Hello!  I'm Sci.  So, I've never participated in a Devtober before.  Or a game jam before.  Or game development, really.  I mean, I got one game that'll be published in November (its called 1 For Yes, 0 For No, it'll be on here and on Steam, be sure to keep an eye out for it and pick it up if you're interested, am I allowed to advertise my other stuff during Devtober oh no), but that's about it.  So I'm kind of out of my comfort  zone.  But what the heck, a little discomfort hasn't killed me yet, so full speed ahead!

For Devtober, I'm not making a full game.  Instead, I'm making an early demo of my next game.  It's called Wrathmalos, and it's based off a very vivid nightmare I had a long time ago.  Its a sci fi/horror visual novel about a shipwrecked couple, an island conspiracy, a mysterious drone, and a heaping helping of paranoia.  I'd already written up the beginning of the game, so I figured I'd just start programming (and add a Devtober-specific intro and outro for fun) and there I'd go.

I'm keeping track of my progress over on my blog, but I figured it'd be nice to keep track over here too.

Anyway, thanks for popping in!  If you have any words of wisdom, feel free to share!

So, I've already done the first three days, so let me summarize them real fast:

Day One: made Melvin's (he's the mysterious drone I mentioned on the first post) sprites and wrote the Devtober-only demo.  Also rigged up a whole bunch of placeholder sprites.

Day Two: fixed the menu font color and the title, made some backgrounds out of some old photographs I had, and palette-swapped Melvin to create one of the enemies.

Day Three: worked on the dialogue and learned how to do branching  dialogue boxes in RenPy.  Ones where your choice affects the game and ones where more options show up depending on how much you're willing to talk to the NPCs.

Everything looks really scruffy, but I'm happy with it.  At most, I want to desaturate the backgrounds and make them more pastel-y.

Anyway, tomorrow will be a more detailed summary.  Yaaaay.

No devtober pics today, cuz its more of the same placeholder stuff visually.  

Ended up porting the rest of the script over.  Wasn't planning on it, but i got into a groove and just couldn't stop.  I already see a whole lot of stuff to rewrite for the full game.  Also will probably need to resize the drones, they are massive right now.  Depends on how the people look.

All in all, got a lot done on this fourth day of Devtober.

Sundays are my days of rest, by which I mean I will take a good four or five hour nap and I really don't want to give that up for Devtober.  So today, I only touched up some errors I'd caught in the script and shrank Melvin down to a cuter size.

Tomorrow I start trying to draw people.  That'll be fun.

Let me tell you a story.  When I was a little girl, I loved to draw.  I drew whenever I could.  I had this weird, cartoony style.  But I loved it.  However, my grandma shamed me for it.  Whenever I handed her a picture I’d drawn for her, she’d want to know why it wasn’t photorealistic.  I was six.  How the hell does a six year old pull off photorealism?  And my teachers genuinely thought my art style was a side effect of some mental issue.  There was more shaming there.

Eventually, tiny little six-year-old me stopped drawing as much.  What was the point, if anyone who saw my pictures would shame me or try to get me medicated?  

Fast forward to today.  I’m 30 years old and trying my hand at game development.  Too stubborn and scared to ask someone else to do the art for me.  So I break out a sketch diary.  I draw a dude: the main human character seen throughout the game, in fact.  I give him a mask and put his hands in his pockets to make things easier for myself.  I draw him over and over.  Finally, I get someone who’s the closest to being properly proportioned I’ve ever done.  I scan him into the computer, retrace everything, color it in to match the drones I’ve already added...and I try to make myself be happy with it.  Technically, he’s the best human drawing I’ve ever done.  Especially since, as I mentioned, I’ve not been drawing for years.  I have a distinct style that, with practice, could be something fun and unique for the full game (and passable for this demo).  

But I just keep hearing all those voices in the back of my head.  “It’s not photorealistic, so therefore its bad.”  And I have a pit in my gut, and I feel like everything is already crashing and burning and we’re only six or seven days into Devtober.

Moral of the story: don’t friggin shame small children for not having the art skills of an adult, seriously wtf is wrong with you?  They grow up to have hardly any art skills at all, do you want that?

Anyway, today I drew the main dude and got him into the game.  Tomorrow I work on the other two human characters, then after that I work on the enemies.  And hopefully, I learn to shut up those voices from the past.  And just focus on making the demo.  Then, afterwards, focus on improving my art skills for the full game.

Got the rest of the sprites done (not counting enemy sprites for the battle sequences, anyway) and tried to do some shading on Melvin and Adrian.  They look...better?  I guess?  

All i know is, I’m going to have to do some serious rehauling for the full release.  Seriously, look at it.  Looks like a twelve year old did the art, not a thirty year old (no offense to any twelve year olds who may happen upon this thread).  I try to keep telling myself, “well no, its okay, you’re out of practice, you got slammed down a lot when you WERE practicing, lots of indie games have nonconventional artstyles that don’t detract from the story, it’s fine,” but I also keep telling myself “why the heck are you so bad at art, what is wrong with you.”  I mean, a lot of that is me repeating the voices of the past, but still.

Anyway, this will work for Devtober.  If I spend too much time obsessing over the art, then I won’t get this demo done.

Finished off the enemy sprites, which means all the characters are done!  Not gonna bother shading everyone else, it doesnt make THAT much of a difference frankly.  I also started getting more backgrounds.  Got a gate and the inside and outside of a lodge.  The reason this bed looks the way it does can be blamed on my cat, which I think requires no further explanation.

Tomorrow I finish (and maybe redo?) backgrounds.  I have some specific locations in mind, and I already have some errands to run, so this works out.  Then once the backgrounds are done, figuring out the battle sequences.  What I reeeeeally want to do is have these sequences be a round of Othello (I was inspired by, of all things, Neopets Puzzle Adventure).  I’ve found tutorials for programming Othello in Python/Pygame, so I can figure it out...it’s just figuring out how to implement it in RenPy.  I had a lot of trouble getting a simple number-guessing minigame working in RenPy, something tells me Othello will be tougher.  

Also, my very first game releases in less than a month, oh gosh I'm so nervous.

So I was going to go around town and take a bunch of photos for my project today, but i woke up feeling kinda gross.  I dont think its THE virus, buuuuuuut I better hole up just to be safe.  So I was going to look up public domain images for the last few backgrounds.

Then my searching led me to this website.  A whole bunch of gorgeous photos, all free to use and edit?  Even for commercial purposes?  SWEET!  Ended up changing all of the backgrounds I already had to pics found on there.  And I think I’ll stick with these for the full version.  They’re just too darn good.

I also desaturated the characters (pic was taken before doing so), which somehow makes them look better.  And apparently I messed up the other two enemy sprites and they don’t have transparent backgrounds and I don’t feel like dealing with that, so the only enemies in the demo are the orange drones.  OH WELL.

And while I still 100% want to improve my artwork and redo these sprites for the full release, I am feeling much better about my artstyle than I have been the past couple of days.  Yes, because the desaturated colors makes them look better, but also because I looked up free RenPy assets and the webpage I found had a lot of sprites that were very similar in style to mine.  I was very surprised, and it made me feel better about myself.  Hooray.

IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO GET THIS WORKING.

This is how I want to handle combat in Wrathmalos.  Othello games.  Electronic Othello, as strange as this may sound, is very nostalgic to me.  I had a handheld Othello game that I used to take on road trips.  And as I mentioned before, Neopets Puzzle Adventure was a direct inspiration for this.  So I wanted to figure out if I could do something like that.  And I can, it turns out!

This build is in pygame.  I’m hoping to be able to transfer it over to RenPy as-is, but idk.  I mean, I looked it up before, and it is technically possible with the screen language.  But that’s going to take time.  Also, when transferring over, I need to figure out how to make it so that a loss or a tie cuts to a game-over screen then repeats the battle and a win continues the story.  Either that or give folks an opt-out option, where the game asks them if they want to play again.

But not today.  That’s tomorrow.  My brain is fried.

Today I ran into a moral dilemma.  While trying to figure out how to get the Othello minigame into RenPy, I discovered that the game actually flowed way better without it.  But I really liked Othello.  But the minigame would actually be more of a hindrance than an enhancement to the whole experience.  But I really liked Othello.  What to do?!

Ended up cutting the minigame.  For the demo, its replaced with a description of a curb-stomp battle and a melted enemy.  Dunno if that’s what I’ll do for the full game or if I’ll expand on it a bit more, but it works for the demo.

Then I went on ahead and added music and sound effects, and scoured the script for errors.  And now, the demo is...actually pretty much done!  I want to spend the next couple of days continuing to playtest and check for errors, but yeah.  My Devtober entry will be uploaded soon!

Oh, and if anyone had their heart set on playing Othello, I called it Dronethello and uploaded it to my portfolio.  Enjoy!

Today is just playtesting and gathering screenshots for the store page.  I’m actually really happy with how this demo turned out.  Even the artwork.  It’s growing on me.

I want to get this posted along with my post-mortem on Tuesday, so that I can just shift gears over to Scream Jam completely (btw, I'm participating in Scream Jam as well!).  I know I’m supposed to wait until the end of the month to write the post-mortem, but I guarantee you if I wait that long then I will forget it.

https://itch.io/embed/786964?linkback=true&bg_color=47b0ec&fg_color=020b71&link_color=a05205&border_color=f1cd79

AND IT'S DONE!

My project for Devtober 2020 is done, submitted, and live for downloads!  It includes the demo itself and my Post-Mortem, which again if I don't publish it now then I'll forget.  

So, what's next?  Well, first I have about a day's worth of downtime.  Then I'm shifting gears into Scream Jam.  Pretty excited about how that game should turn out.  I've also been playing around with the idea of a Skyrim quest and follower mod, might work on that after Scream Jam.  And, of course, I need to work on the full version of Wrathmalos.

Still, this was a fun time, and I'm glad I participated!