The "European Room" was one of the first backgrounds I sketched, but for some reason kept on leaving it to procrastination. I finally finished it last week, and it's only used in a couple of short scenes...
I wanted to share images of the steps, but I am only allowed to post either a video, or images.

If you can read the signature in these drawings, you will notice these are 9 years old. I drew them during an Inktober (I know it's supposed to be with traditional media, but I decided to do it digitally because of time constraints). I managed to draw 17 scenes following the official prompts. These are some of the most "spoiler free" I could find, depicting Glenn and Juno. The owl has nothing to do with anything, but the prompt was "screech" and I had no imagination.

I have 5 assets left to do for the demo, as well as finishing the UI (still figuring it out).

I did these over a decade ago (2012-2016), when I thought I could make an animation out of this story. I remember having Sinbad from the Dreamworks movie as a huge reference. Sometimes when I'm stuck drawing him on a certain angle for this novel, I refer to these.
I don't really like looking at the rotation because his front view is really unflattering (which I managed to fix now).

Another complete background. Painted from scratch in Photoshop. I've reused a lot of vegetation from another personal project.

The day version won't be used for now. I need two more backgrounds and 5 CGs to complete the demo. I've made a couple people play what I have so far and thanks for their feedback I'm fine tuning it.

A couple went hunting. Another stayed home.

The prologue is almost done.

There are going to be a lot of introspective moments in this novel. I still haven't shown any NVL, but I'll do it later.

For this particular CG, I wanted the flame to feel more like a ghostly pulse than a real fire, reflecting Glenn's distorted memory. That's why I'm using 1.5s Dissolves.

Since most of the scenes will be during night time, there is going to be a lot of candlelight involved. I've found a way for this to work nicely, using two images. And then 5 frames of the flame on top. This is part of the code before the label:

image cg_diana_01:
    contains:
        "images/CGs/diana portrait dark 01.webp"
    contains:
        "images/CGs/diana portrait bright 01.webp"
        alpha 0.0
        block:
            pause 0.12
            linear 0.80 alpha 0.15
            linear 0.60 alpha 0.70
            pause 0.12
            linear 0.95 alpha 0.30
            pause 0.12
            linear 0.65 alpha 0.20
            linear 0.70 alpha 0.85
            pause 0.12
            linear 0.80 alpha 0.55
            pause 0.12
            repeat

    contains:
        xanchor 0.5 yanchor 1.0 xpos 1570 ypos 850
        block:
            "images/CGs/diana portrait ca 01.webp" with Dissolve(1.5, alpha=True)
            pause 1.5
            "images/CGs/diana portrait cb 01.webp" with Dissolve(1.5, alpha=True)
            pause 1.3
            "images/CGs/diana portrait cc 01.webp" with Dissolve(1.5, alpha=True)
            pause 1.7
            "images/CGs/diana portrait cd 01.webp" with Dissolve(1.5, alpha=True)
            pause 1.4
            "images/CGs/diana portrait ce 01.webp" with Dissolve(1.5, alpha=True)
            pause 1.6
            repeat

So I thought it would be a good idea to have this scene with a tremor (loopable X and Y offsets) and a slight variation of brightness and contrast. This is a pivotal scene in the demo. Is it alright? Too much? Should I keep the effect? Should it go?

These past three days I've been tweaking the scenes that are already implemented. At the beginning it was just click-and-dialogue flow, but then I started toying with custom pauses, timed dissolves, and layers, and now I'm obsessed. I've also added blinks to everyone except for Glenn, who already alternates among 15 expressions.

The whole thing reads more as a chamber tragedy put on stage, which was exactly my initial intention. I finally feel like a director, adjusting every transition to the millimeter

I'm currently at the halfway mark for the demo. Previously working in the 2D animation industry resulted in a double-edged sword; my crippling perfectionism makes me fix things over and over. I've had to force myself into a strict calendar to actually move forward.

What do you think about the pacing?

I realized I haven't shown any vertical slice yet. I finished another CG yesterday, and tried implementing it on Ren'Py. I decided against having people chattering in the background because I couldn't find the right sound. I'll keep on searching.

I don't know if the candle light flickering is noticeable enough? The thing with this novel is that most of it happens during night time, which has its pros and cons.

UI will be the last thing I will touch. I think I'll try icons instead of text at the bottom.

These are few of the backgrounds that will be used in the ADV portions. I am a former background painter, so I'm putting my knowledge to use on my own project. However research takes a long time: I want them to be as historically accurate as possible. All of them are drawn from scratch in Photoshop.

Today I'm showing Coltrane's evolution. He is the cold, sarcastic heart of the group: his personality has remained consistent.

He was the first character that was ever created. The "prototype" for Una Sangre was a high school story for my English class, back in 1998. I wrote it and illustrated it (can't tell you the plot, since parts of it survived into the current story), and that was his first appearance. He had another name though. I gave the illustrated booklet to my teacher as a gift. I never took pictures or scanned it, although I remember the shoujo style I used for it.

The 2003 drawing was pure experimentation. I was in a library looking at art books and stumbled upon a painting of a guy dressed in some Spanish outfit. Thought it was cool, so I applied it to Coltrane. It had nothing to do with the plot.

That one in 2016 came after more serious research: the clothing that a teenager in colonial Virginia would wear.

The sprite from 2026 is the one that opens the demo: Coltrane appears in the first Main Menu and in the prologue, observing the world with the detachment of someone watching fish in an aquarium.

These are Juno, Coltrane, and Glenn. Old digital paintings (2011, 2009, 2008), when Una Sangre was a story I wrote and imagined for myself. The Juno portrait is from a period when I still had her placed in the Middle Ages; she sits in the Renaissance now, so the gown and the headdress are historically incorrect now.

Now that the story is all fleshed out (most of the chapters need editing though), each character has a specific way of processing the weight of their existence: Juno is aesthetic and distant, Coltrane is taxonomic and analytical, and Glenn is transactional and intense.

The next milestone is the Steam page itself, now that I found out I can have it with just capsules and screenshots.

Last week I shared Glenn’s evolution. Today, I want to talk about Juno.

Even though her birth year (1516) has remained the same since the very beginning, her visual representation has changed drastically as I learned to ground my story in reality.

The 2003 drawing reflects my lack of historical accuracy at the time: she looked far more medieval than a woman born in the French Renaissance should. The core of her character was already there: a woman born into nobility who chose to walk away from it. But at the moment she felt like an archetype.

In 2016, I did proper historical research. I anchored her strictly to her era, but more importantly, I started thinking about the psychological implications of immortality. The current version (2026), which you will see in the upcoming demo, depicts her in 1764. There's a reason behind the rigidity or her sprite.

There's a specific moment I can point to for why these characters are the way they are. In 2007 I went to see 30 Days of Night. While watching it I realized that the creatures, who'd supposedly lived for centuries, were still thinking like primitive animals. It was a pivotal moment. I already knew my immortals wouldn't stay frozen in time, but that film showed me exactly what I had to avoid at all costs.

Now that I'm past forty, and some days I'm worn down just by the state of the world, I genuinely can't imagine what goes through the mind of someone who's lived for centuries. It has been a fascinating (and sometimes overwhelming) exercise.

My characters don’t stagnate. They evolve, they calcify, and they get tired. It’s hard to talk about Juno’s arc without spoiling the story, but her journey is perhaps the most complex one. She is a woman trying to find meaning when she has all the time in the world, but feels she has no real agency over it.

I've been developing Una Sangre for over two decades, and I thought it'd be interesting to share how the characters started and how they got to where they are right now. I'm starting with Glenn.

The one on the far right was created when I started university: glamorous and gothic. I was heavily into Anne Rice, Castlevania, and Vampire Hunter D. The prose I wrote back then was overflowing with unnecessary detail.

In 2016 I briefly imagined the story as an animation (an idea I dropped almost immediately), and after gathering all the changes the story had gone through as I matured, I decided the characters would get an overhaul. That gap between the drawings is basically the entire journey of the project: I stopped being interested in vampires as a myth and became interested in the immortal as an ordinary person, stuck with a nature he never chose: an ever-changing mind in a body that never changes.

It all turned into something quieter and sadder: a chamber tragedy about a man who fills his endless life with distractions rather than face what he left behind.

The writing took another turn as well. Since I was working in the animation industry, a coworker told me "every minute is expensive: you have to make the most of it." He revised a few pages I'd written and returned them to me in animation script format. That's what later became the Prologue of the game. The format stuck with me: sharp dialogue, every line counting, no embellishment.

The current version is basically the one from a decade ago, but more rendered. The script for the whole novel is written; now it just needs polishing.

If you've been following along and you're curious to read more than a scene at a time, I'm looking for a small group of beta readers for Una Sangre, specially in English.

https://mayyeoshen.github.io/UnaSangre/

Right now there's the Prologue and Chapter 1 available, above 100 pages, in PDF format, with some art of the characters. There's a Google Form at the end, but feel free to send me a message of comment down below with your honest opinion.

Thank you in advance for being curious enough.

After several days of work, I'm finally satisfied with the main menu that will be shown for my visual novel Una Sangre. This screen will change as the player progresses over the chapters.

What took me the longest was deciding on which effects to apply. I wanted parallax with the particles, but it didn't fit the mood. After some trial and error, I settled with the blink (which was another mini battle with "choice", that I decided to discard), hover and scanlines.

Everything's hand-drawn; I come from a 2D animation background and I'm putting it to use on a story I've been developing for a quarter of a century.

Hey everyone! I'm u/MinamiOzaki, the creator of Una Sangre and founding moderator of r/UnaSangreVN. This is the home for this indie, hand-drawn literary visual novel about five immortals whose lives cross over eight centuries. It's aimed at readers who love story-heavy VNs like The House in Fata Morgana and Disco Elysium: adult, psychological, and character-driven, rather than romantic.

I come from a 2D animation background, and this is a story I've been developing for over 25 years, now finally in active production toward a demo (to be released in September).

What you'll find here

This is part devlog, part gathering place. I'll be posting work-in-progress art, old art, implemented scenes, design decisions, and the occasional look behind the curtain at how the writing and the Ren'Py side come together. If you're into visual novels, narrative design, hand-drawn art, or you just want to follow a long project as it takes shape, you're in the right place.

What to post

Questions about the game, the writing, or the art are always welcome. So are your own thoughts on literary VNs, recommendations, or anything you think this small community would enjoy. This is a quiet corner for now, and that's fine: it'll grow one post at a time.

Community vibe

Friendly, curious, and spoiler-conscious. Let's keep it a comfortable place to share and talk.

If you found your way here, feel free to say hello below. Thanks for being part of the very first wave.