Many years ago I tried to make a visual novel dating sim, and like most people, I underestimated how much goes into actually making a good visual novel. That VN was The Duenkhy, and though I got as far as a demo and a rough version of an entire dating candidate’s route, I found myself constantly deterred by how much more the project was taking out of me than I’d anticipated. I’ve always regretted not being able to share my finished vision because I grew attached to these characters, and so I lay this incomplete iteration of The Duenkhy before you.
You can think of it as a text-dump of an unreleased, unfinished game, or you can think of it as a text adventure, or you can think of it as a shoddy dialogue-heavy original piece of fiction. There’s a lot of old art assets intermingled with newer sketches that I added in. There are a lot of story beats that remained unchanged, and many more that I completely replaced with new writing. This is a confusing piece of work and I don’t expect everyone to fully understand it, but I wanted to share what I had with the world, however imperfect the presentation may be.
tl;dr, it’s a visual novel turned webnovel, kind of?
Q: But more importantly, how do I pronounce “duenkhy”?
A: “dwen-kai”, rhymes with “when pie”.
Q: Do you plan to post the other character’s routes someday?
A: At this point, most likely not. I want to move forward onto new projects instead of reanimating this one’s corpse over and over. I used Krystoff’s route to gauge how much interest there would be in this format, and truthfully there was not much interest at all, so I’ve decided to move on.
The Duenkhy 