At first I thought I would have a lot to say for Dicentra's postmortem, but now that I'm actually sitting down to write it out two weeks after Dicentra's launch, I feel like I don't have much left to say.

Knowing me though, I think I'll end up finding lots to say despite that.

So let's start at the beginning:

Dicentra was created because I had this oc named Dove. I'd been working on other people's visual novels for a while, and one day I started to think about the possibility of working on my own. Pair this with a vague backstory I had for my oc, and the wheels on my impulsive driven project had started to turn. 

The creation of Dicentra was incredibly clumsy, but I embraced that completely. This was my first solo game, so I set the bar extremely low. From the beginning I understood this wouldn't be the best thing I ever make, or even the most polished, but it would very be created with lots of passion, and most importantly: I would get it DONE. If there's one thing about me, it's that no matter how long something takes me, I will finish what I've started, lest it haunt me til the end of my days. And boy, did it take a long time LOL

Dicentra isn't the craziest thing I've ever done (my craziness is usually reserved for game jams shjsahjsah), but it sure is the longest thing I've ever worked on.  This game was started around two years ago, but it has been truly consuming me for little over a year until its completion.  I expected this game to be like... 30k words, but as I wrote out the story, chapter by chapter, it grew like ivy before my eyes. Working on this game felt like coming home. I found so much comfort and excitement in the horrors and the love, that I ended spending much more time in this space than I originally planned. Not setting a release date for this game was the wisest thing I've ever done, because in every second of spare time I had, I worked on this game until the day I was finally satisfied with it. That was really the most important thing to me in the end. This game is far from perfect. I've worked on like 6 games between the start and end of this project, so I've obviously grown my skills in art, gui, and coding. Dicentra is full of little things I would've done better or more efficiently if I had started it now, but to be honest, I love all the flaws of Dicentra. I'm not usually a perfectionist, so I've grown attached to seeing things you probably wouldn't find in a better VN, like images that aren't flawlessly drawn or are poorer quality. They're simply proof of my own growth. This was my first visual novel, made almost entirely on my own , and it's going to show. 

I keep mentioning this, but despite how hard I worked on this game, when it was finally finished, I was absolutely terrified to release it. "What if this is the worst visual novel anyone has ever played?", "What if it makes people so sad they can't even finish it?", the game launch demons would whisper directly into my ears. I had no idea how to convince people to play this game, I still don't to be honest. My biggest hope was simply that this game would be found by people who love stories, and to my gratitude, it has been. It has been such a wonderful time seeing people experience Dicentra and come out loving it. You don't know how over the moon it makes me feel when people say they've gotten all the endings. Thank you so much to everyone who has played this incredibly self indulgent project of mine. Thank you for loving Dove and Basil, they're such important characters to me, so it means the world to me to see other people love them as well <3 

If you've played the True End, you've probably guessed there is much more to their story, and there definitely is, but this time I will be returning to a different medium of storytelling for it. I'm gonna be taking a break from making my own games for a while, but I really hope people will stick around to support me again when I'm finally ready to return again!! I've got some stuff that have been simmering on the back burners for many years, so I'm very much looking forward to bringing them to life (: 

Huge thank you to everyone who supported me while I worked on Dicentra, and to you, who waited so patiently for it. When I find the time, I'll be doing a mini update to this game for a stray typo and some minor code fixes, and that will probably be it for this game! 

So, If you're interested in more OC lore from me related to Dicentra, make sure to follow my twitter ! And while you're there, go give the Dicentra editor Viv a follow if you enjoyed the care put into all the script lines! 

And please enjoy some early/ pre- Dicentra art!

I'll see you all again soon,

Saf <3