Spooktober-24 Project -  Postmortem

So, let's get this out of the way and rip the bandaid off: If you've been watching the Tea and Torment twitter account, you probably know that I was planning to release a project for spooktober game jam. However, as you can see from this post, that's not likely to happen this year. 

So what happened, exactly? How did I go from being seemingly well-prepared in August to... well, spending a week on the one BG you see as the cover? The short answer is: "I did not manage my time very well, which was an accumulating debt that I couldn't pay off." The longer answer... well, let's go one by one...

Scope

Officially, I had this idea around the time of last year's spooktober. It seemed small and manageable, at the time the story concept was just: "house sitting where every time the protagonist leaves the room, the girlfriend feels like more time has passed than what protagonist experiences." 

And, the story I intended to write did still follow those same beats. But, in my ambition, I expanded the story and concept. That was probably a mistake because it meant that the assets I needed to create had also increased.  What I mean is that this story, in its original concept, probably would've had just a few interior shot BGs. But now... it was planned to have several exterior shots, some interior shots, CGs, etc. The character sprites took about a week to come up with. In hindsight, I should've really tried to scale back the scope. 

The BGs should've also taken a week to make but... I got stuck on the colors. My linework is fine, but my coloring leaves a lot to be desires.

Artwise, after finishing the sprites, I should've placed some premade BGs and moved on. But... dammit, my pride wouldn't allow it. Or rather, I couldn't summon up the will to do it. I kept trying to approach the BG at different angles but it always came back to the same problem: "I don't know how to render this." I can put the base colors on, but I don't know what to do afterwards.  How could that be though? I'm supposed to be a BG artist, right?

The thing is, if you look at my body of work, a lot of the BGs I've had to draw have been interior shots or of manmade structures. This BG required an exterior shot (which takes more work than an interior shot) and one that utilized nature (foliage, grass, trees, shrubbery, etc). So what's the problem then? 

Manmade structures are easier to draw because the majority are cube-shaped. 

Look around where you are right now. You probably see.... a lot of cube-shaped things, right? Let's say I have to draw a cafe, it's mostly just cubes. You can get really far drawing BGs, if you learn how to draw a cube. Nature is different though. Nature is filled with different shapes and structures, because of that... it's a little more difficult for me to visualize. I can draw a cube any day of the week no problem. Other shapes.... less confident in, less practiced in. And while, normally, this would be a good opportunity to increase my skill... testing new stuff is not always the best idea when you're under a deadline. 

So in short, what went wrong with the scope? Overthinking. Because I wanted to win the prize, it lead me to wanting to make the best project I could. Which... lead to a lot of choice paralysis and lots of trial and error.

Pre-Production

For a game jam, or really anything with a tight deadline, pre-production is vital to success. I think my failure here is one of the two major things that lead to this project being placed on hiatus. So, let's get into it and what went wrong. 

When August hit, I first started filling out character sheets and outlining the story. So the next step should've been storyboarding and character design drafting and BG planning. Ya know, the assets in the project. I didn't end up doing that because...

There's an idiom I recall hearing: "He who tries to catch two rabbits at once fails to catch either." Or something along those lines. Applied here, it basically means that: "if you try to focus on too many things at once, you wind up not accomplishing anything." There's only so much a single human can do when under pressure. The reason I bring that up is because during pre-production, I... wanted to do a few things.

1. I wanted to release DreamEater's 1.2 update so I could submit it to sunofes. I did do that, but if you read the devlog for that, you'll see that I didn't get to do everything I wanted for that and also had to rush the title image. I mean, don't get me wrong, it turned out great. But there's still more work to be done with that one.

2. There's a writing contest that I wanted to enter, so I spent some time in August working on that as well. The status of that is... not in a great state either. I may have to go with my backup plan for that, but that's a whole other topic.

Overall, I was being pulled in 3 different directions and didn't manage my time effectively.

The Production Itself

We know what went wrong in pre-production, and I briefly touched on what went wrong with the scope.  So what happened with the production itself? The simplest answer I can give is: "Time management and indecision."

What I mean is, had my daily work schedule been: wake up - work - go to sleep - work again.

Then I might've gotten further along. But, what ended up happening was that I couldn't stay focused on the tasks at hand, and a lot of time was not utilized efficiently. I was doing great for coding, character art, but... failed in regards to writing and BG art. 

In past projects, I would finish the story first before doing other stuff. However, with my menhera jam project, while I did finish writing the story, a lot of other aspects in the production were rushed or didn't make it in time, which is why it's currently in a pre-alpha state.

A big reason the menhera jam project failed was because I put my entire focus on the story, but didn't use my downtime to work on other aspects of the production. 

For this project, I wanted to try to avoid that outcome. My goal was to write the story up until I got stuck on a part, then work on the art. In a perfect world, a more focused mind would've been able to do that.

I was not able to do that though since this was a system I'd never tested before, which meant that I, contrary to being more productive, was less productive.

I think, the way I could've dealt with this is to lay out an action plan. Block out specific times to work on something, and prevent myself from getting distracted by other things unrelated to game dev stuff.

The other [problem was my indecision on certain matters. I touched on my difficulties with background art earlier, but it didn't just extend to that.  I also had difficulties with writing, in particular...

One issue I had was in regards to the protagonist. See, in the original concept, I had wanted the protagonist and Setsuna to be player-determined. This way people can play the game as a gay couple, a lesbian couple, a straight couple, or whatever. However, this didn't really pan out for Setsuna. But, I still wanted something like that for protagonist at least, however... that lead to a certain problem when I introduced a dialogue choice wheel

To explain the problem... normally, I make Set Characters as my protagonists. That means that my protagonists are also characters in their own right, they're not meant to be reflective of the audience, you might not even have anything in common with them. That's a stark difference from a blank slate character, which is what protagonist seemed to be. See, with a blank slate character, a lot of things are left vague or unanswered or generic because the purpose is for whoever is playing to see themselves as that character.

These holes in their characterization made them very difficult to write, and also I had to make sure their character was still somewhat consistent with whatever dialogue choices the player made. In an ideal setting, I'd have done what Dragon Age 2 did, in that if you choose certain dialogue types multiple times, your Hawke's non-chosen dialogue will reflect that persona. But, I did not know how to code that in. Which brings me to...

The coding itself.

Now, this is actually my most ambitious coding project. A lot of my VNs are kinetic VNs due to time constraints and my own limitations. But my coding skills has accelerated GREATLY in the past few months, so I thought I could handle doing something a little more difficult. Technically, my proof of concepts worked and were ready to go. However, while the framework existed, they were not ready for implementation, and I wasted a lot of days trying to streamline my process.

What's next?

So, I'm not gonna make it to the deadline. Does that mean the project's dead? No.

It just means that I won't release in the next... 7-8 days.  However, I don't think it'll be ready this year. Mostly because I'll be switching focus to the other projects, and even before I get back to this, there's other VNs that require my attention more.

I do plan to come back to this story and finish it MAYBE by next October at the latest.