Hi! Today, I wanted to share some pieces of advice since I saw a lot of the participants never joined any jam before. So, congrats on trying to make your first visual novel, and what an honour it is for us to host the jam which will welcome, we hope, the first games of so many flourishing talents! But I also hope these pieces of advice can also be good reminders for veteran devs!

So, this post will be structured as follows:

• Scope of work
• Solo dev or team?
• General Quality of Life advice for your visual novel
• Free online resources!

So, feel free to only consider the points that might be relevant to you! Let's get started:

Scope of work

As tempting as it is to release the game of your dreams and your magnum opus right on the spot, a first thing to realise is that it is not always possible to release a game in 3 months. This is even more true if it is your very first game, since you need to figure out a long of things more experienced devs don't have to! Also, remember that more experienced devs estimate better what work they can produce in a specific amount of time.

Does that mean you should give up on that very specific dream 200k-word project you've had? Well, I don't think so, but you can release a demo, a prototype, a v-slice, call it whatever you want, but basically, a glimpse of it! But of course, if you haven't figured out a project yet, I encourage you to try your hand at a shorter project: you'll get the satisfaction of having completed a full-game and it will teach you a lot of things to apply to bigger projects!

But now, what does a short project look like? Well, I know a lot of VN devs made their debut with the recent O2A2 VN Jam (a game jam about producing VNs less than 1000-words long!), so feel free to explore some entries (and to rate them 5 stars of course, support the devs!!!!!!!!!) to see how they used the restrictions to make meaningful narrative experiences! And if you want to play fairy tale-themed games to get some inspiration, I'll recommend checking last year’s entries for the jam!

Of course, for Once Upon A Time VN Jam, you are not expected to make your game with only one sprite, one background, one music track and in less than 1,000 words, but keep in mind that you don't want to overwork yourself and that fairy tales were short stories, since they are meant to be told rather than written: you can do something short which is in-theme!

Regarding the scope of work, other things are to take into consideration: the more sprites, the more work, the more CGs, the more work (admittedly, it's less work for the dev, but more for the artist), the more music tracks, the more work!

Now, if you lack ideas that could be executed in a short game, here is a non-exhaustive list of things you might consider:

• rewriting of an iconic fairy tale scene (Little Red Riding Hood reaching her grandma's house and meeting the wolf there, disguised as her good old granny)
• an epistolary game (for example, Cinderella writing a letter to her step-mother after having left to go live in the Prince's castle; it would also let you explore the NVL format, which we rarely see nowadays in VNs)
• two characters from different tales complaining about their fates (if you want to make it on the funnier side, give a listen to "Agony", from Into the Woods! If you're a real OG, here is the Brodaway version, and I cannot help but share this very... special but honestly hypnotising British one; or instead make something sadder, which is definitely possible, especially when I think of the representation of women in fairy tales)
• a game about some sort of meta-author in a kitchen trying to find the perfect recipe for a fairy tale, and all the ingredients are reference to other fairy tales
• a conflict between the Grimm brothers fighting over whom their tales belong to
• a game about a child (or a grown-up you do you) meeting the sandman because they fail to sleep
• a princess has been waiting for her knight in shining armor in a tower for years (you can make it on the funnier side, like this Shrek the musical song; or give instead your character a strong desire for freedom, like in this deleted Tangled song which happens to be my favourite song of all time)
• two young people meeting in a ballroom and falling in love with each other (or not; of course, we think Cinderella here, and I think "Ten Minutes Ago" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's version (I put you the 2013 version because I find it most romantic, but it wouldn't be me if I didn't put the Julie Andrews version too), but also "Shall We Dance" from The King and I, for a different mood and to give you a reference which isn't a fairy tale-like story for once)
• you play as Bluebeard's wife who just discovered the corpses of all your predecessors in his closet; he surprises you and you have to negociate for your life by pretending it was an accident (if you would like to make something more horrific or yandere-like)
• you are a storyteller telling fairy tales to children, pretending to have lived them, but a child starts questioning the veracity of your stories...

Of course, you can mix ideas, adapt them etc.; I don't pretend those are perfect or should be used as they are, but if it can be a framework, then I'll be happy! Some of these ideas could definitely be longer games, so if you’re interested in one of them, feel free to release a demo for this jam!

But now, if we're talking scope of work, something we have to talk about is also...

Solo dev or team?

So, of course, a good way to handle bigger-scope projects is to work as a team, rather than all alone. The main difficulty would be, first, to find teammates and then to direct the team.

To find teammates, there isn't any miracle; but in general, I think having a well-put document explaining what you want is a good thing to have. If you need an example or a template, here is the one I made for one of my visual novels, When The Wind Blew You Away. Voice Acting can be a bit different, and here is the document I wrote for another one of my games, The Daughters of the Sun. Feel free to share it on social media (twitter should be your best bet as there are a lot of different talents there, despite the platform being broken)! But don't forget to use the hashtag #OUATVNJam, I will make sure to retweet you!

You can also use other websites: CastingCallClub is primarily made for VA (so you should consider it if you intend to have voice acting in your game, despite the platform not being the most ergonomic in my opinion), but you can use it to recruit artists, writers and programmers too! You can also put an announce on the LemmaSoft forum (being able to create an account will require you to go to a discord server though).

Talking of Discord servers, maybe you can try finding VAs or artists in relevant Discord servers, although I've never experienced finding artists on an art Discord server myself.

One thing you can use is also the community tab of this game jam, in which you actually are if you're reading this! So don't hesitate!

Now, you could also work as a solo dev: it spares you the whole recruiting process or the struggles of finding people who will deliver your vision as expected, but it also puts more pressure on your own shoulders: you'll often need to take care of everything yourself (art, GUI, writing, code, music), so you should really think twice at the scope of your project to keep it manageable. Of course, there always are online resources, but we're going to list them later!

General Quality of Life advice

Now, there are just a few minor flaws I see in VNs, especially from newer devs. That's why I want to bring your attention to these issues.

First, and I'm talking to people like me, who are mostly writers, rather than artists and think: "Well, what matters most is the story!" because that's how we experience VNs... NO. No, the story is as equally important as the visuals. First, the visuals are what is going to attract players, but even so, visual novel-telling is different from novel-telling. If you really don't care about visuals and want your story to only be focused on text, perhaps consider exploring an interactive fiction format? And I see you guys coming: even in NVL format, visuals are important (as wonderfully illustrated by the fantastical VN On Mount Ségou is; I wholeheartedly recommend it).

Then, the main thing you want to keep in mind when designing your GUI is READIBILITY!!! For instance, this isn't acceptable:

So, make sure your menu items and your text is always readable!

Also, and here, I'm targetting Ren'Py devs: change the default font. Admittedly, Deja Vu Sans isn't that horrible of a font, but if your GUI gets very specific, you would like the font to match! For instance, I see so many games with very fancy and elegant GUI using it rather than opting for a serif font, and what a shame! Admittedly, it's a detail, but hey, quality of life is in the details!

The following advice is obvious, but I'll always remind it: puncutation isn't optional and, although a few typos here and there rarely bother (I mean, it would be hypocritical from me to mock typos), spelling mistakes being too frequent really is detrimental to the quality of your game. There are tools online to check your spelling (like Scribens), so feel free to use them if you know you have trouble with that!

Last advice: if you use a pre-made Ren'Py GUI, do not use their options.rpy file, keep your default one, or else, your save directory is going to be shared with all the games using the GUI. Another trick, if for some reason you really want to use their options.rpy file, is to open it, go to the line "define config.save_directory" (in general, it's line 146 of options.rpy), and to change the directory.

Online Resources

When you don't have the financial or material means to work with a team, online resources are god-sent, and there are a lot of them on itch! But itch now has one problem which didn't exist even one year ago... the website is now flooded with AI-generated content. So be careful! Now, you just have to go to the assets page and to search for what you want! For instance, use the visual novel tag for visual novel-specific assets (and you can use several tags for research, so you can combine visual novel + sprite or visual novel + background), so feel free to browse! Of course, you can find assets elsewhere, and CloudNovel is an excellent website to find sprites and backgrounds. And if we talk about backgrounds, how not to mention UncleMugen! Admittedly, his backgrounds are modern, but who knows what idea you have in your bright mind! In general, if you're not afraid of photo-editing, you can try to take a look at websites offering copyright-free pictures (Pexels, Pixabay, Freepik...).

Also, for music, I wholeheartedly recommend dova-syndrome! You'd like to explore more (pixabay also proposes music tracks), but dova-syndrome is a solid one. Feel free to consult the Free Music Archive, and have a thought for classical musics who are now in the public domain (Bach, Mozart and alike). For sound effects, pixabay is at it again, but Zapsplat is a very rich website!

And I guess that's it! Phew, I hope I didn't make it too stressful and that this post might be helpful instead! Also, if anyone wants to share some more free resources for devs to use, feel free to post them below! But let's all remember the main priority is to have fun! So just make a game that'll make you happy!