Or, for the full light novel title glory: "Oh No! The Hero Glitched To The End of the Game, And Now We Have To Pick Up The Pieces!" 

But internally we're just calling it 'Oh No', so you can too, if you like : >

In short, this is a simple RPG game about the party members left behind after a speedrunner glitched to the end of the game with the Hero and defeated the Demon King.  For a little while the day seemed saved, but then the Lieutenant of the demon army realised she could seize power (since the speedrunner skipped over her boss battle). Now she has called the demon armies back on their march, and the remaining party must find a way to deal with this new/old threat. The Hero has mysteriously vanished, but perhaps by utilising these strange 'glitches' (supervised by the player), the others may grow strong enough to deal with the approaching apocalypse...

-------

In terms of team members, I (Soul) am on art and writing, while my friend Aera is toiling away on the coding end of things. We're making the game in Ren'Py and slapping an RPG on top of it, because god has cursed us for our hubris, and our work is never finished.

I've just finished with my development for today, so I'll post about what I've been working on next. After that, hopefully Aera will tag in to talk about the coding, because I only have a vague idea what he's doing half the time.

Hello. I am Aera. 

I come here to support my friend as they participate in their first jam. Though I suppose it is mine as well. But I am mostly here to program. Art is tiring and I am not any good at it, and with five university projects to finish by April that I left late, my energy reserves dwindle.  That said, I may end up making some basic battle sprites if things go well.

And so begins the first day.

Soul is in charge of the writing. A compromise is made that if I can think of a better title by the end of the jam, we will use that. But I do understand the irony. Even if it hurts a little. For their penance, Soul assigns themselves to art.

As for me, the first job for today is primarily to set groundwork and flow control. The gameplay loop will consist of a hub location, from which you can shop or go to fight enemies. Ren'Py has everything I need for that, and so the skeleton is instantly set.

What Ren'Py does not have is a combat system. Before the jam, Soul directed me to a framework they planned to use, dubbed the Syrup lite RPG framework.  The inventory system is great, basic and fits the plan well, but the shop and combat system will need tweaking.

And so I grab my axe.

That went...pretty well, overall. I have never used Ren'Py in my life, and Python is not my preferred language. Learning my way around the keywords used in the GUI system can come tommorow. And so I keep the look of the original for now.

Most of today's work consisted of making things more flexible. The original source was designed for a single persistent combatant and enemy. Our turn-based combat loop needs to support a party, each with their own stats, skills and unique abilities, as well as enemy parties. Basic stuff.

Now that we have parties of units and simple combat, I'll probably be working on implementing the per-unit abilities system tommorow, as well as some of the previously mentioned GUI work. If that goes quickly, my sights are set on the shop screen next.

I didn't expect my first game to be a visual novel. Or 2D. But I'm enjoying it so far.

I am absolutely living for this concept. Looking forward to seeing the work you all put in!

I looked at some of the other threads. One with an author draws extremely pretty, frilly blue hats. I spend several minutes looking at frills.

Hello. I am Aera.

Today, Soul and I both sleep in for later than intended. They spend most of the day drawing. I feel a little bad. Our game needs many...assets to be complete. I've been mulling over how exactly we'll reach the true finish mark. Perhaps, some might say, both genres of this game are not ideal fits for a game jam timeframe, especially lacking a dedicated artist. Either way, things continue. 

With placeholders.

I spend the first part of today's session revising the combat loop. Damage calculation, some structure for multi-target moves and such (an optimistic addition, but it can't hurt). Skills exist, and the first becomes the standard Attack option.  In fact, that is currently the only skill, as like any idiot worth their salt, I was entirely distracted by my next task.

Next, I do some minor GUI work. Ren'Py's GUI turns out to be basically CSS.  While I like Ren'Py for being so easy to work with in all other aspects, making me do CSS is akin to asking me to wash my housemate's dirty dishes.

Now we can actually see all our party member's status. I'll revisit the design and layout when there's no immediate functionality to add. Or, I tell myself I will. I'd like to have some small enemy sprites here as well.

Next, I beat on the inventory until it works how I want it to. Any knowledgeable RPG player knows what I'm going to do next.

To test out the grid and page system, I fill the player inventory with 150 cheese wheels at the beginning of the game, much like a high school mathematics teacher.  The alignment and design of these windows still needs work.

Finally, I make the inventory accessible during combat through the "item" command, and allow the use of "usable" items as a turn action.

It restores 5 health to the one who used it.

Tommorow, I hope to add a functioning shop. If I finish that in time, perhaps finally a party/stat page. The last major functional device after that is randomized dungeon spawns.

These long and pretentiously written devlogs provide me with a weird catharsis. Thank you for the time you spent reading this.

ohhh this concept is so cool!! i love really interesting meta takes on games in general... also it's really cool to see so much UI and art done already. great progress so far!!

Good evening. I hope you're doing well. 

The march of progress continues. I didn't cover as much ground as yesterday, but that's fine.  However, I do sleep in again. Life is a struggle, but my bed is warm. Enough about me, though.

The number of new GUI elements grows again today. Or more specifically, the number of placeholder GUI elements. A proper design for each will be necessary, and perhaps I'll regret eating all of the strawberries on my cake first. i just hope that cake isn't a tiramisu, because I find the bottom layer is usually terrible. Anyway, I can only hope they might eventually be a fraction as nice-looking as some of the others in this jam.

First, as mentioned yesterday, I wanted to get the basic shop functionality to a working state.

As they say about all my other placeholder GUI's: "pretty, it ain't". What it is, however, is working.  Right now it's just a button for each item that you press to buy things. My idea is eventually having a grid on the left to select items, and a zoomed in copy with some dialogue from the shopkeeper on the right third of the window, as well as quantity controls.

Ignore the fact the only item in the shop (and the game, really) is the cheese wheel. The second item was our first weapon, the Cypress Stick. It serves to check that the equipable items section works as intended and provides stats. On that note, we have another new element that is useful for checking that.

More future GUI work for my ever growing pile. Even the thumbnails are placeholders from Soul’s sketches. I haven't added a button to actually choose an equipped item without the console, but that will only take a minute, once I figure out where to put it. 

 However, that may actually be the last screen until the next phase. I only just realised that, and it makes me happy. OK, I did say I'd do a screen with an imagemap eventually for the world map, but I'm not sure if that'll get done.

Let's see, what else? There were many minor things today. Not worth a full mention. Going through variables to check that saves work. I helped Soul set a couple flags, set things up so new first encounter dialogue is easy to add. Small things like that.

My next priorities are again the randomised encounter system, and making some kind of actual targeting system (picking which enemy to hit). An imagemap may be the best thing for that, but we have no sprites yet. I’m still mulling it over. Either way, hopefully my dev logs should get a little shorter now.

This is such a cool idea!!! You could do a lot of fun stuff with it but narrative and gameplay-wise. Can't wait to see how it pans out! 

That goddess twist is -chef's kiss- This is coming together so nicely, you're making a lot of progress! Keep it up!

/// Day 4 ///

Hello. It's very late.

I miss my good friend Soul. They're busy today. I also have classes until tea-time. Yet I still spend a little longer than planned on new mechanics. I still haven't worked on my dissertation project since the start of the jam.

I'm going to do things a bit short today. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That means two are worth two thousand. That's the size of a decent essay.

Today, I implement several more thrilling things; the system to generate random series of encounters, a placeholder skill page, a system for selecting which enemy/ally you wish to target.  It all sounds very fancy, but Ren'Py is very easy to work with. Most of the time.

I've been trying to think of how to implement AoE abilities. I'd like to highlight every enemy that the ability will hit on the target screen, but I'm not sure how I'll go about it. Ren'Py gets a bit antsy with python blocks around screen elements.

Perhaps when I have sprites, I'll be able to draw arrows over each of them, at least. But still, I feel it would look a little confusing if only one enemy is highlighted on the bottom box. If you have any ideas, please don't be shy. By myself, I am but one idiot.

Either way, thanks again for staying tuned. I know things still look a bit bare, but I think at least I can now work on some more permanent graphics. I am no artist, though.

Oh this concept is certainly original in my opinion and I can't wait to play it. Hope everything works out for you and good luck :)

Day Five

I had to take a day off yesterday because I was bumper to bumper with other stuff I needed to do, but now it's back to business!

First off, I fished up a fantasy town background (from good old Uncle Mugen if you're wondering). Unfortunately, it was a bit small for our purposes, so I upscaled it via an online AI upscaling thing, and then reduced it to our native resolution.

Not too bad, eh? I also added in the option to 'buy weapons' and 'buy curios' (though they don't have actual buying mechanism yet). What are curios?

Basically, they're glitch items! The player/goddess will impart a certain 'glitch attack' that can be done with these items, to devastating effect. We're still working on exactly what attacks we want in the game, but so far, I'd like some reference to a 'buffer overflow' glitch (i.e. a number gets so high/low that it rolls over and goes to the opposite end).

Oh, I also put some special conditional dialogue in here for if you talked about glitches back at the inn, too. I've been playing a lot of Hades recently, so while I can't get quite as ridiculous as that game, I'm gonna give it my best! And if that's not good enough, I'll go have a good cry :D

After that, I did a crapload of dialogue planning, as demonstrated above. I had the idea of having special dialogue for if you run from a boss and come back to challenge it, so that was another thing to write. Not that I really mind—lots of writing is what I'm good at! ^^

Otherwise, I did also have a chat with Aera the night before, and we're planning (if time allows) to have dungeon navigation similar to Darkest Dungeon. In other words, a scrolling background with the three characters walking in a line, going from room to room. I went ahead and grabbed some sidescroller assets for us to use, so hopefully you'll see the fruits of those labours at...some point. If we have time.

Anyways, that's about it from me. Aera's been a busy bee, as usual, so I'll leave him to discuss the programming magic going on behind the scenes. See you tomorrow!

- Soul

Today is a bit of a different day.

Since I pulled Soul's changes at the end of the night, the UI has changed colour, and since they were placeholders I didn't make them part of a universal style. What does this mean? It means I won't be posting any screenshots today, because I'm too lazy to re-open the editor and colour them right now. You'll just have to trust me.

I was working on my coursework for the larger portion of today, but I got a few things done (unlike on my coursework). The AoE system I wasn't sure how to do turned out to be...easier than I expected. So now we have abilities that target 2 adjacent enemies, or the whole party,  and the target selection UI will reflect that. Basic, but it's nice to see. I also implemented healing abilities, finally, and left some room in the loop to do buffs later.

As I wrap things up, it seems I've forgotten things I'd decided were low priority - I need to get the "sell" button in the shop to work. After the shop, I'll probably just be making sprites until we do an overhaul of the GUI elements on the weekend. We have a lot of windows, so I want to leave a lot of time.

As Soul mentioned, I've been considering having an animation during dungeon screens where the party "walks" and runs into the enemy encounter. It's not too complicated, but I think it'd be neat. I used Darkest Dungeon as an example for the animation, but I don't know if we'll actually have "rooms". We'll see. Time is the factor - it's not worth time I could spend on not having placeholder graphics.

Thanks for reading. Hope you're all doing well with your own games. I'm looking forward to playing some.

Day Six

Bit of a shorter one to report on this time, but I did actually get a decent done today. First up, vendor trash!

It took me a hot second to wrap my head around how this code actually works (with some supervision from Aera), but I think I get it enough to make a bunch new items, when the time is right. For now, I've focus on the boss drops (the last three) and some regular enemy drops (the first two). Yes, you loot a mimic tongue in this game. Tasty!

Other than that, I spent the rest of my day writing first encounter dialogue for the other two dungeons. Here's a sample when first fighting bears. I thought about doing a bear pun instead, but that would bearly pass quality testing ; )

We're gonna be doing a discussion on GUI at the weekend (because we seriously need to fix it), so for tomorrow, I think I'll work on getting some of the sprites actually done. Or at least, more done. I should also probably define some more positions for the image sprites, because at the moment [left] and [right] are a bit too extreme for what I'm going for.

Alright, that's all from me. See you tomorrow!

- Soul

I'm sorry GUI designers, I have underestimated you. Well, I never thought it was easy at all, don't get me wrong; but it reminds me of when I first tried to learn to improve my drawing.

I suck, and I have no idea what I'm doing. But isn't what this jam is about?

There aren't any finished elements to show so I shan't showcase the horrors just yet, but I've worked on several more things since my last log. Nothing too screenshot-worthy. Multiple enemies require a loot pool to roll the chance for each possible item drop, as well as tally up gold and exp. Another basic functionality for my collection.

I've also got in most of the implementation for selling things to the shop. I have one last thing on my list before we both move completely on to the graphics; level-ups. Characters gain xp, but I haven't gotten round to actually implementing the level-up process yet. Well, I don't expect it to take too long.  I just need an exponential xp curve and decide how many stats characters should get on level-up...though I suppose skills on level-ups are also pretty RPG-typical.

I've been making major progress on my dissertation project lately - in fact, the first (and by far the most difficult) part is finished! That also means things are short again, even though I didn't post a devlog yesterday. I'm pretty happy that I have 90% of the functionality down by the week mark, though - even if I fully expect many bugs to surface.

I hope you've all had success with the progress of your own projects. Until next time!

Day Eight

Well, that should be all of Robin's sprites done!

No talk me im angy

I wanted to get Gareth's done today, too, but unfortunately things just kept piling up. On the other hand, I did make some really tasty donuts, so...hey. Small victories.

See you tomorrow!

- Soul

Day Nine

Got a bit more done today, thank goodness. This includes more VN art, story plans, and...pixel art? Hoo boy.

Gareth's sketch probably had to go through the most changes between that and the line art. I also changed his shades to be red, since that way, every party member has a little bit of red on them. That's like...visual theming or something.

Well, red is also my favourite colour, but that has nothing to do with this decision. Totally.

With all the sprites done, I also fixed all the align transforms so that the sprites aren't layered on top of each other. I could also mess around with layers but uh...nah. Priorities.

Also, yes, Robin is beeg. They could snap Clara in half, but they won't because they're a cinnamon roll. Please ignore the skull necklace, it's not important.

You don't want to see the code behind this, by the way. One of these positions is called 'better-left' and one is called 'better-less-left'. Why did we do this.

Pretty much all the core scenes have been planned (and 95% have been written), but that still left the finale to contend with. On reflection, I'm not planning to do multiple endings, since that would be outside the scope of this jam. I guess that technically makes this a kinetic novel now? Huh.

And finally...the pixel art. I've done pixel art like, two other times in my entire life, so this was a bit tricky for me. The first four were the progression of the 32x32 sprite for Clara, while the last one is as 32x64, since we thought the 32x32 looked a bit small next to the slimes. Personally I prefer the 32x32 sprite, but we'll see. We might end up going 32x32 in the end and just scaling it up more.

Aaaand that's it for today. Phew! We're really getting somewhere with the art stuff, huh? Aera's been hard at work on a few sprites himself (along with some other improvements), but I'll leave him to cover that. See you tomorrow, folks!

- Soul

A final devlog from I.

We're not dead. I was definitely more productive at the beginning of the jam, but I think we're on path to push something out. That something might be different from what we had imagined, but it's there.

Where to begin? We've done a "first pass" (partially a joke at this point) on most of the art assets in the game, prioritising quantity. We have 4 enemies for each area including a boss, as well as a final boss, capping out at a relatively small 13 enemies. It's quite a short experience. I've added equipping and using items out of combat, rest stops, implemented the new areas, there's some status effects like poison and a stun ability, a revival move and item, a boss that continuously summons minions, a bunch of new items, all enemies have a unique skill...

Generally this is more of a pre-post mortem, though.

While the RPG system was partially my idea, and entirely my idea as far as implementing it through Ren'Py - it was a little ambitious for a 2 week project. Just getting half of the basic framework into the game took me a week, and that was at a frankly pretty quick pace. While more content can be added quite quickly now everything is done, the basic workings took most of my time. I hope there aren't too many major bugs, and things look to be fine, but we haven't really had time to do many test runs beyond features breaking while we're implementing something else.

The real killer is all the non-code assets that the now base of the game needs. Every enemy, ability, gui and item needs their arts - although we haven't managed ability graphics, and the enemies aren't animated. We'd have all those things at a decent quality as well as SFX in an ideal world, but there's just not enough time for it, even at a rush. Several features were cut as well. Perhaps we'll polish the game up more in the future, especially when I'm done with my coursework.

That aside, I found it to be an enjoyable learning experience. I have a (slightly) more concrete idea of how long things take to develop, and I've had fun tinkering with how to program a turn-based combat loop among other things. I mean, it's a little wonky, but it gets the job done.

Soon, if things go well, I'll be trying ("trying" being the key word) to develop a short VR shooter with some Metroid inspirations, and I'll be taking many of the things I learned during the jam with me.  Obviously not how to program turn-based combat loops, but more general lessons, like knowing the value of sticking to small, easy to achieve tasks is even greater than I originally thought.

This was my last ramble for this jam. Thanks to everyone for participating, making things interesting and letting me see their own creations.

Soul's Post-Mortem

Man...it's certainly been one hell of a journey. I think in retrospect, we could've reduced our scope a bit, but we did just about manage to get it done in time. That's worth celebrating, right?

Anyways, I'm going to keep this short, since you can see a lot of the dev troubles by looking over the previous log. Hope that's okay!

The Stuff That Went Right

Having never done actual games development before, I wasn't entirely sure how much I would like it. Overall, though, I definitely had fun, and I think Aera did, too ^^

GitHub

Aera showed me how to use GitHub early on, and I swear, there's no way we would've released on time without it. Definitely recommended for others in game dev!

The Writing

I figure you're always the worst critic of your own work, but still, I'd say I'm pretty proud of what I did with the writing. It's nothing too mind-blowing, but I think it has some good funny moments, and the novelty of the plot might help carry it for some people. I wish I had time to add a few more scenes, but now the jam's over, I can do that at my leisure :>

The Art

I have some major self-confidence issues when it comes to my art, but I was surprised at my own ability to consistently pump out the art we needed. Aera did some of the item sprites and such too (I can't take all the credit), but I'll give myself a pat on the back for pushing my way through it.

The Coding (Mostly)

I think it was pretty few and far between that Aera had trouble with the code—anything that came up he tended to work out pretty fast. I'll leave him to detail that part, though ^^

The Stuff That Went Wrong

Scope

Realistically, I think it would have been more sensible to cut one of the dungeons, or maybe even two of them. As it stands, we were really cutting it close...

Music

I really wasn't expecting this one, but getting the music to work right was a pain in the ass. The actual tracks were fine (I'd planned to use PeriTune from the beginning), but Ren'Pys method of managing audio is really, really odd. When I was trying to implement quieter music during dialogue in the dungeons, I really wanted to rip my hair out.

Pixel Art

The main VN art is...okay, but I think my own pixel art could use a lot of practice. I mean, sure, this is my first time doing any major bit of pixel art ever, but I'm still not really happy with what I came up with. I'll be working on replacing some of the jankier sprites when I can.

Whenever I Had to Do Any Coding

Also known as 'Soul breaks something, then cries to Aera about how broken it is'. Oops!

Closing Comments

It's been a great experience taking part in this jam, and I think I owe that to the community! Everyone has been awfully sweet, and I'm really looking forward to playing everyone's games.

And uh, for anyone who's been following this dev log in earnest, thank you so very much. Your comments have really given me the motivation to keep going ^^

Anyway, that's about all from me, at least for now. Take care!

- Soulwithlife