Posted October 13, 2025 by Joey
#devlog #postmortem #game development #jam retrospective #Spooktober #Visual Novel
Hey, Joey here.
This is part 1 of my postmortem devlog, focusing on the pre-jam planning phase. Part 2 will be the jam itself, and part 3 will be the post-jam phase, from the end of the jam to writing these devlogs.
My roles in this project were the project lead, writer, and programmer. In this post, I go into thorough detail on everything leading up to the jam, and give insight on my thoughts as well.
This was made to give both an understanding of the work, and insight on what it's like, participating in a big game jam like this.
Around Aug 10 is when I decided to participate in the Spooktober jam. I was looking at jams that had a lot of people, and I could focus on writing without having to do much else, and decided on this one.
I wanted to put my next project in front of the largest amount of people possible for two main reasons: I've never gotten much feedback on my writing, and I wanted anyone to see if anyone would like my writing and follow, so in the future I can publish what I write to a guaranteed audience, without needing a jam for visibility.
The reality of how that went, will be in the post-jam section.
I recently started writing on June 1st, but I had only done Touhou Project fanfiction writing, including a 6.2k word VN, and an unpublished, unedited story that is about 20k words. It's crazy to think that I went from a short VN like that to the 17k words in this one.
I don't plan on linking back to my fan stuff, but as a bonus to those who are reading this, you can look up AzureBurn49 if you're curious, that's the name I wrote it under.
I always found it easier to use already-existing characters, but for the sake of being a better writer, I had to be more original and used this jam to force myself to make my own characters, which ended up working out very well, I'm comfortable with it now, it just feels normal. I don't even want to do fanfiction anymore.
The bulk of the brainstorming happened on Aug 12. I was on a trip, and did most of my brainstorming at a local park in that area on my phone.
For some reason I tend to brainstorm and generate ideas best on my phone, not on my computer. The computer works better for structured writing.
The main reason, is that I like to walk while thinking and generating ideas, the phone lets me stay mobile, though it comes at the cost of making a lot of typos thanks to my fat fingers.
I don't like physically writing because it's slow, my handwriting is bad, and I like to be able to go back and write in earlier parts of the text. If I could grab and move words in a notebook, I would write physically, but unfortunately that isn't the reality.
I'll try to walk through my brainstorming thought process as best I can below. It's going to get dense, prepare yourself.
When thinking about the game, the first thing my minded drifted to was Corpse Party. Never played it but watched Youtubers play it 5+ years ago. What I like about it, is the environment and isolation from the outside, with looming possibility of death at every moment. I think that carried over into my game pretty well.
My first idea, which made it to the end, is exploring a family bunker with mystery around it, that has that previously described looming death feel, and your parents told you to never go in there. I planned on making it a group of friends going with you at this point. Now I needed a why, and so I decided that you are looking for your little sister.
At this point, what I've got is a group of friends looking for protagonist's sister in forbidden family bunker. That sounds kinda generic. Then I had a fun idea. What if the player finds their sister, but it's not their sister? I wanted to do that, it sounded fun.
To execute that, I decided to make a twin sister, and have that be part of why the bunker was forbidden. Then I had the idea, The real sister you came for, can be the danger. I don't want the bunker to supernaturally kill you, I prefer the idea of making it seem that way, but in reality a person was in control, which will be her. Having her hidden in a tunnel system where she can watch anyone in the bunker at all times was my final idea.
I also decided to make the family situation messed up, and have it so Lily and her father were alone down there, and that father was the real father of them all. The father the protagonist grew up with wasn't his real father, and I left the mother ambiguous.
Then I had this sadistic idea, make Lucy kill that father when she goes down there, and feel heavy regret about it. Now, I can make this into a tragedy and psychological horror as I planned with guilt to dive into.
Around this point, I decided that making the player go alone would be better, it makes it more solitary and personal, since only members of the family are involved.
Now, I had a good idea of the overall plot: You enter the old family bunker alone. Then, you encounter the twin sister, believing it's the sister you knew at first, while the bunker seems alive and trying to kill you, then you discover the hidden tunnel system and the sister you came for.
Now I had to decide how to actually write it. I left a lot of this for when the jam started, but the main idea I had at this point is you explore the bunker with Lily (the twin), and you build 2 things with her that influences the endings: Trust between you two, and her empathy towards Lucy (the sister you knew).
Trust determines whether she goes to find Lucy with you, and empathy determines if Lily views Lucy as a long-lost sister she likes, or a murderer she hates. The trust system is in the final game, but empathy was scrapped, I couldn't figure out a way to influence Lily's view without it feeling like the player is telling her how to think, which I don't want. I probably could've with more time, but the jam time constraint forced it out. The game was written as if empathy is high.
There were originally 3 main endings influenced by a long, branching conversation you have with Lucy, and whether Lily comes with you, or has empathy for Lucy, changes how your final decision goes. I followed this main idea in the final game but ended up with a lot more endings.
The final idea I had at this stage, was the journal system. It is supposed to be a fourth wall break, that records not only what the player does, but other stuff like when they save, load, change settings, etc. I didn't end up implementing that because of other development priorities, but I should, I doubt it would take long.
That got wordy, but I hope you now have a good idea of the idea generation phase. Here's a screenshot of the doc I made at the end of this process.
I had a lot of fun brainstorming it, though it was a little challenging as I've never written horror. However, what I did have experience with is diving into deeper psychological themes, which led me to the psychological horror/tragedy angle. It might also be obvious when reading, considering how underdeveloped the death scenes were compared to the rest.
Now that I've developed my idea, I needed a team. In the previous jam I made my first VN for, I worked solo. It turned out lame, I was happy with the writing, but I didn't have time to add art, it was just basic colored boxes. Also, I used Godot, which made things harder than it needed to be.
I have plenty of team experience from various things like past game jams, a computer science year-long group senior project, working on a game with friends, etc. But it's been almost 2 years since I've done something non-solo, and I've never been the writer, only a programmer. It made me nervous, as I had to actually write well to not sink the team. I also didn't have writing confidence, since I've hardly gotten feedback. Although, that tiny amount was positive. But still, it can be hard to tell if people genuinely think something is good or just being encouraging and positive.
At this point, the competitive pitch was a few days away, and I made that my priority. I've never pitched anything before, and I've never been good at presenting things. Also, when I went into writing, I did focus on it a lot and ended up isolating myself socially, I wasn't very used to talking at this point. Nobody even knows that I've begun focusing on writing. So, I was very nervous with all of that considered, but I forced myself to think of it as gaining some experience. I very strongly considered not doing it many times.
In the days leading up to it, I didn't prepare much. I constantly was stressing over it, but procrastinated preparing anyway. I am both not good, and dislike doing those kinds of things.
Also, I had a decision to make. I was in the middle of a trip. It was a weird trip, I intentionally went away from home because I wanted to focus on writing and I thought a change in environment would help, but I ended up hating that place, it didn't help at all. I also didn't have a good setup to present, my laptop's microphone is the worst microphone ever made.
I already didn't want to be there anymore, and so I made the decision in the evening to take the 3 hour drive home. I had to pack up everything, let them know I'm leaving, and got home at midnight, the night before the pitch. I really started to hate that place so I was happy to be gone, but I definitely wished I left earlier. Oh well.
I woke up, and it was time for the pitch. I would write what I did between waking up and the pitch itself, but I forgot. I assume I just looked over my pitch, stuff like that.
My plan for it was to simply run through the pitch I wrote, deliver it as clearly as possible, and just get through it. I already had a well-developed idea, even if it's in a messy brainstorm doc that would be a nightmare for someone other than me to read. It was annoying that even though I was only trying to think of it as a practice, I was nervous anyway.
Eventually, it was my turn, and I did it. FINALLY. It felt good. I was the first person to present that didn't make a powerpoint, but whatever. And the best part is that 4 people actually messaged me, liking the idea. One of these people was a VA/Voice director, I wasn't expecting that. I had 0 experience with voice stuff and never considered it before this. It took me a while to respond to them, as I desperately wanted to just relax for a while, and eat since I was starving. I wonder why I didn't eat before the pitch.
Later in the day, I thanked them, told them I'd write and share the GDD before making any decisions, and get back to them. And for that VA, simply said I'll consider it.
It's hard to emphasize exactly how good it felt to have gotten through that, and accomplish something that had me so stressed. Up next, was to write that GDD.
The day after the pitch, I ended up slacking on that GDD. But the next morning, what I did was set a 2 hour timer and just write. That worked extremely well, I finished the whole thing in that time block. I couldn't recommend setting timers like that enough, it is my number 1 productivity hack.
I then sent it off to the people who reached out. Unfortunately, none of them responded to that. Did they find another group, or hate the GDD? I'll never know.
On Aug 18th, same day I finished the GDD, I made my recruitment post. It was quiet for a few days but on the 21st, 2 people reached out, and are now the sound designer, and sprite artist. D.ray and Apririnn.
I felt good after that, the major points of the game are now covered. D.ray mentioned voice acting and voice directing experience, and I was already thinking about it thanks to the VA that reached out. Since I didn't think it would add much to my workload since I had a voice director, I ultimately decided to give voice acting a go.
I then prepped for the next meet and greet coming up on Aug 23rd, mainly looking for more artists and the VAs, and optionally, a programmer and editor.
I was far less nervous, but still the performance anxiety comes in. I got one dm afterwards from a VA. We didn't have a VA casting doc yet, I didn't even know what that was until that day, so I just let them know we're working on a doc and will send when ready.
Coming up with the audition lines for the casting doc was a little hard since I haven't written a word of dialogue yet. It takes a little time to get character voices down. I wasn't sure how they spoke yet. It's interesting how that works, because now after writing the game, I feel like I could easily write an endless amount of extra content, perfectly matching their personalities. The fact I find that interesting probably shows how inexperienced I am. Also, the absolute hardest part, was drawing a reference sketch of the characters. My brain is very word-based, not visual, so it's always a challenge to share my ideas that way. And I suck at drawing. I'll attach the sketches here.
I'm honestly proud of them considering my poor drawing skills. And I think it's hilarious how much better I drew Lucy (Sis #1) than Lily.
We got the doc done and made the voice recruiting announcement. We got a surprisingly large amount of auditions, around 35 I believe. I wasn't the one that handled that part, so I don't know the exact number. We waited until the jam started to make our decision on who.
Things were quiet until the last pitch, on Aug 30th. During this time period, I was constantly thinking about the game, I really wanted to make something good. I thought about it too much. It was too early to start making the game but the thought of it was kind of consuming my life. I felt like I should be doing things towards the success of the game, but I couldn't think of anything to do, so it was kind of torturous. There were things that I could've done like starting a twitter, posting about the game, etc. But I didn't do any of them, I put it off. It's funny how constantly thinking about something can actually make me procrastinate and do less. But in my defense, there wasn't anything that I absolutely needed to do.
During this time D.ray made a post on the jam page. I only made mine in the DevTalk discord. Nobody responded yet, but some did later.
I also made a post on Lemmasoft for the jam, and had one artist reach out. I turned them down, as they seemed young and inexperienced without a portfolio, and their art was not horror-like at all. But, I do wish I let them on. Their art was charming, and they could've definitely contributed with things like the jam page or menu art. I was just thinking about the backgrounds and CGs, but their style could've worked elsewhere. This was poor judgement on my part.
Now, it was the morning of the final pitch, Aug 30th. Before the pitch, I went and messaged 2 background artists that made posts, as I really wanted to fill that role and not have to deal with open source backgrounds, since I think finding them is a pain. When the pitch came up, I actually wasn't that nervous this time, I just read my thing and that was it.
An artist from the pitch reached out, and one of the people I messaged responded too. I felt that the one I messaged fit better, so I invited them and turned the person who reached out down. I regret this now. I learned from this jam, and a random comment someone made on discord, that there's no such thing as too many artists. Also, this background artist didn't end up making the backgrounds in the end. I will go into depth on this when I talk about the jam itself.
The day before the jam, D.ray's post got us an editor, Ellie Grace. I didn't expect to have one, but it was more than welcome. A second pair of eyes on my writing is something I've never had. A programmer also reached out, but they didn't end up contributing.
The final thing I did before the jam started, is make a timeline. I wont get heavy into the details, but the idea was to finish the game by the 23rd, do play-testing and work on the jam page until the 28th, then be fully ready to submit at that point. This did not happen at all, as I worked up to the deadline and still didn't finish what I want to finish. But still, having that timeline helped for my writing pace. Without that, it could've been a disaster. If I took longer to write than I did, it would've been a catastrophe.
This turned out super long, but I hope it was insightful. Next post: the jam itself. I plan on posting it later this week.
Please let me know if you have any questions, I would love to discuss my experience in this jam and elaborate on anything you found interesting or relatable.
And any feedback on how this was written is welcome too, I've never done something like this before and I'd like to know how to make future devlogs as best as possible.