Some behind scene during the creation of The Ghost's Call

Hi, This is Saitoki!

Thank you to everyone who played the game! I had a great time making this project, and would like to talk a bit about the making of this game.

This contain some spoilers, so if you are interested in playing the game and haven’t  yet, maybe play it first. It's  short !

1, The scenario:

This time I decided to go with something simple to actually finish a Spooktober project. It's partially inspired by Elias's Ordinary Night, where I took some important plot points from. There’s  also the cameo of the boys from Offline Metting, who I used as smoke screen.  

Then I have to talk about Hardship Of a Vampire,  the main game of this spinoff.  All the side characters  and locations appeared in The Ghost's Call actually should have been introduced in the main game. Unfortunately,  I have been on hiatus for a year and haven’t been able to make any advance on the main game. Fortunately, I would have to redraw all of them if I actually  made earlier progress on main game due to jam rule (lol). 

The script was surprisingly easy to write. I had to make a quick intro on both LIs because I already did the full intro in the main game. It kinda made their presence feel weak compared to the side characters,  but there's not much I can do about it,

The Robert  introduction is not so hard because  he haven’t  been introduced yet. I would have to copy part of the introductory into the main game extended demo actually.  I might later made a leaner version of The Ghost's Call after the full main game, or at least the extended demo is out.

The script took like a week of writing on and off. Which is a good record for me. And I'm forever grateful to Ebi-hime, who helped editting the game for me or it won't be nearly as presentable.

2. The Art

Art is my favorite part of making VN. Too much art could be a pain though, especially  when I have to make everything from scrath in a momth due to jam rule. 

Sprites: I decided to draw the boys in different poses and turning to different  direction compared to the main game. After all, I could totally reuse them as alternative pose in main game (yay). I actually liked Oliver new sprite a lot and might use it in main game often . Robert is actually the only new character  here and drawing him was quite painless, too. It took me about two weeks to draw all sprites (first week was sketching and script writing). Managing sprites variants is quite a pain, thought, like the wet version of Oliver and Leo.

BG: My least favorite but they are needed. BG often cover a lot of space in the VN and my possessive artist nature want me to draw all of it. So I did. A lot of shortcuts have been used during the creation of the BGs, however. I utilized every brushes, textures I could get my hand on and relied a lot on the perspective ruler.  Setting up ruler in CSP is a bit tricky but totally worth it.

A rough draft of every BG. They are quite illegible.

A time lapse of the river BG. What was used: perspective ruler, CSP building brush, foliage and grass brushes.

3. The CG

It's certainly my favorite step in any VN project. Drawing CG is fun! I would make a cg flip book game if i had infinite time. Unfortunately with my day job, it's  not possible  so I gotta settle for less. I still kinda overscoped a bit and added a bit more CG than the initial plan. Still it's  fun. Took me about 2 weeks to finish rendering all the CG. By then it was like 27 of October. Some  initial CG drafts, I like to sketch all of them in one big canvas first because it's fun seeing everything being formed :3

 4, Music and Coding

I bought quite a bit of stock music from various source and keep them in a library folder. I reused a few track that I used in main game and Elias's Ordinary night because they was suitable.  Took me 1 day to pick music and  do all the basic Renpy coding. Renpy is my savior i could never get the game done on time without it.

Mini games: I actually  took a speed study on image map to actually  have point and click section and Cat petting  mini game. Yes this long term Renpy user have never used image map before, outrageous! And once I realized how simple it is, I regreted not learning it before, a lot! Took me 1 day to get everything working! It was 29 Oct, time to submit!

But then, the next day after submission,  I had a cute CG idea and decided to sketch it! I showed it to Ebi, jokingly said that maybe I can render this CG and use it as an unlockable main menu image. I wasn't serious because i had like 1 night before deadline and not even have an idea how to code that. But then Ebi said it can totally work and provided the code for it, I decided  it was a waste not to do some last minutes grinding,  and that was how that image come about. Oliver is very cute I love him >w<.You can find another timelapse here:

https://bsky.app/profile/saitoki.bsky.social/post/3l76zb2i2bf2u

4, UI and Logo

Because it's  a prequel,  I edited the main game logo with a ghost theme. The UI was a minimally re skinned Renpy Easy GUI by Fenirks, another of my savior. As a solo dev it was hard for me to concentrate on everything,  so  I kind  of go easy on myself with the GUI.

To be honest, it was the first one month jam that I actually  went all out from the start date (terrible me usually procrastination until the last week). A weekly to do list was immensely helpful for me and I'm  very happy with the result. It's not perfect,  but even if I can redo it all over again, I probably won't  be able to do it better than this with the amount of free time I have. It was a great test to see how far my productivity  can go!