Hey there! Fae here, with a local version of what was the inaugural post regarding this visual novel project: Void Dreaming!

In the leadup to release (less than two weeks away now!) I plan on porting those blog posts over here a couple at a time to detail the development ideology that went into Void Dreaming, along with the slew of worldbuilding posts that came about afterward.

Once those are out of the way, we’ll move into some final bio posts for the crew of the Void Dreamer herself… and then we’ll be at release time, baby!

So let’s not waste any more time, and dive in!

Introductions

But first, who in the shit am I? Hi there! I’m Faora. It’s pronounced Fae-or-ah, or you can just shorten it to Fae. Or Fao, as some people like to do. I’m not fussed!

I’m a gay Australian furry who’s been writing in the fandom for more than twenty years now, and I’ll thank you to never, ever bring that up with me at all, ever, lest I crumble into dust at the mere mention. I’ve been a pretty quiet, mostly background figure in the furry community over the years, though you may also have caught some of my work in print here and there. Venues such as Heat, Hot Dish, Fang, and a few others for good measure all have my fingerprints on them to some degree, some more than others!

Otherwise, you might know me for a few things. I used to yearly write Fae’s Christmas Music-Themed Special; five stories uploaded in the leadup to Christmas every year that were titled after and often inspired by pieces of music that I was very fond of. You could also know me from Interwoven, my 2023 writing project where I uploaded fifty-three instalments of a single contiguous series, usually once a week for the majority of the year. Or Blood and Water, my previous largest project, and a freely available series and novel sequel (and associated shorts). Or maybe just from any of my other work flitting about.

Or you might have heard about Void Dreaming from someone somewhere on the internet, or seen some of the spritework being released, and got curious. Nice to meet you! So now that you know a little about me, perhaps we should get to what you’re probably all here for: Void Dreaming itself.

Before we start that though, don’t worry! I don’t intend to spoil much of anything in these posts. Everything you’re going to hear (about the story, at least!), you’ll learn about in the prologue of the game itself. I’m also more going to be talking here about the process that led me to creating this project, so if you’re here for the actual meaty details of the VN itself, you may want to skip to the next entry as soon as it’s available. This here’s a lot of storytime about how I started the project, and some challenges with the concept that I had to work through. If that interests you, read on! Otherwise, I guess you can read something else! Meantime, let’s get started!

Inception

So.

I never really got into visual novels. I thought the idea, in my misbegotten youth, was silly. Choose-Your-Own-Adventures were cool, but I for some reason never really connected the dots to, “Hey, these visual and choice-based elements add a neat mechanic for the reader to interact with.” I thought the medium was something less than that of a book. Sometimes you never really grow out of an arrogant mindset… and sometimes you do.

Poking and prodding at a few noteworthy furry VNs began to enamour me with the idea of them as not just a legitimate storytelling medium, but possessed also of some not insignificant advantages over a standard novel. The same elements that I had quietly decried I came to acknowledge as an enhancement to the medium. I don’t think visual novels replace novels in the same way that TV and movies and theatre and video games don’t replace novels, but I do think that they’re a valid, valuable medium that I was very wrong and rather quite stupid to dismiss out of hand.

So cue me, mid-2023. I’m thinking about my next writing project, and I’ve got a couple of ideas on-deck. I’d started writing a bit of three different stories, in fact, to see if I had a feel for any of them. One was a modern, urban fantasy story featuring secret gods of old, shadow wars raged beneath modern civilization, and a protagonist out of his depth. This one I dismissed quickly because I didn’t really feel ready to do more fantasy, even urban fantasy, after Interwoven. Not for a little bit. Another was a dystopian cyberpunk story that would have been similar in scale to Interwoven, but focused on a devastated world run by powerful corporate interests from inside these self-enclosed arcology towers and the gutterpunks who wrote dirty soft and grafted rusttech to flesh, looking out for one another and avoiding the corpo patrols. I love me some cyberpunk and I wound up incorporating some of that into Void Dreaming, but I didn’t really have a plot in mind for this particular setting. Nothing that really spoke to me, anyway.

The third, however, focused around a lone wolf star explorer named Zuberi. Alongside his shipboard AI Obaa, herself full of just the kind of sass that I love to write, he sets out into the galaxy to chart new systems and winds up running into trouble out there in the black. The concept actually is older than 2023; it came about circa January 2020 while I was balls deep in Elite: Dangerous and absolutely enamoured with exploration in my dinky little Diamondback. The plot was more fleshed out, but it would go through about a dozen different iterations before I finally settled on the one that’s set to play out in Void Dreaming.

Some things had to change, obviously. The original plot, between Zuberi and another passenger he picks up in the course of the story, didn’t work for the VN. I mean… it could have done, but I didn’t want to do it that way. It would have been static, with very few choices. Zuberi would have been the point of view character, but he was a loner, antisocial… a bit of a blend between what the characters of Rael and Sam would wind up being. Definitely a far cry from what he turned into with this!

So I set Zuberi aside as the captain of the ship, and started to build a crew around him. We’ll talk more about the crew and characters in a later post, but he and all the crew were designed well before Rael came about. Once I figured out I was doing a visual novel and needed a PoV character to be the player insert, I toyed with giving the reader a chance to name him themselves, but I decided against it in the end. I wanted Rael to be a definable thing; to have some static elements that were all him. That was when it hit me.

Static elements are good, but what if  - and hear me out - I just lost my fucking mind?

Getting to the Point

That’s what this project has taken, really. Losing my mind. So let’s get into a little bit of detail regarding exactly the visual novel is, what it’s about, and what I think is going to make it interesting!

In Void Dreaming, you are Rael; a young wolf down on his luck and just barely removed from a pretty awful circumstance. You’ve entered for various reasons the employ of the Astrogation Guild; a galaxy-charting organization that, among other things, dispatches deep-space survey ships beyond the edge of civilized space to chart new worlds and systems. You’ll meet an eclectic crew of characters, get to know and befriend them (or not!), and build up your relationship with them. And while you’re doing all of this, you’ll stumble into a mystery with consequences reaching far further than Rael or anyone else on the crew ever dared to imagine.

Sounds good? I think so, too! Don’t get me wrong, though; Void Dreaming isn’t designed to be a dating sim. Sure, you can get down and dirty with most of the cast (and sometimes more than one at a time), but the story of their journey into fringe space is what I’m most excited for. And I’m excited by it because your choices are designed to really matter through two key systems: Origins, and Skills.

Rael is not a self-insert protagonist; he’s a character in his own right, with his own history and feelings and thoughts on things. This is expressed through the Origin system, where early in the prologue you’re able to choose from a variety of options that help set who Rael was before he stepped aboard the Dreamer. You get to determine your Rael’s background, from where he was born to what brought him to the fringe. These Origin choices open up different dialogue, better opportunities to interact with the crew, and give you, the reader, the chance to really define your Rael your way. Well… your way within the parameters I’ve given you, anyway.

His Origin choices also affect his Skills! At certain points in the story, Rael will be required to solve various problems that he faces with the application of his Skills. These Skills, defined initially by your Origins but later built up by how you choose to spend your time, will be what helps Rael escape danger, deal with threats, overcome obstacles, and survive against the myriad dangers that prowl fringe space. While less important than the Origin system (at least early in the story), the right Skills and the right usage of them will be key to getting through the story intact.

Choices, as you might have guessed by now, are a pretty important factor when it comes to my design goals for Void Dreaming. They’re also a massive problem, and for good reason. VN writers who have teams of authors working together don’t usually do something like this, and for good reason. They limit significantly the amount of choices that a reader can take during them, like locking you into various routes and providing simple value checks for choices made. All of this is a practical solution to what I like to call the Mass Effect 3 Problem.

I Should Go.

The problem goes like this:

Say you have a story that’s interactive, playable media. You claim the player has choice; that their choices matter and have actual, serious weight and consequence behind them. You give them a binary choice. That means the writers have to write two meaningful outcomes. Then on each branch, you give another binary choice. That’s four outcomes. You do another two on each new branch, and suddenly you’re at eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two, sixty-four, on and on until you’ve backed yourself into such a corner that your choice is to write so many endings as to require insane man-hours to do, or you funnel the choices into a system that reduces them red, blue, green, and ritual sudoku.

Overworked writers, or displeased fans. Not a great binary choice to be backed into, is it? Back now to how I lost my mind.

Knowing the ME3P, I wondered if I could craft a VN that would have plenty of variables that mattered, had subtle threads wound through it from a literary point of view, made the choices the player selected matter for the most part, and through this system create a much more immersive, detailed and enticing tale for the reader. I think I settled on the solution, and this is what I came up with:

 - First, be a psychopath who types at 100WPM with no regard for his personal well-being and a penchant for biting off far, far more than he can chew. I am crazy.

 - Second, introduce very early on a narrow-ish selection of clear-cut variables that the whole story will revolve around. This is my Origin system!

 - Third, build in a system around those variables that can be altered and grown as the reader does certain things, affecting how future events can play out. This is the Skill system!

 - Fourth, use the combination of those early, reader-defined variables and the systems around them as the cornerstone for major decisions affecting outcomes, narrowing the writing requirement considerably. This caused me to become more crazy!

 - Fifth, restrict the scope of the story to one route. No different routes for different character romances here. One story. One route. Clarity of story!

 - And finally, feeding back into that last, have a clear idea of where I start, where I’m going, and where it ends before I even open visual studios to work. Ta-da!

I think this combination of elements puts me in the best position to tell this story this way. I write fast. Stupidly fast. I upset other writers when they see the output I’m capable of on a given day. Jury’s out on quality, but quantity has a quality all of it’s own. Narrowing the variable scope to the reader-defined Origins very early on — in this case, three sets of choices with three variables each — also results in a much more limited narrative scope. I still have to write a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it’s manageable. I only have to write options for twenty-seven different combinations at this point.

Oh.

Oh no.

Exponential Agony

It’s not actually that bad, and we’ll get into why it’s not when we start talking about Rael’s Origin choices in greater depth. That Origin system actually streamlines a lot of the variables and allows me a lot of flexibility in creating circumstances where it feels like those choices really do have meaningful impact. They make a Rael with one Origin feel very different to a Rael with different choices made.

For those familiar with most FVNs though, it’s the fifth point above that might stand out. Most of them, as I said, let your route be chosen early by virtue of (often) who you want to romantically pursue. While all of the crew (with one notable exception) are on the menu in that regard if you play your cards right with them, the routes aren’t tied to romances. Romances and relationship building are things that happen (or don’t happen) in the course of Rael’s journey through the story.

“But Fae!” I hear you cry, somehow through the medium of text and time travel, “You said you wanted the choices to matter! How can having only one route make any choices matter? Your whole story is set in stone the whole time!”

First of all, Tom, if that is your real name, stop abusing your temporal displacement powers to harass furry writers. We’re not fond of it, and it’s a waste.

Secondly, the end of a story is never the point you care about. It matters if it’s done badly, of course (see the ME3P above), but what matters far more than that is how you get there. The journey is the thing. The story will hit the same beats as you play through the VN, but the way you get to those beats will be different based on the choices you make. The relationships you build. The sacrifices made. And then, at the very end, the hope is that all of the major choices you’ve made from the very start come to the fore and give you the chance to experience something truly wonderful. Or horrifying.

Because failure states can definitely give you some meaningful variation in your endings, can’t they?

Outroductions

So, that’s it. I set out to create a furry VN that would have meaningful choices through one interesting story route, a cast of (hopefully) fun and/or hot characters getting into mischief and danger and then getting out of it again with your help, that would leverage my uniquely voluminous writing potential to overcome the fundamental reason why most stories in the medium don’t let you have this many choices.

I think I’m succeeding. I hope you agree! If you don’t… well, please don’t tell me. My little ego is ever so fragile.

Thanks for reading this longer-than-the-rest-really-I-promise inaugural post about Void Dreaming! I hope you’re now as excited as I am and are looking forward to next week, where we’ll have a post going into more detail about the Origins themselves and how you can use them to define the course of Rael’s life before the story even begins.

Until then, stars guide you.

 - Faora