Posted July 31, 2023 by pumpkin spike
Thank you for 300+ plays/downloads! This has been my fourth solo mini-project and the third entry to the kill series. I think it's time to start planning for longer stories...
(Yieien's front design, which I couldn't show in the game lol)
I've been planning this game since around... May? I knew I wanted to do another short story set in this world, but I was running out of short stories. At this point, I have the backstories for most of the main characters planned, but nothing would be very short. The God of Change, Yiein had a story inspired by Beauty and the Beast, which would've been much too long for O2A2. At some point between the months, @high-tea said something along the lines of "Imagine having a shitty boss gets you cursed by a witch, that would suck." And well, the rest was history. 😆The idea came pretty naturally afterwards.
Let's find out why our favorite exorcist chose to become one... (there is no happy ending).
I'll also provide a more proper page on play order for all the games in this series soon, but for now, this collection will give the chronological order.
Writing: For once, an O2A2 project's writing went so smoothly! My first draft was already within 1000 words. Even after editing, I remained under 1000 words. I did have a little trouble when planning the specific curse and how it could've led to the servants being cursed if the Goddess of Wisdom came to save them, but I worked that out after a couple days of musing on the outline.
Art: I actually had more trouble with the art. Although I decided on how the GUI would look early on, I had a difficult time trying to decide if I'd use a sprite + BG, or CG. I was torn between which scene I wanted to show with more art since most of the game would have a white background (to represent a blank wall). It was between the ending or Merritt's conversation with Yiein in the past. Ultimately, I decided to depict the ending since I felt like it'd have a bigger impact.
(...The decision process lol I made a whole floor plan for MC's apartment to try to figure out what should be seen in the CG... and ended up not drawing anything other than a window and a humidifier, haha)
I considered animating the curtains for the CG as well, but when I saw how many layers of overlays I put on top of the image, I just gave up (lol). Other considerations I had was a changing textbox for Merritt when he told his story to have the palace reflected in the glass. However, I got lazy, haha. Which is probably for the better since that would've bent the rules.
Programming: Programming went really smoothly this time since I didn't really try any new tricks. The most difficult thing was making sure the mirror could be positioned properly throughout the game.
Music: I usually struggle with music, so I got really lucky this time! When I was looking for music for my last project, exorcist killing lie, I found a number of tracks I really liked, but didn't fit for the game. I had saved these songs for future projects and lo and behold! The very first one I saved fit this game so perfectly!
So... all in all... This gamejam experience went really well! Thank you again, everyone, for playing my games!