PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE

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• Announcements·31 Aug 2026Official

  DEVLOG 3 - Designing an Environment

  Hi hi!We’re back! I’m teaisfortoby, the developer of the mystery puzzle game PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE. I’ve been quite busy recently, so let’s get to it!NEWSIt’s been a pretty hectic month for me personally, but development is still going strong. Mostly, I’ve been squashing bugs and rigorously testing the full release. All of this is to say: I don’t have anything to announce yet, but I’m still hard at work!I did send out a postmortem about my other game, A field of broken glass, so check that out if you’re interested.DESIGNING AN ENVIRONMENTThis month, I’m talking about environment design, something I was Very Afraid Of before making this game. I am a character artist first and foremost, so anything else was quite intimidating for me. I’d like to think I’ve improved since I started development, and I wanted to show off one of my favorite environments in the game. Let’s take a look at the interior of the Wattsburg Historical Society!The lobby.Designing the environments went hand-in-hand with writing the game’s story, especially because the mystery is linked with the local town history. As a result, the Historical Society was one of the last screens I illustrated, so that I had enough time to properly develop the said history. To give a little bit of context, Wattsburg is a northwestern* city riiiight near the edge of the coast. It’s become a popular tourist spot thanks to some pushes by the local government, and they want to flaunt their (quite small) military history as much as they can to attract those tourists. All of this will contribute to the design of the new area!*You might be wondering, “northwestern? Isn’t Wattsburg in Pennsylvania?” Well, the Wattsburg in PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE is, in fact… unrelated to the real-life city in Pennsylvania. I came up with the name Wattsburg on my own (trying to evoke images of energy to contrast with waiting)… and then found out much, much later it was the name of a real place. It’s a pretty tame example, but a good reminder: you ...
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• Patch Notes·12 Aug 2026Official

  Demo Patch Notes for v0.90.3

  Hi everyone! This is another mini update to catch some small lingering issues. Before I dive into the patch notes, I wanted to say thank you all for reaching out whenever you encounter bugs. I realized that there wasn't a clear place for people to send in bug reports... that changes now!If you run into a bug, please send an email to teaisfortoby@outlook.com. When you send an email, please also:Try to recreate the bug before you send it in!Take screenshots or video footage of the bug if you can.Note the in-game time of day that the bug occurs in -- for the demo, that'll be either Monday evening or Tuesday evening.Note what input devices you used to play (keyboard, controller type) and any settings you've changed from their default.Describe the bug in as much detail as you can!Thank you all again!Patch NotesAdjusted text in the bug book indicating if you haven't collected a specific page's bug yet.Reworked the bug book's pagination so text is readable regardless of font size/style.Fixed an issue with Louis still being able to access his house after already starting the tour.Removed some objects from Louis's house that shouldn't have been accessible on Tuesday.Updated the error node to better direct players on how to submit bug reports.Fixed an issue during puzzles where the highlight on words would not scale properly with different font styles.Fixed an issue where players could still interact with puzzles during transitions.Fixed an issue where image descriptions wouldn't play upon starting a new playthrough.
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• Announcements·31 Jul 2026Official

  DEVLOG 2 - Drawing Character Portraits

  Hi hi!Welcome back, everyone! I’m teaisfortoby, the developer of PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE. I hope you all had a restful Disability Pride Month! In case you missed it, some cool stuff happened this month...NEWSWe were a part of the Nonbinary Coded Games event on Steam a few weeks ago, and the demo got a tiiiiiny little cosmetic update to celebrate. If you haven’t played the demo yet, you totally should, but should ALSO go check out all the other games featured in the event here!In terms of development, things are going very well. Some late-game art was finalized, but mostly it was lots of debugging this month. I can’t share much of it, because so much of it is major spoiler territory, but I promise that things are happening. Stay tuned!In other news… I made a new game!!A field of broken glass is a toxic yuri puzzle VN I cooked up in a week for the TOXIC YURI VN JAM. It is completely unrelated to PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE, but I had a lot of fun with it! Give it a try if you wanna.DRAWING CHARACTER PORTRAITSThis month, I’m going to talk about character portraits — AKA sprites, AKA the little expressions you see during dialogue. They’re one of my favorite things to draw!When approaching any new character’s portraits, I always try to think intentionally about how they take up a space. How often do they move around? How willing are they to emote? What parts of their bodies do they move? I come up with a short list of notes that tell me how a character physically acts. Think of it like blocking for an actor.LOUISThese were the acting notes I wrote for Louis:full body emoterdoesn’t know how to use his bracesshows his emotions very openlyoveracts sometimes for the bitWith him, I had to consider how he would be using his hands whenever he had his braces on. His relationship with his disability is such that doesn’t care about caring for his aids… so some of his sprites have him in positions that would be actively uncomfortable. He’s not just overacting because he’s dramatic — he wants...
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• Patch Notes·13 Jul 2026Official

  A small demo update for the Nonbinary Coded Games event!!

  Hi hi!The Nonbinary Coded Games event is live right now!! If you didn't know, it's Nonbinary Awareness Week, and tomorrow is International Nonbinary People's Day. In its honor, the event's showing off games made by nonbinary devs (that's me!) and games featuring nonbinary characters (me again!). A ton of other games are on sale, have new demos dropping, or are releasing today. Go support your nonbinary devs!!To celebrate the event, there's been a small update to the demo. Four new menu styles have been added, each based on a different pride flag: Disability Pride (happy Disability Pride Month!)Trans PrideNonbinary PrideGenderqueer PrideIt's a great time to dive into the demo if you haven't yet. And you can wishlist the game while you're at it, too!teaisfortoby!
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• Announcements·30 Jun 2026Official

  DEVLOG 1 - The Initial Concept

  Hi hi! Welcome! I’m teaisfortoby, the developer of the mystery puzzle game PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE. This is the very first devlog! We've got a lot to cover, so let's just dive in.NEWSIt’s been a very busy month for the game! The Wholesome Direct showed off our first trailer, and the demo released on Steam! The support so far has been unbelievable. I never imagined so many people would be interested in this story. Thank you all so so much! If you haven’t watched the trailer, here’s your chance:Also, we've got a newsletter! It has all the same info as these devlogs, but you'll also get a free wallpaper from the game every month. You can sign up for it here: https://buttondown.com/tiftnewsletterNow back to business.THE INITIAL CONCEPTFor this first log, I want to look back on how PIAV’S gameplay loop has evolved. It’s been in active development since 2024, and it’s come a long, long way since then.I had the idea to make what would become PIAV near the end of 2023. At the time, I was in the process of getting diagnosed with some of my disabilities, and I found the whole experience very isolating. I have invisible disabilities, so there was no external proof of my symptoms. The only “evidence” was what I told people about myself, and nobody could ever feel those sensations themselves. I felt like a stranger in my own body. I needed to write about it, mostly for myself.It started, oddly enough, as a dress-up game! The idea was that the main character would get dressed up by the player every day, go to work, then come home. Rinse and repeat. You’d pick which mobility aids he would use while you dressed him, so you would also have to gauge his energy levels, if he could walk without a cane, et cetera. Players wouldn’t get to see him go to work, but they would see how he felt about his day when he came home. Ultimately, you would watch as he grew to hate his body to the point that he found it unbearable (which, in my initial outlines, involved some pretty intense body horror). ...
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