January thoughts

It is my first time experiencing winter. Coming from the equator, the weather was always around 30 celcius, so winter is really something special to me!

Coincidentally, one of my OC project revolved heavily around winter (lol).

Epistle of Winter

Is the title of my OC project. I think it’s a cool sounding title.

The story is centered around the protagonist, Takayuki (whom I affectionately call Takakun) as he struggles with his identity and finding love. When I first came up with the idea, it was supposed to be an adventure RPG, but lately I’ve been thinking about turning it into a visual novel instead. Of course, the hurdle for me is that I don’t actually draw! (lol)

‘Winter’ wasn’t initially a big role in the project. As time went on, it naturally became the symbol of Taka’s story (due to his winter jacket design) and the fact that Taka’s birthday is in winter. It was completely accidental, but I thought ‘eh, it fits!’. Plus snow is magical and cool. It fits the fantasy world setting if I say so myself.

The ‘epistle’ came after developing the story. The definition of an epistle is ‘a poem or other literary work in the form of a letter or series of letters’--basically a letter. Without delving in too deep to the story (spoilers), at the end of the project’s main story, Taka writes down a collection of letters while as he grows up. That same letter collection becomes an important object for his partner in the future. Of course, at that point it had clicked to me that naming the project ‘Epistle of Winter’ would make sense. So that’s exactly what I did.

Honestly, coming up with titles is hard... but I’m happy with EoW’s title.

EoW is one of my most important project

Because Takakun practically has been with me half my life. I’m sentimental, it’s not that big of a secret. When I was a kid, I couldn’t draw that well, much less design original characters. So, my OCs had always been a concept floating around in my head.

In late 2019, I first decided to use my spare time to create original works. At first it was nothing more than a simple hobby--a pastime. When the pandemic happened, like most people, I became highly invested in my hobbies. It was around this time I felt the joy of creation and being inspired by other people’s works.

One of the people who inspired me was an OC creator I followed on Twitter. At the time, they were working on a OC sub-universe of an existing IP. The works they produced were very high quality and pleasing to me as a consumer, which led me to be inspired to follow their footsteps. The creator had set up a Toyhouse world to store their original characters and lore. Almost immediately, I talked to this to my college friend who then helped me snag a Toyhouse code from the forums.

From then, I began working on properly introducing my creations via making profiles on Toyhouse--everything went up (down?) hill from there. I barely listened to online classes to work on Toyhouse coding (I was a total beginner who had never learned HTML before!) and tenaciously worked down on writing down my OC stories. I worked on my worldbuilding to make the fantasy aspect more prevalent. It was so much fun! I have always been fond of fantasy genre because it seemed cool to me.

The main story is almost finished

Being a really old concept (2012), the main story was already 70% finished when I first started writing/ coding in Toyhouse. While working on the worldbuild aspect, I eventually finished a route of the main story, which I dub the ‘canon timeline’.

The canon timeline is actually only a timeline/ route out of the possible 3-4 routes of the actual project, but the canon timeline is also the one I am heavily invested in. Thus after completing the canon timeline, my motivation to work on EoW has slowly died down.

While I daydream of adapting the story into a visual novel, it is highly unlikely I will finish it any time soon due to:

1. My IRL schedule. Also the fact that I am not an artist (merely a drawer) thus making a visual novel is very hard for me.

2. EoW features many icks that is not acceptable to some people. I know that the story can appeal to the people who do enjoy the genre, but again, EoW is a very personal story that has very big sentimental value to me. I am not perfectly comfortable of sharing such a personal to the public.

3. Relating to (2), I started another project that I do want to share to people with comfort.

... which I will share another time.

That’s the signal to end the post. I’d be very happy if someone stumbles upon this post and understand me a little better from reading this.

May we meet in another post.