Why did you make this you homo

I can't draw or animate or whatever; if I could I probably would have just drawn something, but I like to think I can write well enough, so I wrote a thing.

Something reignited my love for Dawn a year or two back and I felt like self-inserting to smooch her. Eventually I found out there was enough art out there to make a VN of sorts, so I downloaded Renpy and got to work. Idly mentioned it in a Dawn thread on 4chan and some people asked for a download link, and here we are.

Why Anime continuity?

Well for one, it made it easier to write Dawn using an established personality and history rather than having to worry about game canon and choices and "who's the main character" or whatever. But the real reason is because watching the anime when I was a kid is why I love Dawn in the first place. Plus it gives access to Piplup, who I also love.

Sorry if the mention of Ash is annoying or whatever, that's not really something that occurred to me might happen when I was writing it.

Dawn falling in love with the MC after knowing him for like a week is unrealistic!

Yeah.

This is a common sentiment I've heard from people who've read the VN, both as a positive and negative, and while I'd like to defend myself by saying that "love at first sight" has been known to happen, it's also not a coincidence that the way I did it involves less work. This is my first major project like this, and turning it into an epic multi-pronged 30-hour journey is really not something I feel capable of doing, nor is it really what I set out to do. This is also why certain days tend to end rather abruptly; I just don't have the material to fill everything as much as I'd like to.

Therefore, since this is a romance VN, the romance happens pretty quick, perhaps unrealistically so for some people. I put in the option to not say "I love you" for that reason, which hopefully mitigates at least a little of the problem for those people. But honestly, at the end of the day, this is a fantasy fulfilment VN that caters to people who post in Dawn threads on 4chan or whatever, so there you go.

Why Scyther?

Honestly I don't know 100%. The boring answer is that Scyther is what popped into my head when I wrote the line asking the MC if he had any Pokemon. Given that there's plenty of other mons that I like more, and I tend to like "cute" more than "cool", I don't know why that's the case, but I think it ended up pretty well. Scyther is physically imposing, yet the MC's Scyther is lazy and couldn't cut his way out of a paper bag at the beginning of the story, which gives him a good opportunity to change and develop over the course of it. After writing him for a while I really like the big lovable dork he turned into.

So what's next

For this? A 1.10 will hopefully have new sprites, especially for Hilda and Rosa. The less of other people's stuff that I have to use, the better.

For other projects, not sure. I've been fiddling with a Roxie VN but don't really have anything more to say than that. If you've got an idea, lemme know.

Any scrapped stuff?

Sure, plenty. Just look at the money system for example, which is kinda pointless when you get down to it. When I was first starting out I kept riding the line between proper VN and gamey dating sim, so there used to be a variety of Dawn stat gains, which are just condensed down into "dawn_affection" now. There's also a piplup_affection stat that has really minor dialogue changes and nothing really became of it. I also wasn't really happy with how suddenly days end so I considered adding a "what do you do tonight" loop which I was never able to make feel right.