Dev Diary 107

Hello all, TD here, cramming one last dev diary into the calendar year 2025.

Ch4Up7 is ending the year with 572 statics, 31 animations, and 10,587 words.

That works out to 137 statics, 5 animations, and 2,419 words over the past two weeks.

So… as it tends to happen when the new year rolls around, I’ve been thinking about the past recently.

Somewhere in July of 2019, I started work on Pale Carnations as you don’t quite know it. It was yet another project in a series of comics and visual novels, iterating on some past characters I had used in an older work. Save for one comic that I abandoned after like half a year of uploading, I never did anything with these short lived excursions. They were basically masturbation in every sense of the word. A tool for me to scratch a creative itch and make my own smut, before discarding them and moving onto a new thing. I think part of me wanting something to stick, but keeping them mainly to a very small group of friendly (safe) eyes, nothing ever came out of any of them. By the way, the image above is from the 2nd iteration of Pale Carnations when it was just a little comic I was making.

That was, until, September 23rd 2019 at 8:12 PM.

I shared with GIL a prototype build of Pale Carnations, the visual novel Not because I was fishing for help, but simply because I had shared all my other failures with him. By this point we had known each other for a little over two years and he was the reason I wanted to explore my creative itch in the first place. GIL made a comic called Club Casting Series and shared it on the now defunct Hongfire, a website for eroge and other porn games. I thought it was so cool that someone took a little poser packaged with an Illusion Software title and did something transformative with it – and I wanted to do it too.

Anyway, I showed GIL Pale Carnations. Maybe it was because of my perfect artistic vision (ha), maybe it was because he was coming off a slump of his own, having lost interest in a comic he poured countless hours into. Either way, he was far more into it than I expected. Somehow or another, and I don’t remember who proposed it (I could check, the history is all on discord), he wanted in and I lucked into working with an amazing artist.

That was when Pale Carnations became more than just me. That was when it started to grow legs.

For the next six or so months, we worked on what we called the prologue. Basically, everything up to when it is revealed Felicia is a Carnation. During that time, as we moved toward that stopping point for us to finally share our work with the world, I lacked confidence. I was apprehensive to the extent I drug my feet getting the final build ready. I made changes, I reverted changes, I took my sweet fucking time to the point GIL was getting worried.

This goes back to why I never did anything with my various projects in the first place. Sharing things you pour yourself into is scary. Hell, I was reticent to even have a Patreon, as the thought of taking money for my work seemed silly.

But it wasn’t my work, it was *our* work. I couldn’t just throw away the efforts another person had invested themselves into it. So, on April 17 2020, Pale Carnations released on F95 – and, thanks to the cretins on there and the support we found on this site, that’s when it started running.

Pale Carnations wasn’t our project, it was now *your* project. More than just us, you had invested yourselves into the project. Not only did it become something we felt we were obliged to finish, but also something we wanted to finish.

The small community that has built up around our silly porn game has given us many things: we have met so many nice people, had wonderful conversations, and we have found a little bit of purpose in our lives thanks to you all.

So, yeah… next April Pale Carnations will turn six years old. A project with 29,000 images, 827 animations, and roughly 708,000 words. A project that outlived my father, a project that has given me a best friend, and a project that has become an anchor point to hitch my happiness on.

I know we live in scary times, but it is my New Year’s wish that you all find and keep safe “your thing”, whatever that may be.

Thank you GIL.

Thank you *all*.

Be safe and happy news years!

Lots of love.