I saw that we could go ahead and set up our devlogs, so I'm going to do that now. :-)
Hello, my name is Sciaenops and I run a one-woman game dev studio called Drone Garden Studios! You can see a collection of my work on my profile or on my portfolio. I tend to focus on narrative-heavy games like visual novels, and I really don't want to buck that trend for this jam.
I'll be making a sci-fi/fantasy visual novel called Legends of Tzonac: Friendship & Automata. Its an excuse to revisit a whole bunch of robot characters I've created over the past year and have them interact. Originally, it was going to be a friendship sim. Like a dating sim, but for buddies instead of kissin'. But then after a fantastic nightmare (these are often what spark my inspiration), I decided to shift gears towards something more potentially tragic. The player will have to maintain the friendships and loyalties of the characters, or else said characters will die at the end of the game. So like the loyalty missions vs suicide mission aspect of Mass Effect 2, except in RenPy. I would even like to see just how difficult it is to write around potentially-dead characters in a future game, see if that's as difficult as people say it would be. But that's a future project. Also, the game will have achievements. I learned how to add achievements in an earlier project, and that was fun.
For this game, killing off my favorite characters is going to hurt enough. I've not done that yet. And there's two characters in this game in particular that will be very hard to write out death scenes and consequences for. But that's another part of the challenge. Working up the courage to take them out.
Yet another challenge will be selling my game. I tried selling my first project, which was a game I was extremely proud of. I even had it on Steam. Long story short, it was a miserable failure. The game was removed from Steam, with the users shaming me for trying to be greedy and sell a short game in the first place. That hurt, honestly. But it was kind of my fault, too. I didn't know nearly enough about dev or visual novel writing to make a sellable game. But I've been working with the engine for well over a year now, and I think I can make something worth selling/buying. Now its just a matter of overcoming that little nagging voice in the back of my mind saying I can't.
My schedule set-up is going to be a maximum of two hours, Monday-Saturday. I say a maximum of two hours because I can't commit to a stricter frame. My work schedule isn't always the same, nor are my energy levels after work. Some days I may only be able to put in a small amount of time, some days I may go hogwild. But I definitely don't want to spend hours and hours and hours at one time on one project. And I need my Sundays, I sleep on Sundays.
My marketing plan is this devlog, my blog, and posting a trailer once I have enough footage (usually, I wait until the week of release). I am also considering posting some screenshots on Twitter. I'm not a big Twitter user, but I can give it a try for this challenge. And if there's any folks here who offer to livestream demos, well they can have a go. ;-)
tl;dr, I'm making a visual novel in at maximum 2 hours a day from Monday to Saturday, thanks for joining me on this adventure.
