Heya! It's roughly been a little more than one year since I conceived and published my first ever visual novel! To pay homage to its one year birthday, I decided to write up a devlog revolving around its community and history - and what got me into developing visual novels long after that.

Before I started making visual novels, I'd joined a site called ScribbleHub, which was basically NovelUpdate's sister site for original novels. Think of it as AO3, but designed by NU's owner, Tony. At that point I was already on AO3, but I'd decided to try my luck on ScribbleHub as well.

It was on ScribbleHub that I was messaged by Queenfisher, the founder of a group called BL Palace. I joined the forum's list of members, and subsequently Discord later on to support their workshop (that's right! They give talks and presentations on the topics. One's about to happen on the 13th of August this year (2022 as I'm writing this)).

Anyway,  the site, abbreviated SH, had (and likely still has) a rather low amount of female users based on its site-wide demographic poll, so there'd been some posts by some of its writers asking for female input on their works. So as a lark, I'd posted a thread in the forum to provide feedback on the forumers' male characters as a hot-blooded female reader.

One thing led to another and I started receiving posts from other BL writers like myself in that thread. I liked what one of them presented me very much, and as she was also a fan of Mo Dao Zu Shi, an ancient Chinese fantasy themed BL anime, yet another one thing led to another and I'd ended up sketching an outfit idea for her character.

This particular user was a game developer called Tsukimii on itch.io, who is also the developer of Scales of Fate, a Xianxia-themed BL visual novel. At that point, she had been developing another game, Suiyue, and this character happened to be the main character of that game.

I was then, on Discord, introduced to Scales of Fate, which she and some other developers were working on at that moment for a game jam on itch.io. One of the core developers of Scales of Fate was Summer, who's also the developer of Leap of Faith and an upcoming otome game for OJ2022. We had some discussions and eventually, to help market Scales of Fate for them, I'd tried my hand on making fanart for it and posting it on my tiny little Twitter page. I'm not sure how well I did at marketing it, but here we go:

One thing struck me after I completed the picture - that I could actually make characters look a bit like game characters. Prior to this I hadn't done much game design outside of the odd commission by one of my friend's boyfriend, who was a game developer, and I was, of course, drawing mostly fashion figures. Although this image wasn't used in the actual visual novel and was only maintained as marketing material on my social media pages, I sort of realized that I may be ready to make my own visual novel!

This realization was what eventually led to me creating Douya and the Golden Scroll. When Tsukimii and Summer told me they were developing a Xianxia visual novel, I decided to make my own too, just to up the number of similarly themed visual novels submitted into the jam. At that time I was having a one week or so semester break, so I had about one week to create and complete it. Thankfully, Ren'Py was very easy to use and I could push out characters quickly since I was able to draw models and add clothing to them in a short time.

Fashion design classes in my university require you to put out at least 30 - 60 different developed outfit sketches in less than a week so we're essentially trained for speed; that's how you get clothes designed, made, stress-tested and shipped out on time to your neighborhood boutiques. By 2021 I was a second-year student, so as you can guess, I was seasoned enough to produce them digitally at breakneck speed. So I managed to finish the game within the same week... after slapping the monsters together using recolored stock images.

I held a quick demo on Discord and with the help of the members there who had been willing to help test it out, quickly found bugs and readjusted some parts of the design. Then I launched it. That's where the real fight starts! Marketing, and all the shenags!

The goal of Douya and the Golden Scroll was fairly simple - it was to get more people interested in ancient Chinese fantasy-style BL games. During this time we, the fandom, were riding high on The Untamed, which had exploded in popularity through Netflix and other Asian drama channels. Then came Tian Guan Ci Fu, a beautiful and romantic BL Xianxia anime based around Chinese gods which was also picked up and made streamable on Netflix and Scumbag Villain, a BL anime based on one of my favorite novels by Mo XiangTong Xiu (seriously, I recommend this one! The link I provided is to the free online version by WeTV, the studio. If you have time, please watch it there). The BL Xianxia fandom had grown in number - but there were still few visual novels and games themed around it - and trust me, we did search for them!

Well, maybe they weren't tagged Xianxia so we couldn't find many.

If you're wondering how Douya and the Golden Scroll did, I don't think it did very poorly - at the time I'm writing this, it's got 7,676 views and 996 downloads, which I don't think is terrible for a visual novel made by an amateur without any real game design background. Of course, a large reason for those numbers is also because it was featured in bafflinghaze's novel, Dao of the Salted Fish, on Chrysanthemum Garden, one of the larger Chinese novel sites. But I really don't think it's bad - I like to think that I have contributed at least a little to the Wuxia and Xianxia BL game world - by being brave enough to put one out!

Seriously, I thought I'd be scragged and flamed to death for putting out the visual novel. Surprisingly, I've only gotten only a handful of hate-rates so far - the rest seem fair! Overall, though, I haven't really received much feedback, so I don't particularly know how good the reception is. Until today, I still don't know if most of the people who downloaded the game played it through or liked it or not. The only thing I can go by are just numbers, which I think is a pretty positive indicator. If the game didn't look good at least, no one would download it or even click on the page to view it, right? Glass half full! Of beer! Yess!

And oh yes, just so you know, Douya's design came from one of my parents' favorite Netflix shows of that year, The Handsome Siblings. I personally haven't watched the whole show yet, but they were raving about it, which was how I discovered it. The main character's very mischievous and cute.

Anyway, to cut a long story short - and it has gotten long! - after a year, I find Douya to be a success in its own way. It's my first game, even if it was rather silly, and I'm quite proud of it.

If you want more information on BL Palace, the group originally responsible for the events leading to the conception of this game, you can find their page here. For more information on Xianxia, Wuxia and Xuanhuan, click here. If you're more interested in my character design flow, you can try reading the development log I've written here.

If Douya and the Golden Scroll has somehow gotten you interested in Xianxia/Wuxia/Xuanhuan, do let me know! The genre's pretty popular in South East Asia, where I live, but I hope more people from different parts of the world will know about it and be willing to give it a go. I've never really talked much about my culture until Wuxia and Xianxia started having a larger part in the BL world, but it makes me happy now that I'm able to share it in a bright and colorful way!

Cheers!