Roygbiv: The Abandoned Pre-Penlight Visual Novel

Hi, cakes! 

Here's that little interesting thing I was talking about in the last early access post. What with there being so little new content to show recently, I thought you folks might fancy a little look into Penlight's past. So here I present Roygbiv: my unfinished prototype visual novel! Download links are at the bottom of this article.

Features

• Choice of protagonists: Nozomi and Kyou (although Kyou's story is basically proto-Penlight)
• A total lack of polish. Doesn't even have a proper title screen xD
• About 10,000 words total
• All routes end abruptly. I abandoned this to make Penlight after all ^^;

So before 2019, when I began making Penlight in earnest, I'd spent years half-heartedly thinking about making a visual novel. It was going to feature a protagonist who got ensnared by some creep and she'd either end up escaping or succumbing to his will. And he'd use a penlight to try and control her, only each time he used it on her it would change colours in sequence according to the rainbow (hence the title). Each new colour she saw supposed to bring her further along to becoming his...

In my halfhearted struggles to get it done, I couldn't find a way to make the whole victim protagonist thing work to my satisfaction. So I tried a different tack with Kyou as protagonist, started writing things from his point of view and... well, you know the rest :p

So yes, Roygbiv is the visual novel that would eventually morph into Penlight. It's fun to see what ideas carried over from this half-assed thing into Penlight and what was left behind. Not to mention seeing Hiroko and Sayori in their original forms as faceless members of Nozomi's clique and Akiko as a prominent character before she was disappeared (and then got brought back :p).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little bit of history. With any luck we'll be resuming normal service from now on as we go back to regular preview articles and more content for the next early access update of Penlight!

Download

PC (Windows & Linux) 

Mac 

Android

Minor epilepsy warning: The game has several sequences of coloured light flashes during Nozomi's path. It's a single screen-sized flash each time, but advancing the text triggers the light flashes so be careful about advancing too quickly during these parts.