Another month has passed by and there's actually a lot I got done and some I couldn't! Before I go into the details first I want to say:
The Palestine Relief Bundle is live! Get tons of cool games for 8 dollars, and all proceeds will go to PCRF (Palestine Children's Relief Fund)! The bundle ends in about 5 days from me posting this devlog, so be sure to grab some good stuff and support a good cause before it ends!
I spent the first week of April resting after publishing the demo for I Got Transported Into My How to Draw Manga Book!? I got sick in the last week of March, so I wanted to take it easy after the game was published.
Once I recovered and was done resting, I still wanted to take a break from IGTIMHTDMB!? itself, so I decided to work on quality of life updates for my small visual novels and learn how to port them all to mobile! A good portion of the month was spent updating the GUI because I'm prepping all my games for mobile, and well, you have to make sure all the buttons and text are a good size for a mobile device compared to a computer screen. I still need to do some testing to be sure things are okay before releasing them, but if things go well then perhaps you’ll see those soon!
In-between getting those done, Velox Formido came around and I was really interested in getting something done for the jam. To anyone who doesn’t know what the game jam is about, you get a list of themes the moment the jam opens and you have to make a visual novel in 36 hours! It’s kinda like Ludum Dare, and I was really interested in seeing if I could get a visual novel done in 2 days! So I gave it a shot and the answer is: nope! :D
I'm not going to take my inability to complete this jam as a negative! A fun fact about me if you don’t already know: I’ve attempted NaNoRenO many times in the past but never could finish something in time. I did regard these incomplete games as “failures,” but little did I know then, thinking this way honestly doesn’t do me any good. All it did was make me look at those projects with shame and made me never want to work on them again because I felt incompetent.
Instead, I’ll look at any incomplete games for jams as a type of feedback from me to myself, which is way more fruitful than beating myself up over it. After all, I’m able to complete games for a jam, like O2A2! I was able to get something done for NaNoRenO 2024, even as a demo! Anything that happens, even setbacks, is good info for in case I want to try something like this again.
So what went wrong? I did try as much as I could to see if I could get something done in the 36 hour time limit, but the timing of the jam was not great for my end (it went through my work days lmao) so I wasn’t able to dedicate as much time as I’d liked to developing something. I got a 700 word story written on day 1, but when it came to putting it all together, that’s where I started hitting some roadblocks I didn’t realize I set up for myself.
The main problem was that I was drawing too many assets in too little time. I chose Doomed By The Narrative and Flower Symbolism as themes for my story, and one of the big things in the game I wanted to do is the player would choose the flowers and their meanings, and each choice informs the player of the story that’s unraveling. Which would be an awesome thing to pull off, but that is a lot of flowers to draw oops.
By the time I realized my drawing workload, I was getting a little loopy and scatterbrained because the jam’s end would be 5am in my time. I figured I should prioritize sleep now because even with quick sketches, I would not be able to code all the choices in time at the rate my brain was functioning, which was little to none at all by 2:30am.
Would I have been able to publish the game if I hadn’t had to draw all those assets? Probably! But I want the flowers to be visually depicted and not just as text, but that would require a lot of work with not much brainspace at the time. So, good to know for next time I attempt something like this!
Remember everyone, crunch is bad! And this was a good reminder that I personally cannot do all nighters anymore lol.
As for the story itself, I am honestly going to recycle it for a newer story that’s been kicking around in my mind since writing it. Maybe you’ll see it in an evolved form in the future? Who knows~!
tl;dr my brain when i realized i wont be able to draw everything on time
By the way, go check out all the entries to Velox Formido! Everyone’s whos entered did a fantastic job with their visual novels, and you should give them ratings once the rating period is over.Well, I’ll be focusing on getting those updates and Android versions of my small games out, but one thing to keep an eye out are a pair of jams that Omegabutton, Catsket, and I are going to host!
The first jam will be “Worst Visual Novel Ever” Challenge Jam! This jam is based on the ones that ran in the Lemma Soft Forums in 2012 and 2013 where the goal is to make a bad visual novel. The intent of the jam is to shake off the pressure of putting out a good, polished game out there and get something done. You can experiment, get weird, let loose, potentially learn a new engine, and have fun making some bad stuff! I have something in mind to submit to the Worst VN Jam, and hopefully I’ll see some of you there too!
The second jam will be “Fix the Worst Visual Novel!” Jam! Anyone who submitted anything to the Worst VN Jam will be able to consent to having their game to be “fixed” by future devs! The idea is spiritually an Exquisite Corpse where you don’t erase the previous work, but build upon it, though that’s not a hard rule due how some bad VNs could be lol. Be on the lookout for that jam!
That’s it for now! Be sure to donate to the Palestinian Relief Bundle and play the games submitted to Velox Formido! Here’s to interesting things to do for May, and I’ll see you in the next month with maybe a new game to tortue you with! :D
~Knickknack PJ
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I know that some people like the shorter jams like Velox because they feel more in the "spirit" of a jam, but I totally feel you regarding the failure to do all-nighters. I see the perfectionist tendencies and scope creep and I commiserate: drawing assets is so hard onL. Did you ever consider publish what you had and fixing it up progressively? A similar thing happened to me with my NaNoRenO submission (because of school), and I plan to update it at least once more--but if you don't feel like it would've been a good show of your skills or use of your time, I totally get that too!
The thing with Velox Formido compared to NaNoRenO is that the game has to be completed in the time allotted: no demos, no prologues, and it has to be a self-contained and finished game. Unfortunately I built my game's idea and visuals on having images of the flowers as choices, so no matter what, the flowers would have to be visuals, be it drawn by me or photo edited, both of which takes time orz.
I was thinking of publishing it after the jam for Blossom Jam, but I had a thought that it seems like it can be a part of another story I was kicking around in my brain, so I'm just gonna shelve it for then because it seems better suited to that story than a standalone piece imo.
That story will have its day in the sun, and maybe I'll be able to do a two day jam someday~ When I have better luck and less priorities, that is lol