The Joyful.

A demo, and an exposition on creating stuff.

The Joyful is a visual novel I started work on about a week ago, but not really. I'm a writer by practice, so I write a lot of stuff. I write silly little substack posts here, but the goal is to become a published author. I've written two books and a novella, and a third book is in the later stages of being finished. The Joyful is an adaption of my novella by the same name. And I'll be real, it's rough. The best advice I got from my editor was “You should do something else.” And not in a disparaging way, but what he meant was that I should broaden my horizons and both become better read to understand what makes a good novel, but to also dabble in other mediums to see if my story-telling chops would work better in those. He said that The Joyful reads and is paced a lot like a visual novel, so this is me taking his advice to heart.

And also telling him “fuck you” to an extent, as well.

I have no programming or coding background to speak of, for I am a technologically-illiterate boomer. So what do I use to make visual novels? Ren'Py was out of the question; it's too in-the-weeds regarding coding and programming that navigating and editing scripts is both tedious and difficult for me. Then I tried a free visual novel engine on steam which was easy enough to use, but I learned that it was in beta and impossible to export my work, so I pissed away around 18 hours of my life on something that I couldn't even share. So I settled on Tyranobuilder, and in five hours I was able to make up for all my wasted time due to its easy interface, gentle learning curve, and ease of complex coding (but it's still there if I ever feel confident enough to try). It'll probably show its cracks if I ever try to do something more robust, but for now it seems to work.

So now we're here. I am new at this and it's been a week since I started, so obviously this is going to be an incredibly scuffed visual novel. The art assets are pictures of paintings I've made, or heavily edited stock photos distorted into oblivion. The music is shit I slapped together in Ableton and Audacity with no compositional background save a few tracks that are unlicensed edited loops of songs I like, and the volume mixing is all over the place. I used Pixabay for stock sound effects like rain and crowd chatter. The character assets are based on a picrew I found and either hand-painted or edited in Gimp. Hell, I don't even know if I exported it properly because the folder is full of gibberish and files and I'm afraid of doxxing myself or giving people viruses or some bizarre paranoid shit. The most straight-forward way I can think of sharing it was through Itch.io and even then I gave up on trying to get Butler to work. Everything about this is more of a proof-of-concept of one psychotic disabled recluse with a lot of time and depression on their hands.

This is my demo of The Joyful. It covers the first four chapters of the novella, out of sixteen or so. That number may fluctuate depending on how much I want to adapt or cut from the novella into this. It's a kinetic novel, meaning it's just for reading with none of the choice or branching storylines that visual novels typically offer. It's a straight line to the finish, and you're along for the dark and surreal ride.

Speaking of dark, THIS IS THE CONTENT WARNING: This novel covers themes of self-harm, drug abuse, sexual assault, bullying, stalking, and parental neglect/abuse. It is reflective of my own nightmarish upbringing as a child who grew up in an abusive family and had an abusive school life. Bad shit happens in this. If you are susceptible to bad vibes, do not read this.

This is the culmination of a year-old novella I wrote and 25 hours in visual novel makers. There’s something utterly terrifying about putting out a body of work for other people to judge because imposter syndrome is real and I’m a bad writer and this is a bad visual novel hacked together in a week, but I’m gritting my teeth and here it is. So read it, and give me feedback on whatever you feel. It can't be worse than what my editor has said.