A Haunted DVD

Over the summer of 2025 I had two vague interests, creating a text-based adventure, and learning how to burn DVDs. One followed the other, and I found myself making text-based adventures by programming DVD menus. This quickly proved extremely tricky. DVDs have no means to store variables, and I hit a wall in terms of what I could do efficiently. So, I decided to look for other ways of creating games. But, the idea of DVDs and physical media stuck in the back of my mind.

D. Vid Dee

In my search for a better solution, I moved to Twine, a framework for making text-based adventures. Perfect! I whipped up a few sprites without thinking much about them. I was playing Date Everything at the time, which I'm sure had some influence on the whole "sentient DVD" idea.

The name D. Vid Dee was probably the first thing I thought of. Although, it is partially an inside joke. Anyone who knows me personally probably knows that I pronounce the acronym DVD as Dee-vuh-dee. This original name was an admittedly poor attempt to incorporate that.

Y2K Girlie

As I was thinking more about this DVD girl, I wanted to give her an appearance that resonated with her concept. I associate DVDs most with the late nineties and early 2000's, so I looked to the imagery of the time for inspiration.

I was inspired by the iconic silhouette advertisements for iPod, the holographic patterns on DVDs, and celebrities like Britney Spears and Billie Piper

I also commissioned a few artists to draw Vid as I was developing her. I don't typically do this, but I found it helpful to see her through someone else's eyes. Sometime after these commissions, I changed her name to Vid Glitch.

The Digital Bitch

Like so many of my projects, I further developed Vid through a class. This class, Prax 300, focused on interdisciplinary projects. She was a perfect fit!

I decided to make an interactive website with heavy influence from visual novels. So, I worked up some revised sprites

This is where Vid's personality calcified, and she became Vid Glitch the Digital Bitch.

The Future

There's a lot about Vid that I don't know yet, I'm still working on her story, and the website where it will take place. There is a short demo version available, and I hope to keep expanding as I discover more about Vid and her story!