Hi, hello, hi there! I saw multiple people writing up postmortems and I thought that’d be a really good idea to do for this short project so that I could reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and why I even made this. I suppose this will be a lot of rambling, but I tend to enjoy doing things arbitrarily, so if you do happen to read this, I hope it’s entertaining at least. 

Hey Tabbie, why’d you write RIDE HOME?

Excellent question, myself. There are a few reasons that I’ve pinpointed after pondering in the shower. First of all, of course, I love toxic yuri and I have for a long, long time. However, I struggled with finding a medium that really interested me until I realized how much I loved visual novels. So in autumn of last year, I decided to fire up Ren’Py and see how hard making a visual novel could possibly be.

This is the first little test I made! 

After I figured out how easy Ren’Py was to learn and how much was possible with it if you can put in the effort to truly learn it (which, here in late summer of 2025 I still don’t consider myself to have ‘learned’ it fully), I figured it could be a fun way to kill an afternoon occasionally. I was right! However, the reason that I pursued it further than that was that I watched Look Back with my group of friends and my wife, who doesn’t usually enjoy subtitled movies. If you’ve seen Look Back, you don’t need me to tell you how beautiful it is and how well it expresses the thrill of creation, but as my wife had recently gotten into game development as well, the ending had us holding each other while crying for around 5 minutes as we promised to make a game together. That is what really gave me a ton of motivation to start trying to make a “real” visual novel after I made a very short game to prove to myself that I really could make one. 

My next reason was that in November of 2024, I started writing a longform project titled Cuscuta, which should be releasing in winter of this year, 2025. Cuscuta is a yuri visual novel about two women stuck in a cabin over a 6 month winter seducing each other while lying to each other and themselves. Without giving too much away, the themes I wanted to play with in Cuscuta are connection, perception, and solidarity. I’m planning for there to be two very divergent routes, and I finished a mockup of the route in which they decide to trust each other in March of 2025 with all WIP assets (in retrospect, kind of a waste of time, but was exactly what I needed to keep the momentum I need in order to write). 

After sitting on it for a while and writing lots of supplemental material (smut), I began to think about how much I tend to lean on connection and perception as themes in my writing, in particular perception. I thought that it’d be very interesting to write something that I, at least privately, considered to be the other side of the coin of Cuscuta as practice for the more tragic route later. I heard about the Toxic Yuri VN Jam, so I figured that would be a really great chance to practice the actual programming portion of visual novels, so here I am!

Didn’t you put ‘why I made it’ last in the intro paragraph? Why was that first? 

Well, I did say that I enjoy doing things arbitrarily. 

Okay, then how did you make RIDE HOME?

Honestly, it was pretty easy! Even thinking about trying to do any kind of art just makes my poor wrists hurt, so I thought that it could be fun to make a visual novel without sprites of any kind. This coincided with an idea I had for a visual novel that captured how I felt when I drove on country roads in South Carolina very late at night in the throes of dysphoria and general mental illness, so I thought that I could just combine the two. I had a concept of what I wanted to do very early in terms of backgrounds and sounds, but the music was what I was stuck on. I wish I had more of an interesting story about how I asked my darling wife to make music for me, but she had been wanting to collaborate anyway, so that was that. 

As I’m sure you could tell, the backgrounds were taken from a video recording that my wife and I took on her phone on a shared day off. We found it funny that driving around on more rural Oregon roads that she plotted out for us counted as game development. Most of the sounds were recorded by me in our car, but some (like screeching tires) came from the usual suspects for sound effects. I really considered taking a drive and slamming on the brakes, but I thought that my wife may get mad at me for that, so I decided against it. 

The script came about fairly organically once I thought about the relationship that I wanted to convey. I wanted to play with the concept of flawed perception, so I thought that giving the main character a form of facial blindness could help to immerse the reader in the story. Plus, once I started thinking about the inherent power imbalance in not being able to see someone who can see you, I thought it was pretty hot. When I set out to write an evil woman, most of the time I arrive at someone who simply doesn’t have a vital aspect about them that prevents them from meeting the other person in the pair eye to eye, so to speak. With how important music and sound is in the visual novel, it made sense for them to be important to Dahlia, so the idea of Ivy being unable to perceive music fit like a glove. 

Alright, that’s great and all, but what did YOU feel like worked well in RIDE HOME?

• THE MUSIC!!! OUGH I LOVE MY WIFE!!!!! MY WIFE IS SO TALENTED!!!!! I LOVE MY WIFE SO MUCH!!!!! I gave her a few things to use as inspiration or the general mood (Twin Peaks, Signalis, etc) and she absolutely knocked it out of the park. I’m so so so enamored with how driving the drums are in the tracks that are meant to represent Ivy (Roadbump and Do You See Me). She’s so cool. I’m so glad she’s my wife. Musicians are so hot. I need to kiss her. Anyway, one thing that I really enjoy is that Dahlia plays Ivy a song that she wrote after Brad tries to take advantage of her, which plays while Dahlia is being taken advantage of by Ivy, unbeknownst to her. I just thought that was neat. 
• Tension. As I mentioned to someone in the Toxic Yuri VN discord (if you’re reading this, you should check out Play Our Roles by Maolong!), a goal that I had for RIDE HOME was to learn how to build tension that wasn’t necessarily romantic. I’m very happy with how it turned out, given the smaller-than-I’d-like scope of it. 
• Ivy. I love her, I’m afraid hahaha. I said that being at the mercy of someone who perceives you in a way that you can’t perceive them back is hot, but I became a real pervert about it by the end. 
• How exactly Dahlia and Ivy spoke to each other, in particular Ivy. I’m the type of autist that enjoys rereading or rewatching media multiple times (I watch Code Geass every single year), so I tend to write things that benefit from a second read. In particular, I really like how Ivy speaks to Dahlia. She never comments on the content of the music itself, which is a reflection of Dahlia’s being, and I was careful to make sure that she never refers to Dahlia as “she” or a woman unless she’s using her work voice. I enjoy how delicate Dahlia seems in contrast to the violence that Brad and Ivy wrest out of her. 
• I like the ending a lot! The ending was one of the first things I came up with, and it was largely unchanged from my original vision, unlike a few other things. I wanted to give the viewer a sense of powerlessness or helplessness that Dahlia would soon come to arrive at. 

So what didn’t work?

• The length. I did plan on 9 or 10 months originally, but I ran out of steam partway through and just wanted to skip to the good stuff. For a game jam, I think it was fine, but for a “real” project, those extra scenes would’ve sold it more.
• I’m unsure if it “didn’t work”, but I’m disappointed that I didn’t play with the format of the viewer being stuck in the dashcam more. The original vision was for the relationship to be more tumultuous with the pair being happy one week and horribly cold the next to give the viewer a sense of disorientation and voyeurism. 
• The UI uggghhhh oh my godddd I need to learn how to make a halfway decent UI. There’s really nothing wrong with Ren’Py’s default UI, but I tend to set much higher standards for myself than others. Looking at the default Ren’Py UI is driving me fucking INSANE and I’ll definitely cook something for Cuscuta because that’s my baby. 

Have you got anything else to say?

Yes! I neglected to have any kind of real credit roll in the visual novel, so I’d like to say this chance to thank people here.

First of all, I want to thank my wife. This project, and making visual novels in general, never would’ve been possible without her endless support and love. Thank you so much for putting up with my insane yurijin rambling. 

A huge thank you to Four Dora (you all know who you are) for your support! You all have been there for me at my lowest lows and my highest highs and I hope to be there for you all as well for as long as humanly possible. 

Thank you to Melody, Katherine, and Emilia (in no particular order). Melody is actually the one that came up with the title of RIDE HOME, so if anyone’s eye was caught by that, that’s on her! Thank you for putting up with the endless cycle of “it’s over” and “we’re so back” in my creative process. 

Thank you to Eri for playtesting! Without her, the game would’ve been much uglier and repetitive. 

Thank you to the organizers and participants in the Toxic Yuri VN Jam! It's been an incredible experience and with everything happening on itch, it's been so comforting to see a community come together to figure out what's next. 

If I know you and you’re reading this and I’m not specifically shouting you out, thank you too! 

Lastly, thank you so much to anyone who's read RIDE HOME. 

Like I said, I’m aiming to release my first real big girl project, Cuscuta, in winter. If you enjoyed RIDE HOME, I hope you check it out and thank YOU for your support as well! I am going to go play Hundred Line now, so till next time!