The Blue Horizon Halloween Visual Novel feat. twins Fernando and Antonio Chandrani-Rivera.

10/16/25:

The BG is an darkened greenish waterfall with regular granular photo effect heightening the eerie vibes along with the darkly lit icebergs beside it.

Main GUI has a darkness motif with an aquamarine + a bit dark blue tone around it, including a backlit light through darkness feeling, and with the bottom having a soft opaque aqua-to-black gradient.

Antonio says "Novels changing text is another issue."

So I've begun work on a visual novel! It's done via Ren'Py. I've been tracking progress for several days on Bluesky, but I'll summarize most of what I've written here today.

As I've said prior, this new project is a Halloween visual novel centered on Fernando Chandrani-Rivera and Antonio Chandrani-Rivera's relationship. They are identical twins and the brothers of Raj Rivera.

This visual novel will focus on introducing several of the main girls, and thus have a girls' love/yuri focus to it! However, Antonio and Fernando's own romantic dramas with Alejandro Altaha and Diego Garza will come into play, too. (A.K.A. BL.) This game will not be a traditional romantic visual novel; there'll be gays but I have the low-downs shaped a certain way in my head.

I really enjoy how Ren'Py is pretty easy to use and intuitive. I miss the era of the Internet where this was a given and desired effect. I've figured out all the main coding I want to utilize for the project: visuals, audio, inits, timed choices, adjustments to fonts, sprites and objects AND how to get to branched endings...!

Code for the title card appearing on its own during the game.

Code written below (will read strange):

stop music fadeout 1.0
play music titlemusic

window hide

$ quick_menu = False
scene bg titlecard with fade
$ renpy.pause(4.0)
$ quick_menu = True
scene act start

scene bg waterfall1

e "100,000 years in the future, our world is surely not the same.

[/End writing of the script.]

Code for timed choices.

Script will be written out and sound strange:

l "What’ll happen if you don’t get it?"
a "It does hurt me—but you know how well I self-heal—"

label exTimedChoice:
menu (screen="timedChoiceScr", seconds=3):
"Move."
".bar": # Show the timeout bar as the first item.
pass # Never reached.
"DODGE":
$ [censored writing of ending code]
a "LAYLA, LISTEN TO ME."
# you can put more here as required
"BLOCK":
$ [censored writing of ending code]
a "I understand."
# and more here as well
".timeout": # Action to take on a timeout.
$ [censored writing of ending code]
a "I stay powerful."

scene bg waterfall3
with vpunch

[/End writing out of the script.]

Since I want to get everything done prior to Halloween and in time for a Jam I joined, it's still small and uses free assets. I've written out the prologue and have everything for the plot set up. If I wind up too stressed and dissatisfied, though, I'll put off dropping it till November.

Was curious getting used to writing first person. I'm very used to third person now after writing a lot of early Blue Horizon novel drafts, so this is definitely something new and I'm determined to try to keep it as I like it.

It started like this:

OG extremely early screencaps of me just starting out creating the VN. It has all its automatic fonts, more sans-serif than serif.

Antonio goes 'The song is in my ear...'

Antonio says: Are these really the children's drawings?

the same waterfall background as the above (dark sea green and eerie with dark icebergs) except antonio now says 'it's too disconcerting. it's not her lullaby. what is this?' the previous color tones for the gui are subtly more blue, making the backlighting-through-black effect, and antonio's text is spectral font as well as darker blue for the main name tag. otherwise the larger gui changes shown above and below this is not yet done for this screencap.

And now we're further along, though I haven't started sprite artwork yet.

This Layla placeholder sprite (was part of a sketch from early 2024) really works for every mood she has, though, LOL:

Layla going "You reek of freaky alchemy no one is supposed to be using."

Layla placeholder image description in front of a waterfall:

layla with implied chatter vs light rays. layla has white wavy hair, is reddish brown in skintone, and grayed out expression aside from a smile, along with her black eyepatch with esoteric symbols on it and silver theads.

Estimating the game to be somewhere around 10k words, though it might go near 20k again. Currently there are 6 variant endings via 3 character routes (again, it's not a traditional romantic VN and instead horror-oriented, despite having a romo-focused character route).

Several characters will feature! Currently planning for 10, including Layla and Antonio.

For people who are new, the previous Blue Horizon game is called "Blue Horizon: Hibiscus, and the Loved Garden Paths of Raj Rivera."