Made Marion Development Update, October 2025
5 months ago
– Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 04:34:55 PM
On the Homeward Stretch!
Happy Halloween, all! I'm putting the finishing touches on the writing for John's Chapter 3 this weekend. It was a beast, but we're in the home stretch now. I just have writing the Chapter 4s (which doesn't take me too long) and coding Chapters 2-4 left before release.
Our cut-ins are mostly done and we have 3/5 CGs with the final two nearly complete, so our art is in a good spot. Our animated intro will not quite be complete by this release, but there will be an updated video with some excellent progress made. It will be in full video format instead of in-engine, which will make it a more seamless player experience.
With our current progress I'm going to say our release will be toward the end of November. I want to make sure my editor has plenty of time with the text and we also have a lovely Black-identified sensitivity reader with a strong background in Medieval fantasy who is checking the route over for me.
I'll be back in a few weeks with our Beta announcement!
Made Marion Development Update: September 2025
6 months ago
– Tue, Sep 30, 2025 at 10:15:22 AM
Hi everyone! Sorry our dev update ran so late in the month, I got laid out with a bad cold and was using all my limited energy to work on the game.
I am currently writing John Chapter 3 and coding Chapter 1. I've received buy-in from the team and John's route will be releasing in November. We'll post the exact release date once we begin beta-testing.
Lawrichai has been hard at work on our lore intro, and we should have a version with a lot more of the animations available when John's route releases! You can take a look at some snippets on our Bluesky feed.
In addition, Sandra is having a good time illustrating our Mega-Guide lore stories! I have to share this one from Robin's story with everyone because it's just so cute. Little Robin and Geoffrey having a little tiff! Yes, they've been at odds for their entire lives.
Hope you are all having a most excellent spooky season. John will be seeing you very soon!
Made Marion Development Update: August 2025
7 months ago
– Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 12:01:43 PM
Livin' on a Prayer
Whoa, we're halfway there! Writing for John's route is now 50% complete. Major coding will begin as soon as I get Chapter 1 back from my first reader.
Johnny used to work on the docks...
We will be releasing John's route this fall. I'll have a more exact date when we are closer to release. Thank all of you so much for your endless patience as I continue to deal with the ups and downs of chronic illness. The ups are getting better and the downs less frequent, but it does sometimes feel like two steps forward, one step back.
Hope you all have had an excellent summer and are looking forward to some good ol' fashioned romantic yearning when John's route releases this fall!
Made Marion Development Update, June-July 2025
9 months ago
– Fri, Jul 04, 2025 at 01:33:52 PM
Hey everyone! Sorry for the slight delay, but I had a lot of stuff to get together for this update. The whole team is coming together to get things done for John's route after my chronic illness made work in the winter-spring difficult.
Writing:
I'm now writing John Chapter 2. Chapter 1 is complete at the usual 20k-ish words. Things are flowing much more smoothly now that I've figured out a better relationship dynamic between John and Marion, and John's character flaws are more apparent. He may seem like Mr. Perfect at first (and he certainly does to Marion, who gets a big ol' crush on him quite early in the route) but of course nobody's perfect. A challenging Marion in particular can bring out John's bad side (a compromising Marion deals with some different challenges).
By the way, if you missed it, you can now view our preview of John's route on our Youtube.
Sprites and CGs:
Arrapso has completed the more-naked versions of our Sherwood sprites. We noticed their trousers were visible on screen in scenes in which they were meant to be naked, so we now have trouser-free sprites. As we're trying to keep a Mature rather than AO rating, nobody's crown jewels are visible, but the illusion of nudity is now much better.
We also have John's common route CG complete. As I've been sharing these early, please take a look. I adore the lighting in this one, as well as the tenderness.
Lore Intro:
As we've decided to change the animated lore intro from an in-engine piece to a full animated movie, Lawrichai has been making great strides with Live2D. She now has the first couple "scenes" in the intro completed. Here's an example of one of the animated characters who illustrate our intro story, an elven greater fae:
The final product is going to be quite lovely!
Mega-Guide:
This spring I discovered that I'll need to remake the Mega-Guide from scratch. When my previous hard drive died, it took the source file for the Mega-Guide with it, and I was an idiot and only had the .pdf version backed up online. I've rectified that and am using the .pdf as a reference to re-create and add to the guide.
We have enough money in the budget to make the guide even nicer, so I've hired Sandra to create some illustrations for the lore stories. Here's one of the ancient druid Morgana taking a ride in a hawk as King Arthur and Merlin raise the Wall that cuts Stennland off from the rest of Avalon.
Since I decommissioned the VC Games website (too much expense and I didn't have time to upkeep it properly), I will re-distribute the in-progress Mega-Guide to everyone who pledged for it and it will have a new permanent home for updates on the VC Games Google Drive from then on out. This time it will have a wealth of new information and stories as well as walkthroughs for the Sherwood routes.
Whew! It's going to be a busy summer of writing, coding, and arting, but it's great to have everyone along for the ride. See y'all in August!
Made Marion Development Update: May 2025
10 months ago
– Thu, May 15, 2025 at 01:30:09 PM
Hi everyone! Thanks for you patience with our small gap in monthly updates. I'm back in business with the current state of the project and team.
State of John's Route
So chronic illnesses can be very frustrating, and this winter and early spring I ended up struggling a ton with mine. I'd been doing well in the fall, but I relapsed hard in Feb-Apr. The good news is that after three years I finally found a specialist who was willing to try medications on me, and the most common med being used on long Covid kicked in during late April after just a couple months! (It can take 3-4 months to fully feel the effects.) For the first time since January 2022, I feel... normal. It's very exciting!
On top of the illness struggles, I was having difficulties with the way I'd planned the relationship development in John's route. It just wasn't working for me. After a lot of scribbled notes and cursing, it was a conversation with my first reader that helped me figure out my issue... I needed John to be more flawed and for the main pre-relationship confusion to be two-sided instead of one-sided. This avoids a formerly pivotal scene that I felt was too cliche and replaces it with some lovely angst and flailing. Having figured that out, I'm much happier with where things are going.
This leans into my route theme where Marion and John have a number of things in common as the "responsible one" in their families. Both of them are very hard on themselves and that can lead one to not realize that somebody else might actually be super into you. ;)
So never fear, production has been slow so far but in my new brain fogless state I'll be banging this sucker out over the summer and a fall release should be possible! Wasn't able to speed up the production rate quite yet, but it will be out.
Team Status
While I'm doing the writing and coding, the rest of the team is on their usual tasks.
Sandra: As we've basically finished the backgrounds (I'm trying very hard not to need anymore!), Sandra has moved to assisting Lawri with cut-in production. Here's one that I particularly like from John's route. What did Roan do to deserve being scooped? It involved shenanigans. I gave Sandra reference pictures of angry cats being held. :D
Arrapso: Only one major NPC sprite left to do, so Arrapso is mostly on CGs now. She'll also be doing a more naked version of our male-identified love interest sprites so that they're not obviously wearing trousers during scenes where they're implied to be naked. They won't have visible genitals, you'll just see their lower bellies and maybe some nice muscular lines down there.
Lawrichai: With Sandra helping on cut-ins, Lawri is able to concentrate fully on the animated lore intro. She learned Live2D over the winter so she could take over the animation duties herself, making for a smoother experience than me using in-engine animation tools.
That's where we are, and I hope to be able to deliver much swifter production updates over the summer!
