Made Marion

Made Marion Development Update, June-July 2025
about 1 year 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
about 1 year 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!

Made Marion Development Update, Feb. 2025
over 1 year ago – Tue, Feb 18, 2025 at 01:40:42 PM

Festival Season Continues!

As I mentioned last month, we're in a variety of Steam festivals this Feb-Mar. The first one is the Storyteller's Festival, which is on now!

As part of our festival experience, we have a livestream preview of John's route! It's playing on repeat throughout this festival and our next one, as well as Steam's Visual Novel fest later in March.

Find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/broadcast/watch/76561199108480417

I got a few buddies and our faithful first reader/editor Edhie together for a blind playthrough of the first few scenes. Take a peek and learn a bit about John's impish side and, um, giant swords. This is pre-beta footage, so rest assured that the couple of bugs that made it into this stream will be fixed before release! (Today. They will be fixed today.)

John Route Progress

So the problem with deadlines when you're chronically ill is that, yeah, chronic illness. I wasn't able to finish John Chapter 1 by mid-February as I'd hoped (part of that was taking the time needed to code in the material for the festival stream, but hey, that coding had to happen sooner or later), but I am still truckin'!  I was having brain issues and had to do a lot of re-writing.  I will continue working and hope to be moving on to Chapter 2 ASAP.

That's it for this month, next month we should have some previews of the ongoing (improved from original plan, with full movie animation) lore intro!

Made Marion Development Update, January 2025
over 1 year ago – Wed, Jan 15, 2025 at 02:03:34 PM

Happy New Year!

New Year, new routes, huzzah!  This is a quickie, but if you backed at a level that gets you the Made Marion Mega-Guide, please take a gander under Studio Updates.

Studio Updates

1. I decided to shutter our studio website experiment because I didn't have the time or bandwidth to run a website along with everything else. It was too expensive for not enough exposure because holy geez do I not have time to play SEO games. velvetcupcakegames.com no longer exists.
2. This means I will be finding a new place to store updates to the Made Marion Mega-Guide. Those of you who backed the Mega-Guide will receive a new download key from Backerkit once I release the Will updates (I'm late on that, sorry!) and that copy will contain a new download location for updates.
3. I have started a company Bluesky, since that appears to be where people are finally solidifying after the Twitterpocalypse. You can find us as Velvet Cupcake Games: 
   https://bsky.app/profile/velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social

Development Updates

• I've been dealing with some major hypersomnia (bordering on narcolepsy) since December, which eats into my work hours. I'm working with my new specialist to get on chronic fatigue meds, which can be helpful for long haul Covid folks, but the wheels of medicine turn slowly and we need to find a solution that costs less than $18,000 for a three-month supply.
• That said, John Chapter 1 is coming along and I'm setting a hopeful end of January, definitely mid-February due date for its completion.
• We will be in a ton of Steam festivals through Feb-March and will have a sale going for at least some of them (I just learned I might be able to run a discount for more than one fest if they overlap).  Watch our socials (Tumblr and Bluesky) for info!  I'm hoping to have a video preview of John's route out for the fests as well.
• Why are all the Steam festivals that are a good match for us running Feb-Mar?  I don't knooooow, but I think the festivals themselves have noticed this and hopefully they'll spread themselves out more next year. :-p

That's it for Jan, see y'all mid-Feb!

Small Patch Now Live
over 1 year ago – Fri, Nov 29, 2024 at 05:34:19 PM

Version 2.1 EA Release

• Uploaded the final version of Will's final CG (Spontaneous Ending). If you unlocked the in-progress version, you can see the final version in your Art Gallery in Extras.
• Misc. typo fixes and editing pass over the Love Interest PoV Scenes.
• Will's Sunjati name has been changed to Iyiola as we were informed that his previous Sunjati name was unintentionally funny/awkward for modern West African readers.
• Altered "you can leave your hat on" joke/reference because due to sprite limitations he literally can't.
• Small blocking issue solved: Will's route was blocked at the end of Sherwood Chapter 2 if you first asked about Layton. This has been fixed.