Devlog #1 - Designing a Visual Novel About Fate
I’ve been digging into a specific feeling lately.
It’s that moment when you sense something slipping just beyond your reach, long before you understand why. Like realizing a friend is drifting away even while they’re smiling at you. Or noticing that the future you imagined has quietly changed shape.
I wanted to tell a story that lives inside that feeling.
Not a tragedy, exactly. And not a puzzle to solve. Just the gentle ache of recognizing a future too late to hold onto it.
That became the seed of our story about fate.
Why Fate?
In order to explain what Inkweaver is, and what it can do, we need an example.
To be honest, that sample novel had a tough job to do. We needed a story engaging enough to welcome newcomers, but big enough to show writers what Inkweaver can actually do.
A deck of tarot cards turned out to be the perfect answer.
The symbolism does the heavy lifting—it sets a mood without forcing a plot. Plus, a four-card spread maps beautifully to a four-part kishotenketsu arc (Introduction, Development, Twist, Conclusion), which already resonates with VN readers and authors alike.
It lets us share a complete story while leaving the door open. It’s a world you can enter instantly, where you can explore the engine without the pressure of designing a whole novel from scratch.
A Quiet Shop on a Rainy Day
And so our story begins... Our MC gets caught in a sudden downpour and ducks into a small fortune-teller’s shop to escape the rain.
He doesn’t believe in that sort of thing. But the rain is cold, and sitting for a reading feels easier than walking back out into it.
The reading unfolds across four chapters, each driven by a tarot card. A fifth card represents a future-person—someone whose life becomes unexpectedly entwined with his own.
As the visions unfold, the MC realizes something unsettling: the future feels more vivid than his actual life.
By the end, he comes to believe not only his fate, but the nature of fate itself: He is powerless to stop it.
But the fortune-teller hands him the deck.
“Maybe you can’t change your future,” she says. “But someone else might.”
That someone is you.
Community Anthology
This is the part I’m most excited about.
After the story ends, you can draw a new set of cards. These five cards represnent an address that points to a new version of that story. A different set of cards, with a different fate.
If a story exists at that address, you can read it. If it doesn’t? You’re invited to write it.
We wanted to make it possible to shape something new in a matter of hours, not months.
Closing Thoughts
For our first impression, we wanted something small and sincere. A short story, but one treated with the polish and gravity of a full-length novel.
In the next few devlogs, I want to dig into how this world actually works—why only one character is fully rendered, how we use color to hack the "mood," and how we built a story that feels like a memory you dreamed before you lived it.