Hello again! N here with your August State of the Metacosm.

Uhh, I did say I wasn’t planning on doing these monthly and I don’t want to make it A Scheduled Thing, but I’ve actually been working my little tail off for August so I have lots to tell.

First, I want to announce we’re going to be included in an anthology! We wrote a short story about Chani and Avandra, a sapphic meet-cute during an attempted assassination, and it’ll be included in Space Wizard’s Lesbians In Space 2, going live on September 9th. We won’t be posting it here for quite some time so if you want to read it, back the campaign!

Second: I’ve finally taken my first step into becoming a game developer!!

One of our ultimate reach-for-the-clouds goals with Metacosm was always video games alongside our more literary stories, since A and I are both huge game nerds. But — obviously — video games are a huge undertaking, and we’re two disabled/chronically ill people with limited funds and ability, so I always figured they were out of reach unless the books got like, really popular.

(That became its own issue, which I’ve already gone into at length at this point.)

So, story time!

In 2022ish I got into webcomics (specifically manhwa — Korean comics). Hardcore. (A hyperfixation that still hasn’t faded, ahaha)

I even spent six months planning a webcomic and eventually realized I couldn’t make myself do it because the sheer amount of drawing was just not possible for me. I can write 6-10k words in a day easily, but drawing for more than an hour? Nope. Due to my illness, I physically cannot draw that much without courting a serious injury. And we’d already established that we weren’t comfortable with accepting help from people who aren’t getting paid.

Then, right in the depths of the despair that I definitely was not cut out for comics, I chanced upon visual novels. Funnily enough it actually started by happening to see Red Spring Studio’s tweet (back before Twitter, y’know, got too musty to tolerate) about their Kickstarter for their visual novel Touchstarved. They’d made an absolutely gorgeous animation for it and it instantly drew me in — I’ve always been a sucker for animation.

In playing the demo I had a sort of an epiphany. I can do this. It’s more writing than it is art while still allowing me to do something with the skills I’ve honed since I was 10.

So I looked into visual novels. Played a bunch. Expanded the comic idea, altered it to fit a visual novel format. (Which quickly spiraled out of control for a first attempt lol — it’s at almost 60k and climbing. But I’ll talk more about that another time.)

Honestly the journey so far has been kinda fraught.

Got ready to use Unity. Unity imploded. Tried to learn Godot, found that coding from scratch is not something my brain is capable of. Heard about Ren’Py; downloaded it, watched the tutorial.

By that point, I was rocketing toward burnout and the idea of starting a new project was too much, so the entire thing got shelved.

Skip to three weeks ago. While organizing our shorts and one-shots, I came across the script I’d written for a mini comic. I thought I’d edit it into a short story — but reading it, the visual notes I’d made were too compelling for me to toss out completely. It was a story that needed visuals.

It occurred to me — I did it once, why not alter this one as well?

On complete impulse, I finally, finally, opened up Ren’Py with very low expectations. Told myself I’d mess around inside the engine, toss up some placeholder assets, just to see how far I could get.

Now, I have most of a short (2500~ words, 3 characters) visual novel done.

(Image description: a visual novel screenshot of a blonde woman in armor looking concerned at a large being of white noise with nebula hair, against a backdrop of space. The text box has “Nemesis” saying: “Arthur. This is what we’re here for, yeah? To explore space. I’m exploring. Calm down.”)

I have some more art assets I need to do and — as I’ve said — I’m very slow with art, so that’s kind of holding up finishing it. But right now I’m very confident that I’ll be able to.

We’re definitely going to release it for free (it’ll end up being very short, maybe 20min~ gameplay) probably on our itch.

So keep an eye out for more news related to that!

(Can I call myself a baby gamedev now? lol)

That’s been the majority of August, though we also have been doing some groundwork stuff and bits and pieces of other small projects. As always, we’re trucking along.

And to close us out, some extra Art from the Metacosm! A sketch of Redd I did not too long ago.

(Image description: A greyscale sketch of a young woman wearing a bandeau dress and crouching, with the dress pooling around her.)