VN devs, let's share our works together! quote this with 4 screenshots from your game and a link to it ❄️ Made Marion is an action-adventure romance VN inspired by the Robin Hood Legends. Fight for freedom and fall in love! store.steampowered.com/app/1482150/...

P.S. Hours spent removing genAI bloatware from our productivity software should be billable to the companies that jammed it in there without our permission.

In addition, I found this nice guide to remove any existing Copilot bloat from Visual Studio Code: leonidboykov.com/how-to-disab...

Visual Studio Code heads-up! The latest update includes the option to use a bunch of Copilot agents. If you detest that stuff like I do, right click the "Finish Setup" box at the bottom of the window and you can "Hide Copilot Status" which I assume means you'll never actually install the damn slop.

Season's Greetings from VC Games With apologies to Arrapso for poorly messing with her sprites once again. Santa John ushers out the old year and Angel Meissa, to whom John is passing the torch, ushers in the new. Hope you all have a lovely holiday/day off and we'll be seeing you in 2026!

Season's Greetings from VC Games With apologies to Arrapso for poorly messing with her sprites once again. Santa John ushers out the old year and Angel Meissa, to whom John is passing the torch, ushers in the new. Hope you all have a lovely holiday/day off and we'll be seeing you in 2026!

I'm opening up three slots for commissions =^.^= Check out my kofi for full price range and add-on options! ko-fi.com/lawrichai

A friend reports that she is playing Made Marion on high difficulty. How do you do that? This is how.

@velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social Hello!! I am your Secret Santa!! I ended up drawing Meissa from Made Marion! I really enjoyed what I saw of them so far! I hope you enjoy! #VNSS2025

Seeing discussions of why it's completely unnecessary to use genAI for placeholder art. And even dangerous, because like what happened to Sandfall, you can miss that it was a placeholder. There was a 0% chance that I could miss my own placeholder art for our tarot deck.

Wanna avoid a huge PR blowup for your game company? GenAI: Just Don't Use It.

Watercolour Wednesday Alanna of Nottingham. Watercolour on Moleskine Pad Alanna is a romanceable character from the game "Made Marion" from Velvet Cupcake Games. @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social

John's Route is Live on Itch now! Little John, now DRM-free! ;) velvet-cupcake-games.itch.io/made-marion

John's Route is live on Steam! Please see our announcement and patch notes: store.steampowered.com/news/app/148...

John's Route is Live on Itch now! Little John, now DRM-free! ;) velvet-cupcake-games.itch.io/made-marion

John's Route is live on Steam! Please see our announcement and patch notes: store.steampowered.com/news/app/148...

John Releases DEC 7! Just a quick note from late evening December 6. John's route will release TOMORROW, Dec 7! However, I need to do a bit more QA and polish. So it will probably release later in the day rather at 12:01am or 10am PST like our usual releases. I will announce once it is out!

For how popular that "one guy slow-claps and then everyone else joins in" trope is, it's rather difficult to find that sound effect. Had to kinda queue it up myself.

It's with my sincere apologies that I have to announce that John's release date has been delayed by a week due to chronic illness flare-up. John will release on December 7. We're trying to keep a sense of humour about it!

We've just uploaded John Chapter 3 onto the beta test server, so we're on the last stretch of our release. John's route will come out on November 30!

Online spellcheck is increasingly region-specific, which is nice except that I (located in Canada) write my games in American English. Have had the word "favorite" underlined so many times that it gaslit me into checking online to make sure I wasn't nuts.

We've just uploaded John Chapter 3 onto the beta test server, so we're on the last stretch of our release. John's route will come out on November 30!

Spoke to my source familiar with internal workings at Mastercard. The holiday call campaign re payment processor censorship is working, there is a lot of pressure being felt from your calls. This is resulting in increased response times at a core moment for Mastercard due to the holiday season

1/3 of all gamers quit playing games all together because of toxic communities What would happen to a restaurant if 30% of their customer revenue walked out the door and never came back? Grand Closing!! We literally can’t afford to allow bad players to terrorize our communities.

Made Marion Monday Redrawing a character from a different angle isn't my favorite thing... but you gotta do what you gotta do. @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social #gamedev #indiedev #amaregame You can find Made Marion's demo on Steam store.steampowered.com/app/1482150/...

If you ever want straight-up unfiltered truth about your game, have your sibling beta test it. 😅

You know it's a good gamedev day when you're downloading "quality_bone_popping.mp3" from Pixabay. (Pixabay is pretty awesome, btw. Although it technically allows AI stuff, the rules for such are pretty strict, it must be labeled, and it's not highly promoted on the site.)

Are you a Made Marion Kickstarter backer with beta test access? John's Beta Test Phase 1 is live! More info here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/vcg...

In case anybody wonders when it comes out, the small ode to Lucanis Dellamorte in John's route is absolutely purposeful. After all, you don't need a literal inner demon to have inner demons.

Watercolour Wednesday Will Scarlet, from the game "Made Marion" by Velvet Cupcake Games @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social

It's important to support the many indie devs who are staunchly anti-genAI and believe first and foremost in collaborative development. My dev friends don't use genAI, that's for sure.

We don’t use generative AI at Strange Scaffold and I can confirm that a *lot* of other studios are not—whether indie or AAA. Get outta here with this normalization bullshit.

Micro-indie "process.": Me word-vomiting Ren'py gobbletygook at my spouse for three full minutes until I figured out what I needed to do with my coding issue. Me: OK, figured it out, don't worry if you weren't listening. Spouse: I wasn't. Me: That's what I thought.

John's route adds several new achievements to our roster, including the achievement "Big Flirt." Can you earn it? (It's not difficult, you'll see.)

Made Marion Monday A rare view from old concept arts that were replaced early on in the game. Sometimes, what seems like a good idea at the time ends up clashing with the overall visual ensemble of the project. @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social #gamedev #indiedev #amaregame

As you can see, we are a Very Serious Studio with a strict top-down management structure where nobody is allowed to give the studio head any sass.

Our sexy cut-ins for John are complete and they're nice an' sexy. Pleased with our decision to be a bit bolder and transition away from silhouettes. Robin's sexy cut-in will be replaced once Lawri is finished with our animated intro, which is also coming along very nicely! Mini-preview:

Happy Halloween from Velvet Cupcake Games! John's route releases next month!

Made Marion Development Update, October 2025: www.kickstarter.com/projects/vcg...

We are so pleased to see this decision from the Python Software Foundation. I'm going to become a supporting member as soon as I can get their payment form to work (hoping it's being overwhelmed by new members right now).

Made Marion Monday Sometimes work IS fun and games =^.^= Like designing bandits for a scene in our prologue. Please meet the Pompous Pilferer, Bearish Bandit & Rough Ruffian ... one of them is not pleased to meet you😅 #indiegamedev #amaregame #visualnovel #gamedev @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social

Realizing that the scene I'm writing right now, which was planned some time ago and is actually inspired by Tolkein, yet again bears a striking resemblance to current events. Would our world leaders stop doing Medieval-style dumbassery, please?

Reposting again because now I've actually tried it and went very quickly from “this is cute” to “this is my entire personality”. The romance options are very 🔥 yes absolutely but there's also a cool protagonist who deserves her time to shine, cool art, cool writing, and cool worldbuilding

Writing Becky: "Ooh, this scene is gonna be so great, look at all the action-packed combat!" Coding Becky, some time later:

Having a think about hypocrisy in character development. I've seen people call it out as poor or uneven character development. I think before one does that, one should ask, "Is this, perhaps, purposeful?" Because we're all hypocrites about something. I think our characters should be, too.

Made Marion Monday From Sketch to Final drawing The making of an Oathkeeper You'll be able to meet him one day... if I can just finish this Intro clip! So much left to do @velvetcupcakegames.bsky.social #gamedev #indiedev #mademarion

Ugh, I've been writing romantic angst all day. It's necessary--these daffy kids have to fumble around for a bit before they finally manage to get together--but some happy flowers or something wouldn't go amiss.

Me: I made up a new card game for a scene in Made Marion. It's a rummy variant with teams. Spouse: Why not just use bridge? Me: I would rather make up a whole-ass new card game than learn the rules of bridge.

A lil' post for new devs on Steam. When you go live, you WILL get contacted by a ton of Steam Curators looking for keys. You should *absolutely* use Curator Connect (it's under Marketing Tools & Data) if you want to send keys to curators. This keeps your game out of the hands of resellers.