Hana Exposure! Frail Flower (Part 1)

Here is part 1 of Frail Flower, with pages 1 through 11! There's a lot to unpack here. I'll first talk about the doujin itself, and then wh

Here is part 1 of Frail Flower, with pages 1 through 11!

There's a lot to unpack here. I'll first talk about the doujin itself, and then why I am making Frail Flower.

For starters, the release schedule. For the next few months, on top the usual progress log at the end/start of the month, there will also be an additional mid-month post with a new part of Frail Flower!

Here is the rough layout of Frail Flower:
-Part 1: Intro
-Part 2: Setup for the main situation
-Part 3 and onwards: Main situation. There's different scenes and parts to it, but for the most part, it's all part of that main situation

As for the content itself, this is a bit different from the usual doujins, which are usually fully fledged stories. Frail Flower however, is essentially a single event. An event that has various different scenes and situations, but a single event nonetheless, and it all takes place in the span of about 20 in-universe minutes. The story is canon, and takes place during Blooming Flower. In part 2, it's shown clearly when this takes place.

The pages for the most part will remain as they are, but there are a few minor missing effects, as well as some minor issues to which I applied some band-aid fixes for the time being. I will likely update this post later with the fixed versions, or will add them to future part releases.

I intend on releasing the complete and slightly more polished version of the doujin with whatever bells and whistles are missing later in the year once these monthly Patreon releases wrap-up. It would be a proper product that would be sold on DLsite and what-not (I have no idea of English sites of the sort. I am open to suggestions!). I am thinking of having these monthly Frail Flower releases be a tier 2 and 3 perk, with them later being removed from tier 2 once the complete doujin is fully released. Tier 3 would maintain the the availability of Frail Flower.

Now, how did we end up here with Frail Flower?

Context. A dear patron approached me, who wanted to commission a small event of Hana in a certain kind of situation. There was one problem though. I am really only interested in it if it's a fun and worthwhile endeavor, and making that situation fun and interesting, as well as making it make sense, while staying within the limitations of the commission, such as the budget and what-not, was complicated. I got to writing, and the pieces fell into place for a story that I found to be fun and interesting while also making sense and fitting in with the already established story. There was now a new problem though, that story could not be told within the limitations of the commission, it was too big and expanded too much from the original idea, but that's where additional context comes into play.

Additional context. I've personally always wanted to make something along the lines of a doujin. I even wrote a couple of really cool and fully fledged doujins for Hana, but I just never got to actually making them. It's really expensive, takes time to make, there's other projects on my hands, etc. Because I never got to makin one, this commission ended up being a rather unexpected way to make that happen. It was a good opportunity and excuse to finally make something like a doujin. There was of course still the issue of the limitations of the commission, and I decided to cover the rest myself and go for it. The cost of Frail Flower is like ten-fold of what the commission was, with all of that increased cost now being on my end, but again, a doujin is something that I have wanted to do for a long time, so I just went for it.

Is it expensive? Yes. Will it be a worthwhile endeavor, or will it be a net loss like Blooming Flower? No idea, but here we are.

At the end of the day, I had that itch of wanting to make something like this, and I am also really curious to see how Frail Flower as a project will pan out. As mentioned earlier in the post, it will be released here in parts, and later in the year, I intend on releasing it in digital stores as a proper complete doujin.

Some extra commentary.

It's been an interesting project to work on. I have never done a doujin, and it's been a learning experience. There's many tools that I've had to get familiar with, writing for a page is different than writing for a game, etc.

An example of the learning experience. On Sunday, I decided to change the font size I would be using. It was at 8, which worked but I wanted it a bit bigger, so I increased it to 10. That small change of course messed up the text everywhere. It wasn't just a matter of readjusting of how the text boxes and text were spread, it also required some heavy rewriting. I needed to rewrite a lot of it in order to get rid of text so that the new font size would fit, while keeping the ideas and event intact. Small change, big workload behind it. Learning experience.

Weirdly enough, another thing that was a bit of a challenge were the colors. The doujin takes place during the night, and we hadn't really worked on much night stuff. The couple of nighttime CGs in Blooming Flower had innerworkings and workflows that were different to this. Ultimately though, we kind of figured it out, and I think it came out very well!

Anyhow, that's it for now, but that's not it for August just yet. There is still a post/progress log for Purple Dream to look forward to at the end of the month!

Thank you for supporting Purple Dream and Hana Exposure!