Posted October 02, 2023 by saitoki
Hi, this is Saitoki!
I'm excited to finally announce this project. Hardship Of a Vampire had been one of my longer, more ambitious ideas that i spent a lot of time planning. The outline is fully completed with over 40 scenes for each character routes.
The story will have two love interest: Leo and Elias. You might have already seen Elias in my other game, Elias's Ordinary Night. Elias was actually first designed for this Vampire project, but i thought i would totally fit to make a short game about him for a jam theme. There will be a few characters from my other short games make appearances here too, like John from my haunted house mini series. And it won't be just for cameo, their roles won't be minor!
Development process of this VN had been bumpy to say the least. First, i got seriously sick starting from the 3rd day of Spooktober and that put me out of commission for almost 2 weeks. By the time i recovered enough, there was only a little over 10 days left for the jams, so the scope of the demo was cut by half. It wasn’t supposed to be that short. The beginning of the game introduces many locations and characters, and i underestimated the bulk of work just for the demo. I'm sure they will be helpful for development of the later part of the game, though!
My UI artist also got sick and only managed to send me some draft files, so it was a lot of last minutes adjustment and modding to make it fit the stock UI. I can’t count how many times stock renpy UI had saved me on last days of jamming!
All in all, I'm glad how the project turned out despite all the setbacks. Hope you will enjoy playing the demo!