Wow! It's been a little over six months since -Black * Cherries- came out and it's been such a wild time since then. So many people have sent kind messages and left lovely comments about their time with this little experimental horror visual novel, and it means so much to me that you all had so many kind words to say about it.

This was the second visual novel project I decided to pursue in 2021, released a month or so after my NaNoRenO and Non-Binary Game jam submission Confession Center, and admittedly, I found myself having a great deal of trouble creating such a small, but still frightening, horror experience. 

The original core idea behind this short horror story was an area I'd spend many summers walking through in my local area, with a variety of bizarre overpasses and twisting wooden pathways through swampy river run-off. When night falls in this area, the lights from the highways overhead create very striking silhouettes in the darkness, and every step reverberates around you, as if somebody is following close behind., All this inspired me to create a chase through such a locale, and I set to work photographing the area during the day and creating in-depth edits to make the area more eerie and abstract on the whole. 

The concept of being trapped in a liminal space, surrounded on all sides by unknowns and only one way forward despite the danger closing in, brought to mind several toxic friendships and relationships I had experienced in the past, and from there stemmed the characters of Dee and Cherry.  But, actually building this dynamic and telling the story in such a short form was a daunting task. The actual characters and personalities involved in this chase changed pretty consistently over about a month, where I wrote and threw out a handful of rough drafts that all tried to imagine the story from entirely different directions. At one point, I even imagined switching the two leads and presenting the story from the villain's perspective. But, in the end, I found my original concept was the most affecting, and in a hurry on a hot Saturday night, I wrote a full first draft of the script in a single sitting. 

Horror may never be my main focus as a writer or developer, but this creative process was an important one to me. It meant that my experience with Confession Center wasn't a one-time fluke, and pushed me to imagine other narratives that could be built and completed in shorter periods of time (and in particular, without requiring every free hour of my day to finish). 

If you enjoyed this little visual novel, feel free to check out some of my other works, such as Forgotten Fiction (a micro-fiction story about past creative works) and Scary Gourmet (a Halloween themed queer family comedy). My hope is I'll be making new things in 2022 as well, time-permitting, and look forward to playing even more as well! ^w^