nutta’s Post-mortem
(Guess I’ll be the first person from my team who writes this, so here we go!)
First of all, I have to say that Escape From H1-MA Station is such an ambitious project for a 14-day jam! We planned so many things at first and had to cut the numbers down to make a minimal playable game. (Unfortunately, the game was still submitted late. But on a bright side, our team started quite late as well.)
I was very confident with the engine (RPG Maker MV) at first because I’ve some basic knowledge. But making a visual novel with time-resource managing element was totally a new territory to me. It was challenging, yet entertaining to implement the time-calendar system and build the jobs and crafting system around it.
Since my knowledge about plugins was rather limited, I created most of the game mechanics with RMMV eventing. (The game used many tricks I’ve learned from old gba-era games, like combining some UI with the backgrounds)
The over-world map below was made solely with eventing. ;)
It surprised me that the visual novel part was actually the most time-consuming section of the development. One reason was because the engine was not mainly made for it; I had to put the character sprites and the script into the game sentence by sentence. (All of that worths the taken time though, because many players were impressed by it!) At least now I know how to do it quicker for the next games.
All in all, it was a fun experiment making this game. It also taught me a good lesson about communicating with my teammates, especially when our team was from different timezones across the globe! Using Trello was a good way to keep the team updated and sharing the files on google drive made everything more organized and easy to find, which become crucial when I needed to put everything together.
I hope this post-mortem not only lets me reflect on things happening over the past few weeks, but also interest you to try our jam entry out!