking of it as monstrous, and to be gotten rid of, will do more harm than good . a lot of things in life are what you make of them, and that goes double for the things that happen in your head. some courses of action will do a lot more harm in the long term than they are worth!!!
(so preachy...)

less a central thesis and more of a central theme, the twisting of love. once again this is so central to the story i sorta feel like a bumbling fool typing about it here but i guess if im to make this blogpost about it at all i might as well, right?
a lot of actions which "shouldnt" be loving end up signifiers of love, especially during the epilogue.. obviously its because it makes me horny. getting that out of the way right now its because it makes me really horny. but i think the idea of accepting abuse, to an extent, and thinking of even those actions as different types of love. this ties into how i sorta thought of irida and null as having something uncomfortably "parental" about them... something no one i've talked to really picked up on, i think because its not really even present as subtext and i basically imagined it all in my head and forgot to write about it!! but even so, the idea of despising something you yourself came to raise, in a way, was central for me when i was solidifying slowguts as an idea.
how could that even be, after all? what a weird world, where you can feel that about your own offspring, right? its odd odd odd.
and don't get me started on the weird ownership sorta inherent to this idea of parenthood. in my head that was all there lol

speaking of dissociation,, i think also fairly self evident, especially with certain scenes where i made sure to deal with it in as heavy a hand as possible (lmao) i wanted to give off the feeling of how terrifying psychosis can be. delusions aren't to be completely demonized either if u ask me, but what they can be is EXTREMELY SCARY.. my life a horror movie!!!!

when it comes to visual inspirations... i wish i had more to talk about here. something in specific to cite. really i just wanted to make a big tentacle-ish eroguro msgk. and i wanted her to have gurowings. i dont remember getting the idea from any specific place... at least one person said null looked like a miku of sorts but that was never really an inspiration i think . i recognize her hair guts look a lot like pinocchioP's "what's inside" miku. kinda hate that localized title btw, but its official so what can you do i guess ??
it took me a while to get irida's hair just right. she looked entirely different at first, but i banged out her final design after doing a lot of aimless sketching on my little sketchbook... the one i ended up finalizing randomly looked a lot like chii, so i went for it!! null's design came first, so the idea was to have a lot of the same notes as null, only "looser." that's why she has those weirdly loose, weirdly low hair ties... in case it wasn't obvious idk lol

honestly its getting tedious writing this out so ill cap it off quickly talking abt my experience working on the novel..

i got some good responses to the snippets of text i was showing oomfies as i wrote, and from people i forced to beta read as well. which surprised me!! my nerves are always always at their worst when im writing. i have so little experience with it!! im sure it shows, at certain points, or even in these postsgdfhbdfh,,,
even so i can't help but write anyway... write write write... so much unfinished stuff, for many reasons, some of which aren't even my fault!! i think. i always dreamt of finally getting something out... for a while, having something out felt straight up unreal. a part of me still can't believe i'm a post "ame debut" world?? its funny because feb 16th was just another day for everyone else in the world, and slowguts is just another vn to anyone else in the world... but that's how it is!! that's alright!!! it means the world for me just the same

i also felt some pressure over thinking i had to keep my art pretty consistent... despite loving art, and some people liking my art output somehow, i am anything but consistent!!!! i especially stressed out over the cgs... for some of them i felt like i was taking so, so many liberties lol.. cant help but feel like some of the expressions look a bit out of place still. i really should probably care less, though. its fine that my greasy fingerprints are all over this thing, right? you read it to see me, in a way. even if you don't know who i am, that is me.

thank you for reading me!! especially if you cared enough to read this all the way. by by~~

this is prolly gonna be the last slowguts update before it comes out (vibrating) (excited) (dying)

yesterday late at night i finally finished the script and sent it out for oomfies to betaread... ive been getting really pleasant responses that have made me super duper happy!! its hard for me to have very high expectations for myself, especially writing, because im not very confident in my skills as a writer... i have very little experience after all!!! but my peers seem to be getting something out of this story and oh my god i was not ready for how good that feels....

two things are relevant in this screenshot... first of all, just earlier today i finished work on the menus!!! (for now)
the quickmenu was actually pretty fun to work on... i wanted to do a more in depth take on the ingame pause menu as well but trying to mess with the screen code for it made my eyes sorta bleed so i went with the easy, obvious approach. oh and i redid irida!! look she doesn't look so bad now, right??
i finally tried a multi costume system like i wanted to for a while... its kinda funny to have done it for SUCH a short vn where the character in question barely appears but nonetheless waow waow yepppp ^_^
the bow irida wears in that outfit is based on a bow my wife giulia wears to work sometimes. she's been helping me with a lot of small decisions and tiny details... like the name of a certain incidental character whose name sadly didn't even make it into the vn in the end!! so sad

slowguts was my first for a lot of things... including my first time changing the title screen!! i mean yea if my backlog consists of a thousand WIPs that couldnt even get their scripts finished.. it makes sense that i wouldve never TOUCHED a title screen before, right? its also the first time ive touched ATL, for a certain transition that shows up later.. it actually sticks out a ton so anyone who's read this blog will know what im talking about when they play it. i assume ame.fish readers are in the minority tho. hello if ur reading this !!

a really heavy feeling of warmth is setting in the closer i get to finishing this little work. its very short, and for many reasons maybe for the people reading it wont seem very special, but the idea came to me from a pretty personal place.. that's not really why its important to me though!! (generally most of my ideas so far have ccome from personal places so wtv lol)
having been a fan of visual novels, wanting to tackle them myself for so long, even having a ton of attempts some that have lasted years now.. knowing that this, my debut work, is approaching so so so soon, and at this point its so close to done that i could LITERALLY SHIP IT RIGHT NOW ,,, it feels really special to me and ive been bathing in that glow since yesterday.
i will really never forget how this felt, and the experience will never ever stop being important to me.... im so happy

but anyway more to come when i.. finish the novel for real!! (still a few CGs left to go... lets get back to work noww~~)

slowguts update!!!

i had (at least what felt like) a fairly busy week irl so progress was more of a slow drip, tho just earlier today i actually got a bit of a burst of energy and wrote more than i've usually been writing!! yippieee

earlier in the week i decided i probably hit the limit on how many days i could go without working on portraits for the two heroines... im not really happy with irida's right now so i might eventually remake it? but for now itll stay the way it is . still im a bit ashamed to show.. (actually im pretty happy with her expressions so far at least!)

i think at this point my intent with this greasy little character is probably obvious.. i want to capture a dangerous sort of "moe." the kind that has the potential to be really annoying... but i hope to make it work nonetheless. plus its all for a reason in the end but i need to make sure i deliver all of that in a good way ^^;

having written way more dialogue for her lately i think i have a good grasp on her, at least how she will be during the main parts of the story!! ahh is that saying too much? mayb i shouldnt hold my tongue so much anyway..

well, im almost done with one of the scenes im fairly excited to be writing but i still wish i had more to show rn .. i'll just see how next week goes

its 2026~~~

a bit ago i lost some of the work on my two ongoing visual novel projects. granted what damage there was is actually fairly salvageable... its just gonna be a bother, and i dont rly feel like it rn ... so i felt like starting something new .. so i joined a jam!!

as usual i kinda have to take my time with these things, so that's exactly how i've been going about it . trying to keep a decent balance between progressing steadily and not overwhelming my easily overwhelmed rat brain !!

as always im really unsure of which parts of my idea to share before its fully finished.. its less about spoiling it and more that i'll sort of feel more pressure to deliver it exactly as ive written it if i were to write it here or somewhere else people can read.. but the general idea is that you're observing a very dissociative girl who hates herself very much. and then a girl gets hurt, ofc

the nvl display is one of the few things i managed to get done so far.. i really like little visual projects where i get to use negative space, like i did with the guts in the UI here lol . i also need to do the buttons at some point, but i think thats for later!!

from a mechanical sense i knew from the second i started working on this thing that i wanted to see if i could pull off a subtitle style for the more conversational scenes. i feel like it solves an issue ive been having writing the nightfall universe games lately where the conversations feel a bit more stilted than they wouldve been in an adv format,, im enjoying writing with this style a lot !!

recently i finished a rough, sorta hurried cut of the prologue. usually at this point id have some basic portraits ready for the main characters but this time around i focused on the CGs for the first scene because i REALLY wanted to test if this format and the nvl-to-sub and sub-to-nvl swapping read well... its very new to me !! i think this is maybe the first time ive ever done a cg im generally satisfied with for one of these projects as well lol ^^;

not much to show other than that.. which is funny cus ive been thinking about this damn thing nearly 24/7!!! got lots of plans written down and a general structure... the hardest part for me is always writing the scenes because im so so so terminally afraid of my skills as a writer, its hard for them to amount to much because i just do not have that kind of experience!! aaahh.. but ill keep at it slowly and something will come out in the end.

this concept is extremely personally poignant to me so i really really need to get it out this time... i want to super badly. and i want to think maybe someone else would connect with it, specific as it is... if anyone read it at all id be super happy !

been kind of at a standstill with art this past month, but today i worked on something pretty decent i think.

lately i've been taking a lot of comfort in separating "myself" from "my body." i like it when i choose not to call it mine, because the body feels like it limits me and takes control away from me when i know i am so much more than it. this piece is inspired by that knowledge, depicting the body limply holding onto the plushie known as ragdoll. i tried to use old royal portrait paintings as inspiration for it, though i'm not sure it shows so great. thank you angel for help with the piece as always

very little art to hang up here lately because ive mostly been spending my artistic energy on my forever-project visual novel cherubic nightfall ^^ but

yesterday (as of writing) i tried to do some character design 4 personal reasons ^^ im not sure if im happy with it yet but i'll keep doodling w
here's two random screenshots of the visual novel in questionb lol

"I am born again."