EUDAEMONIUM

2026 February 15 // devlog

Trans Joy Jam - Devlog 02

Time for another devlog, this wraps up the second week of the jam! I think I’ve made some good progress on both development and the writing front.

Progress and Changes this week

I spent most of this week writing and tweaking bits in the code for a smoother gameplay experience and writing the first scene of the story.

I won’t go into everything but this is a rough overview of my progress this week:

Pronoun tool

I switched from Feniks’ detailed pronouns for renpy to npckc’s pronoun tool. This was mostly because Feniks’ pronouns were too complicated for me, since I’m a noob to coding…and while I can read code I don’t know how to write Python blocks yet. Npckc’s tool requires more copy-pasting but it was easier to set up since it’s just one .rpy file.

I was able to get 7 pronoun choices for the player, and even wrote my first menu in ren’py, which is more functionality than I initially planned for!

Animations

I found Renpy default animations surprisingly difficult to get the hang of at first…but I think I finally figured out how to move images around on the screen in a way that feels natural and more like an immersive visual novel rather than a slideshow. I’m not really using any fancy effects because I want this to be as simple as possible, so everything is just animated in engine.

The most difficult part for me was getting things to move around without the windows getting in the way and slowing down animations that were resolving too fast.

Player Experience

I have some segments that switch between NVL and ADV style dialogue, and it was surprisingly hard to get this to feel…right? NVL (AKA Novel) are games where the text goes over the whole screen and obscures the characters, while ADV(AKA Adventure) is the currently more popular version with a little dialogue box at the bottom of the screen. NVL is the style employed by the When They Cry and Tsukihime series and ADV is more akin to Doki Doki Literature Club and Ace Attorney‘s presentation.

I’ve always wanted to write a VN that switched between these modes of text delivery, but having it transition between these windows without it feeling abrupt was tricky to get right, especially since I write most dialogue in big code blocks rather than line by line declarations. I had to split up some of these code blocks and insert commands to hide the window or transition between images to get it to feel more clean and seamless to the player.

The NVL segments are reserved for descriptive/expository text and long internal monologue, while ADV style narration is where the bulk of the game takes place with character dialogue broken up with brief player asides and descriptions.

Sound effects and design

There isn’t much to talk about here since I’m largely using stock assets, but it was surprisingly difficult to find the kinds of sounds I needed at first. I checked out freesound.org at first, but https://www.soundjay.com/ was a lot better for my needs.

I think sound design is heavily underrated when it comes to VNs, even my favorite VNs are marketed more as “sound novels” because of their reliance on music and sound to set the tone of a scene. Unfortunately I am not able to be extremely complex with the sound design in game, but even adding a few knocks and the sound of a door opening has already improved the immersive experience of the story

To-dos for this week

Overall I’ve made good progress in some areas but I’m behind in others, which I think is pretty normal for a first time game jam.