On November 14th 2023, I made a post on r/RoleReversal about how I was so hyped up writing my visual novel that I was going to go and make it.

The RR forum has been begging for visual novels for as long as I've been on there, and I've been on there since 2021. It is now 2025 and I have yet to see anyone else post a completed visual novel. There have been projects announced but many fell through.

The story that I was imagining when I made that original post was a court romance, political Intrigue kind of story where the main character would basically be trying to gain the favor of three potential love interests. I had never made a visual novel before, so of course my scope was insanely huge:

I wanted three love interests, each with three different endings, and each route exploring different aspects of what role reversal would look like on a societal level. I wanted opulent art, beautiful music, amazing backgrounds, cool special effects, even a mini game…

Needless to say it was way past my ability.

I was still on step one, which was plot out the story and write it…. and although I had gotten a lot done, I was nowhere near where I wanted to be, and the more that I wrote, the more I realized that I didn't have the writing skill that I needed to succeed at achieving this goal!

I wanted to play in the NBA without ever going to the gym, basically. lol.

By the time the New Year rolled around I was frankly embarrassed that I had hyped myself up so much and told people on the forum what I was working on. So many people were so excited and offered to help me, and I was genuinely really hyped to connect with them and build something for the community, but oh my God I really couldn't write for shit.

The ideas were really good. The scenes were pretty good. But the writing was so WEAK.

Then I got laid off, and went back on the job grind. I found a new position fairly quickly and once I was settled in, around summer 2024, I decided that I would give this whole VN thing another try, but with a much smaller scope.

I ended up writing two different stories, which I titled Lady Mage and Lady of the Forest in my drafts. Lady Mage is pretty on the nose for what the story is, it's about a lady who's a mage, and I want that story to be my next visual novel.

Lady of the Forest really stood out to me because all of the different scenes and character interactions popped out of my head with so much passion and force that I got really attached to the characters. I especially got very attached to Rowan and her story.

To actually complete my first draft took about 4 or 5 months of working on it. Once I had that done, I went through and did a second draft, mostly tightening up the story. This is where I started to utilize ChatGPT to basically ask a questions about different aspects of my writing, getting some help on creating the right atmosphere for scenes,  and helping with the usual grammar and tense issues.

When I felt I was finally done with all the writing and different routes, it was the end of 2024.

In January 2025, I got laid off again. It took me down a very bad depressive spiral that I'm honestly only now starting to get out of. Luckily because I'm actually decent at my sales jobs (despite the fact that I keep getting laid off lol), I have decent savings and I can support myself as I look for a new opportunities.

…But like I said, getting laid off really hurts your self-esteem. My self-care plummeted, and I was overwhelmed with feelings of doubt, anger, and fear.

After a few weeks of sulking and hating myself, I decided to come back to this project, and really put my all into finishing it and making it as good as I can. Based on the visual novels I have read on Itch over the last year,  I know this is not that impressive of a project (here’s a list of my favorites btw).

The art isn't that amazing, the music is good but often times a little janky in how it comes in and loops, the writing is okay, the programming could have been more streamlined and organized, the GUI is very generic…

And I could spend more time knocking myself down for all the minute problems I'm now seeing in my project after it's done, but oh my God I'm just so amazed that I managed to finish this and that it's as good as it is!

Like, for a first entry, an almost 3 hour game with 5 endings and 40,000 words completed by one person over one year is very impressive.  I did that.

I DID THAT.

I'm so proud of myself.

For context, I've always had some sort of project going since I was a little kid, but very few of them actually finished. I have at least 50 different stories packed away in my Google Drive and various note apps full of interesting worlds and characters that I obsessively wrote about for a few days and never came back to.

When I was in high school I got into game development and tried to learn Unity and Godot and started half a dozen different games that I inevitably gave up on because I kept hitting roadblocks and kept taking that personally.

If the game crashed, it was because I was too stupid to code, not because I was learning.

I developed a massive fear of failure around programming because of this.

But things are different now. RenPy is such a straightforward engine that I could do most of the work by myself, and when I hit roadblocks it was fairly easy to find solutions. Massive kudos to the documentation, the Lemma Soft Forums, the DevTalk and Ren'Py Discords, and r/RenPy for the help!

I genuinely think the reason that I took to this system so well is because of how well documented it is, how supportive the community is, and how what determines a “good visual novel”  doesn't depend at all on complexity of mechanics, length of playtime,  fidelity of graphics, or any other metric so often used by the video game industry as shorthand for what is worth caring about.

The visual novel community says, “Oh you like this type of thing? I like it too!” and that's it. That's good enough.

I can't express to you how critical that is in creating a space where it's okay to fail, it's okay to do something simple, it's okay to do something completely self-indulgent.

I still want to make that RR court romance, but I don't have the skill to make that happen yet. The release of that game is many years away from today.

Still, I've learned so much by making Lady of the Forest that I actually feel confident that I can make that court romance happen.

I just have to put in the reps.

Check out Lady of the Forest.

Other links: YouTube, Ko-Fi, Reddit