20250802_Content_rollout_part2

I’m so tired.

I feel like I don’t have very much to say about the current itch.io situation that hasn’t already been said. What a time to start dipping my toes into gamedev and launch my first non-anthology vn.

While Offsuit Pair is in no danger of delisting from the current “NSFW” targets, it hurts to see all these new friends and acquaintances that I now know personally from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam be subjected to this (and, well, I was also planning to dip my toes into publishing explicit works soon™…).

We don’t just have to stand by and watch. Aside from contacting card services directly, events like these really emphasize the importance of community. When big corporations throw the marginalized to the curb, all we have is each other– events like the Toxic Yuri VN Jam bringing people together is a feature, not a bug.

In the past few days there’s been a big push for people in the VN-space to build their own personal websites, and given my 20+ years (😨) of off-and-on web dev experience and 2+ years of programming education experience, I wanted to do something to help out with this. There are already a thousand different "make your own personal website" guides, I figured that I didn’t really need to make guide number one thousand and one.

Instead, I set up a discord community to connect people who are working on their own personal websites, where people can share help, resources, and status updates.

Aside: Yeah yeah, I know, you don’t need to preach to me about discord itself being a walled garden at the whims of corporate overlords– this was just the common tool to get together people who were already in the TYVNJ discord server. If there’s a sustained interest in this I will consider moving to something akin to phpBB.

While this server is currently full of TYVNJ participants, it’s open to anyone who wants help with their personal website, especially those who are queer or otherwise targeted by recent social media content restrictions.

Anyways. On to less grim news: Offsuit Pair has been really well received and I’ve been overjoyed about it. There will be more on this in the upcoming postmortem, but I knew that the project was going to be a very big undertaking for the timeframe and I’m glad that the completed work managed to stick the landing and resonate with people. There are even small gaming sites talking about it!!

Near-future plans

• this week (?): finish Offsuit Pair Postmortem; this is currently at around 2,000 words and I’m expecting it to at least double before it is completed.
• before the end of August: finish this year’s YSO VN Anthology; I am planning for my contribution for this to recycle the engine from Offsuit Pair, so please look forward to it.
• before the end of September: Third (and final) major content rollout for this site, after which I will consider it complete (or at least: not under construction). This will primarily entail finally writing the gallery page and researching alternate hosting services. Once a satisfactory host is chosen I will host mirrors of all my games there, given the current itch situation.
• October through the end of November: Work on my current ongoing project for the Yuri VN Jam, aiming to get a vertical slice and/or demo completed.
• January through mid-February: make an entry for the Ryona Yuri VN Jam. I do know that Fisher plans to move this off of itch, the link here will be updated appropriately once this happens.

Site changelog since last update post

• new domainname! Now posted at http://hamaonoverdrive.online/
  • worry not, old links will redirect to the new url
• now hosting all assets locally (previously hotlinked stylesheets from google fonts and fontawesome)
• improved audio player: can now collapse and respects user pause when loading new page
• overhauled frontpage
  • now has buttons!
  • new splash graphic
  • truncated list of recent blogposts instead of just word-vomiting all of it at once
• added games page
  • this uses the same backend code as the writing index page, both of which read in from a yml file (will make future updates trivial)
• added Toxic Yuri VN Jam Webring
• added comments sections to select pages in lieu of standard guestbook
  • For the one person who left me a very lovely comment in the old guestbook, thank you. I have saved it so that I will still have it even after changing guestbook providers.
• dozens of smaller things that are too minor to bother listing here

Comments