Dev Diary 2: Lessons Learned
Just now
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the second Black Incense development diary. Writing for the next release is going well, and I’m on track for a December launch. It’s been a busy but productive few weeks.
For this entry, I wanted to take a step back and look at what I learned while creating the Prologue. I’d planned to do this reflection privately anyway as part of making sure I keep improving with each release, but it also seemed worth sharing here. A lot of you have asked about the process behind the game, and talking openly about what worked, what didn’t, and what’s changing for the next stage feels like a good way to start that conversation.
So, let’s get into it.
Lesson One: Scale and the Art of the Possible
The Prologue of Black Incense was enormous, with over 100,000 words of dialogue, about the size of a 350-page novel. In any single playthrough you’ll probably only see a small fraction of that, but of course every branch had to be written, tested, and kept coherent. It was easily the biggest writing project I’ve ever taken on.
At the same time, I had to teach myself how to create NSFW AI-assisted art that looked consistent across poses and scenes, then produce more than 200 final images. Every piece went through several passes, manual touch-ups, and prompt rewrites. Add in designing a new UI from scratch and learning enough coding to make it all behave, and the process became a real education in what’s actually possible for one person working nights and weekends.
The lesson was simple but vital: ambition has to be matched with something sustainable. Now that the groundwork is done with the art pipeline, the UI, the systems, I know roughly what a sane release target looks like. Whilst these aren't definitive figures, I estimate that around 15,000–20,000 words of new content and 20–50 fresh images each month is achievable without burning out. That rhythm should let me keep building this world steadily while maintaining the quality and depth that drew people to the Prologue in the first place.
Lesson Two: Keeping Up with Artificial Intelligence
It’s hardly an original insight to say that AI is changing everything, but for independent creators, the pace of that change is dizzying. I’m grateful for it, though, because without these tools Black Incense couldn’t exist. They let me focus on what I do best (writing, story design, worldbuilding, scene and image composition) whilst handling the parts I simply couldn’t produce alone, like the raw artwork itself.
When I started generating assets for the Prologue, the tools I was using were state of the art; three months later, half of them were obsolete. That’s the reality of working at the intersection of art and technology right now. Keeping up is about constantly refining workflow, experimenting, and learning. For anyone interested in exploring this side of development, I’d recommend the Pixaroma YouTube channel; his tutorials were invaluable when I was building my pipeline. I'm not affiliated with him in any way, I just wanted to give him the credit due for helping make this all possible.
Looking ahead, I plan to stay close to the frontier. As tools evolve and become more intuitive from image generation to animation I’ll experiment carefully with how they can enhance Black Incense without losing its human core (the writing and storytelling will always be made by me). However, that's for the future. For now as the project is in its initial stages my focus is to get the fundamentals right, tell the story properly, and build a strong foundation.
Lesson Three: The Development Cycle Sequence
When I began the Prologue, my process was straightforward but imperfect. I outlined the scenes, generated the artwork for them, and then wrote the story to match. It worked, but as the writing evolved, some scenes drifted in directions I hadn’t anticipated, leaving moments where the images didn’t quite align with the text.
For future releases, I’ve refined the sequence. After the initial planning stage, I now do a quick draft pass before generating images. That allows the structure and dialogue to take shape early, while still leaving room to adapt once the visual material exists. The final writing then incorporates any new visual details that appear during generation, turning those spontaneous quirks into part of the scene rather than inconsistencies to fix.
Because the monthly releases will be smaller and more focused, it’ll also be easier to move between writing and art creation fluidly, keeping both in sync. I may eventually revisit the Prologue to add a few images where I think it would benefit, but only when time allows. Which leads directly to the next lesson...
Lesson Four: Perfection is the Enemy of Good
This is less a lesson learned than a rule I knew I had to follow from the beginning. A project like Black Incense can easily spiral out of control if you try to make every detail perfect before moving on. At a certain point, you have to decide something is good, release it, and keep building.
There are still plenty of things I’d like to add or polish. A few images could use another pass, and I had extra ideas (like a tarot reading for Molly at sixteen) that didn’t make it into the Prologue. One big example that some players have since asked about was the idea of including a female-only option for Molly’s first time. The problem was that doing it properly would have meant writing alternate versions of every later sex scene with a man, to account for whether or not that was her first male encounter. That’s hundreds of extra lines of dialogue and code, effectively doubling the amount of work for every sex scene that follows, and it would have pushed the release back by over a month.
Those are the kinds of decisions you have to make if you want to keep a project alive. The priority is progress and consistency, not chasing every “what if” or giving in to feature creep. Each update will add new content, refine old systems, and expand the story, but the only way to reach the finish line is to keep moving forward.
Lesson Five: Why It’s Worth Doing
It might sound like an obvious point, but it’s true all the same. I spent months working on Black Incense before anyone else saw a frame of it, long nights, whole weekends, and no feedback beyond my own instinct that this idea was worth pursuing. Seeing the reaction since release has been incredibly energising. The messages, comments, reviews, and kind words have totally vindicated my decision to put this out there.
It’s easy to underestimate how much that matters to a developer working alone. Every piece of feedback helps guide what comes next, and every bit of support makes it possible to dedicate more time and resources to the game. To everyone who’s played, shared, or pledged: thank you. You’ve made these first weeks far more rewarding than I imagined, and that support is exactly what will carry Black Incense forward.
Conclusion
Before I sign off this week, I wanted to share the short trailer I put together for Black Incense. It’s simple, but I think it captures the tone and atmosphere of the world well, and it was a fun experiment in learning new tools. There's no way to embed videos within the body of text so you will have make do with me just posting the YouTube link instead. I hope you enjoy it!
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Next week’s diary will be about game mechanics I’ll be avoiding, the things that can undermine immersion or break narrative focus, which I think is just as important as discussing the systems I’ll include.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts or questions in the comments. I read everything, and your feedback genuinely helps shape what comes next. Thanks again for all your support, and I’ll see you in the next update.
Himeros
