dev diary: return to ash, and studio life!

i'll be crossposting this to my website, but i wanted to give more info about this morning's announcement! sorry that it's coming like 12 hours later, i was playing the new deltarune update (weren't we all?) ...it's been a long time since i wrote a dev diary, hasn't it!!!!! this one's a freebie, but i want to get back to doing them more regularly again soon. i have some syrup 2 progress to share, just need to put together the post about it...

anyway this is about the new vn announcement and more about the whole "im working with a studio!!!" thing. so if you were curious about those things, read on!!

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Return to Ash was annnounced today! it’s my next big commercial VN, and it was made in partnership with Serenity Forge. or rather i should say, i made it as a member of Serenity Forge! they’re a colorado-based game studio who has published games like doki doki literature club, slay the princess, and LISA. those of you with a discerning eye will notice those are all ren’py and rpgmaker games… the very engines i prefer making games in. to me it seemed like kind of a match made in heaven! which is why when z, the company’s founder, told me they were looking for a game director… i rushed to put a game pitch together in the hopes they’d be interested. which they were! so here we are.

z (and serenity forge as a whole!) was very kind to let me join and make games with them. becoming a game director at a studio was something i’d aspired to for the past decade... it’s a goal i was very close to reaching before i was forced to leave my previous job. i’m really grateful to them for accepting me, and for thinking my ideas are worthwhile… i may have cried about it a little. cuz, yknow, for a while there i thought i’d have no choice but to be a solo dev forever. which would also be fine, i enjoy making games on my own—it’s just nice to know that i don’t HAVE to, that there are people who find my work valuable etc etc… i mean if you’re here reading my blog you probably also find my work valuable lol but i hope you know what i mean!

anyway, more about the actual game

the original concept for return to ash was called life after death afterlife, and it was one of the many game ideas i’d hastily scribbled down as a “maybe i’ll make this later” type of project. i wrote it up sometime during 2022, when themes of isolation and (metaphorical) death were heavy on my mind. i can’t talk more about the specifics until the game is actually out, but when i pitched it to serenity forge at the end of last year, z helped me develop it into what it is today!

i spent the next 4-ish months writing and drawing the whole story, figuring out the endings as i went along. it came out to be about 40,000 words, which is the longest game i’ve written aside from syrup 2! (and maybe LWT..? i have no clue what LWT’s word count is.) anyway, the setting is more based in the “real” world—or at least, the characters are supposed to be from a world like ours. it’s a game that takes place in the afterlife, so there is still quite a few fantasy/surreal elements. my last several games have taken place in the shared universe i’ve built up over the years, so it was fun writing something separate from that! like a clean slate… the words just came pouring out…..

so yeah, return to ash has a different vibe from my usual work, but i think people wil be into it!!!! i’m especially excited to share the music cuz it’s such a vibe… i was putting together a crossfade of the OST yesterday and was like “damn this game has such a great aesthetic,” i really want people to get lost in the atmosphere. i hope the characters will stick with you too… i’m feeling the urge to write more for them, so i might plan some supplemental material… ahh that’s for the future tho, the game is not out yet hahaha.

one last thing

as part of a way to help distinguish this game as separate from the rest of my work, and also just to give myself a more professional-appearing name than “NomnomNami”… i am now introducing my cool game director persona, Sophie Gray!

sorry that it’s just a quick sketch, i actually planned on remaking my site layout (again) with a new illustration at the top, but it’s not finished yet… i was drawing all my characters in it, but i didn’t plan out the composition very well so i got stuck. oopsie. i’ll get around to it soon!

anyway i just wanted to make a mention of that somewhere before people saw “Sophie Gray” in the credits of return to ash and thought “wait who is that, where’s NomnomNami?!” …and obviously for the games i make outside of studio life i will continue to just be nami. it’s not a rebrand, it’s more of an alter ego i guess. i hope that makes sense, i’m pretty fond of this name now so you can just treat it like my real name! nomnomnami lives on… nomnomnami will never die… but sophie is a cozy name too. i think i’m making less sense as i keep writing, so i’ll go to bed now.

thanks for reading!