I’ve been waiting to write this until I finished rating all the entries but now it’s time :)
Let me start with a bit of a sappy love letter to the jam itself. Multiple people have already said it but the Velox jams have this cozy little community around it that feels really special. This was only my second Velox jam but I felt the same surge of inspiration and motivation as last time. It’s a place to create something purely for the love of the genre and for the love of creating. Despite the ranking and the voting, it doesn’t feel like a competition. It feels like an oportunity to put something out there and actually have other people look at it, and to then give the same appreciation back.
Playing thorugh all the games has been such a blast and I’m so impressed with what people managed to accomplish in just 10 days. So many amazing VNs, many that will stay with me for a long time for sure! I have this deep love for passion projects and every single game truly felt like a labour of love. Every game also gave me something I want to work into my own future projects. I just want to create more now raahhhh!!!
As for my own entry, I might write a proper devlog later, we’ll see. But I will share some throughts in short! I thought 10 days would make me less stressed after I managed to get through Formido without crunching… I was wrong. 10 days felt so long that I started putting things off and went into procrastination mode. Somehow I still managed everything I wanted to put in the game (even a simple CG that I almost scrapped from the plan due to lack of time!). My biggest issue this time around was the writing. I wrote most of the script in the first 2 days and then spent a week not knowing how I wanted the game to end… I wrote the finishing lines (of the good end) in the last hours of the jam, when everything else was already done. I’m still not sure I like how I wrote it, but at least it is done!
I also tried a lot of new things for this jam! After Formido, where most of my focus was on the narrative, I wanted to focus on art direction. I had a lot of fun designing the UI and trying to make everythingn look cohesive. Pixel art was another new experience this project. While I have done simple pixel graphics once before for a game, high resolution pixel art was a new world for me, and it was so fun!! I did struggle a bit getting the art to show up nicely in ren’py at first but once I managed to put it all together, I was really satisfied. I’m honestly so happy with how the graphics turned out for this game and can’t wait to work on something similar again in the future!
I think that’s all for me! Thank you Robobarbie and Allie Vera for hosting once again! And thanks to all my fellow participants for making this jam so awesome! I hope to see you all around for the next Velox <3