Precious Kouhai

I've talked about this a few times now, but it's never gotten its own post, so let's fix that and make this official.

Precious Kouhai is a slice-of-life nukige-style adult visual novel. If you have no idea what that means, it basically boils down to not having much of a story. You'll see little snippets - slices, if you will - of the character's lives. The "nukige" part means that the snippets you see are going to be focused on the sex. Not to say that there will be no story, though. It is still a visual novel, and I'm still a writer, so there will be plenty to read. Just expect it to be short - maybe an hour or two in total once it's completed.

This isn't normally my style, but Precious Kouhai is (like most of Maids & Masters) in large part an experiment and an excuse to improve some skills. I'd like to think I've come a long way as a writer in the couple of years I've spent working as a writer and developer, but especially in terms of making entire games by myself, I've still got a long way to go. Precious Kouhai will help me improve in two big ways.

The first of which is visuals. In helping Berkili rework the renders for the first chapter of Companion of Darkness, I got to use a bunch of tools that I'd either ignored or weren't available to me when I started Maids & Masters. MnM now has a visual style that I don't want to stray too far from, so if I want to practice using those tools, I should start a new project - like Precious Kouhai. Since the visual style isn't established and the project will be relatively short anyway, I can try different things out from scene to scene without it being so unexpected that it takes you out of the experience. 

 

On top of that, while I have started making custom animations for Maids & Masters, it's something I'm hesitant to do because I'm slow at it. For Precious Kouhai, I want every frame to be an animation, not just the lewds. The title screen is animated, the mundane parts with the characters just sitting there will be animated, even things like the menu backgrounds will be animated. And not just animated - hand animated. HS2 has a lot of pre-built animated poses, and I'm not going to use a single one. This should not only help me improve as an animator, but help me learn how to speed up my process and create a unique experience since not many visual novels put the time and resources into animating mundane scenes.

The second way PK helps me improve as a developer is that it's the first project I'm creating in Ren'Py. While I want to keep my focus on making RPGs like Maids & Masters, Redemption Harem, and Love/Loss, eventually branching out into other genres like I have with Saccharine Soil, some of these games just won't work in RPG Maker, and I'll have to learn how to use different software. While I do want to eventually learn Godot or Unreal, Ren'Py is a much simpler first step.

Ren'Py is extremely easy to learn and work with compared to other things I've attempted learning over the years. I've also got a handful of stories that either I don't think will translate well into anything except a visual novel, or that will work best using a visual novel as the interactive medium instead of trying to shoehorn in game mechanics. As an added bonus, development in Ren'Py is also significantly faster than development in RPG Maker, so if I need a break from working on MnM, having PK as a fall-back project so that I can keep working without burning myself out grinding away on MnM will be incredibly helpful. It also means that if a month would go by without a release for MnM, I can spend a little time on PK and get a release done for that instead and keep up with making monthly releases without either project suffering for it.

As a closing statement - if you're the sort of person that gets nervous about developers picking up new projects because you've seen so many of them either drop the first project or stop developing altogether, do your best not to worry. I'm a little apprehensive about putting more on my own plate, too, but I've been working on multiple projects since I started Maids & Masters. Until I start making enough to financially support myself independently, I'll always be working on multiple projects. I abhor an unfinished story like nature abhors a vacuum, so you can trust that I'll be doing everything I can to finish everything I started, and that includes the games behind the demos I've been making.

Precious Kouhai's existing preview build will go public on itch and on Patreon this Friday.