A visual novel built in Ren'Py about a high school girl named In-Ha who is obsessed with being the best until the boy she spent years measuring herself against comes back from Canada and quietly dismantles everything she thought she knew about herself.

I've always been drawn to stories about academic pressure and the specific kind of loneliness that comes from tying your entire identity to performance. I also wanted to write something that felt like reading a manhwa. I wanted to see if a visual novel format could replicate that feeling while giving the player actual control over how the story unfolds.

Tech stack:

• Ren'Py

The script is split across multiple files by chapter and arc. The branching is handled through the choices themselves and where they jump. The endings are tied to how In-Ha processes her burnout whether she commits, stays uncertain, takes it slow, or ends up alone. The UI uses a semi-transparent dark dialogue box over the scene backgrounds to keep text readable across different lighting conditions in the background images.

The hardest part in RenPy is always managing a branching script across multiple files. My other biggest struggle was keeping the tone consistent. It's easy for this kind of story to tip into melodrama. On the technical side, getting backgrounds to scale properly across different image formats (jpg, avif, webp) took longer than expected as I made an error in defining bg_fit.

None of the character art in this project belongs to me.

All character sprites were created using a picrew by wawawa_o_o_ on X. Picrew link: https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/2308695

Background images were sourced externally and are not original assets.