Hello! Pour yourself some tea, make yourself comfortable and let me tell you the most frustating story ever.

This is a visual novel about a girl who tells a story of her life during psychologist session. As a player you can choose things she's going to tell, which will impact the story, write your own name and name the rest of the crew. It's just a really simple game :). I'm going to code it in RenPy. 

My current goals:

• 20-30 minutes of gameplay
• player can name the main character
• player can name the rest of the crew
• choices that player makes during the game affects the ending
• 3 different endings

I probably won't post daily updates or screenshots (since I plan for the game to have like, one background and that's all), but I'll try to notify you with my progress in written form :).

Thank you for following my progress and I'll hope you'll like the final product!

Disclaimer: this game was made from just pure need of heart. I don't mean to make fun of/offend medical system/people with problems who need to visit psychologists etc. It's just my way to express my frustration with things. Please, don't take it personally. 

Edit: As you can see, I decided to change the name of the game since "The Mess" sounds more fitting for the story.

First update! I've made some graphics for the main menu and implemented some royalty free music. I'm still searching for the right bacgrounds for the main game. I've also already coded ~1k words for you to read (about 3 minutes of gameplay, I think). The code to name 7 characters as you want is also implemented; some of them still wait for me to code their story. I'm happy with the progress I'm making.

Second update :). I mostly finished one of the routes I planned for the game. Now I'm working on the second one. There have also been a change of plans regarding endings - instead of 3 different ones the psychologist will comment on what he heard about from main character (choices player make along the way).  Right after I finish writing all the routes I'll code the end speech for the doctor. There's also a possibility to unlock a secret topic to talk about, which will contain some easter eggs and hints about my previous game, Astral Nights. So yeah, looking forward to releasing this little thing into the wild :D!

Quick progress update: I had to take a day off because my family visited me, but I managed to write about 3k words and finish the third route. Now I have to write the secret topic to talk about, code the end speech for the doctor, improve some writing one route that has been already written and I think that's all! Since I won't be working on weekend, I  will post the next update on Monday. Have a great friday! :)

Another day, another update: the secret topic is finished and one of the topic got extended. The only thing that is left is to improve writing in one route and code the end speech for the doctor :).

Story time

Meet my cat, Nala:

She's dorky, but a cute one. She's also a hunter that needs to hunt down everything she sees. For most of the times she just play with animals she hunts, but sometimes she decides that she needs to bring me her prey because I don't know how to take care of myself and she needs to feed me.

So today she brought me this:

Yes, a freakin' living bird. So for most of my day I tried to catch this little guy without hurting it and set it free (mission accomplished!). Why am I talking about it? Well, I didn't had a chance to fully work on a game today, so I only managed to improve some writing. The only thing to do is to write the doctor's speech and do some proof reading. I think I'm gonna finish the whole game in two or three days (unless my cat decide to bring me some more living animals from the garden). Wish me luck :)!

Sooo I finished the game. And because I need to take my cat tomorrow to a vet and there's some stuff I need to take care of on Friday that just came up, I decided to publish the game page today. I hope you like the game and thanks for checking it out!

Take care! :D

Postmortem!

I'm actually suprised that I managed to do pretty much everything I wated to. Now that I think about it I should have do something more complicated to hide the additional topic (yup, talking about dreams is the mysterious route I was reffering to). The whole process would go a lot more smooth if my dear cat didn't decide to bring me some wildlife into the house.

I'm really glad I decided to take part in the jam. At the beginning of July when I learned about MFGJ I was unsure about joining because I had some friends coming over for the weekend (that's why I began my work on the game a little bit later) and I already planned for a whole year to focus my work on Astral Nights, since it's my last summer vacation. But making The Mess was fun. It was refreshing to just let everything that bothered me just go*.

*A little disclaimer, because I think some of you may got the wrong idea: this game is not based entirely on my life or something. It's just a bunch of stories that I heard of from friends, family, distant relatives, news or social media. Everything that frustrated me in those stories I put into the game.  I think that the only thing that I wrote based on my own life are the dream about kittens and some memories from prime school. That's all. 

Plans?

Now I'm taking a break to finish some documentation (like this post you're reading rn) and play games that the rest of jammers made :D. I also want to focus more on the cross-stitch project I'm making in my free time and I think by the end of the week I will finally work on Astral Nights. 

The Mess, as stated before, was made especially for this jam and because I needed to let go of some negative things. I may upload patch to fix some typos and such, but that's all. It was fun while it lasted, now it's time to say goodbye :).

Take care!