3 days late into the jam, I decided to make the devlog.

Team: 

Xian Xian

I'm the writer and  noob coder in Renpy for this visual novel project. But I've been writing since my late teen years. I've been in this jam multiple times so I feel weird talking about myself. I'm a sociology major, literally just graduated with a B.S.  Uh I like magical realist novels, mystery and a little bit of horror.  I'm from a multiracial background and most of my recent writing projects actually have Afro-Chinese or Afro-Latino main characters. My recent project that I put on pause takes place in a sort of cybernoir Chinatown. I like JRPGs and only recently got into visual novels like 2 years ago. I love the medium but I wish there was more in the mystery and horror genres since those are the ones that got me hooked, aka the Zero Escape Series and Banshee's Last Cry. However, I don't really read that much horror and mystery, my only exposure is through movies and video games so I hope I pull off this story well enough, especially since I feel like that's all I ever write these days. My experience in game dev is Twine, I've coded baby html/css and did all that variables and boolean fun stuff. I've tried to learn other engines but college and executive dysfunction got in the way. 

Wispna

I’m the artist for this ren’py project. I’ve always drawn, but began doing art more seriously when I started high school. Now I do digital 2D art on a regular basis, and though my main program is Clip Studio Paint I am also proficient in Sai, GIMP, photoshop. I also have experience with coding, and while most of my expertise is in html and CSS, I know some C# and Python as well. Having made Ren’py games before, though never completing them due to writing hangups, helps me better able to understand what the assets I create need.
I am mixed chinese and caucasian, and enjoy seeing projects that have both eastern and western elements in them. 
I’m mostly a fan of the fantasy genre, but I also enjoy scifi, suspense, mystery, and horror. The games I play most are rpgs, visual novels, and survival games. I really love the art in games, and am hoping both this game jam, and working on a team will help me see a visual novel to its full completion. 

Platform: Renpy

Game Concept

I wrote a summary for this in  a doc and I'm just going to copy and paste it.

"Mellizos (Twins)  is a kinetic visual novel. It tells the tale of Símon Álvarez, a hermetic, unambitious college student who returns to his birthplace, Santa Paulo, after the death of his grandparents. The island is shrouded in dark clouds of pollution and the population is small, which leaves Símon dumbfounded, as it contradicts his blissful memories of childhood innocence and diasporic nostalgia. When Símon meets Luna Garcia, a distant cousin, repressed memories begin emerging and he falls into an obsessive spiral of uncovering more about his home country and his deceased twin brother."

 Mellizos, is a rip of an unfinished twine game I have in a folder that is loosely inspired by the chupacabra which is a mythical creature  that has apparently been seen in Puerto Rico first. You will read a lot of about typical Puerto Rican things like virgin mary statues, brightly colored houses, folktales, and poverty caused by colonialism and imperialism and floods that have caused destruction is mentioned in this story. An eerie thing I just realized while writing this devlog I wrote this story way before Hurricane Maria. My Puerto Rican family is safe, but thinking about the condition of the island is pretty grim. This game's setting and story is heavily inspired by Puerto Rico, it's basically a Caribbean modern folktale about a creature that has been stalking the family after the great flood. After writing the unfinished Twine game, I actually wrote a script for a detective story that takes place on this island in Renpy and then I wrote another side story for that in Twine and god, I wish I can finish one of these stories.

So far for the game making progress:

I have written 3, 839 words and I'm barely even done with the first day of the game. I already feel like going back and adding and fixing stuff because I feel like it's rushed.

These are the sprites of the two main characters,  Símon Álvarez and Luna Garcia by Wispna.

 

I was going to work on music by myself but I've been having tinnitus which means I'm trying to chill with the amount of music flowing in my right ear.  So who knows if I will post something other than word counts and Wispna's art. Uh, this text thing started doing some weird bug that's similar to when you hit the insert key and text you just typed starts getting replaced by the new text you made, so editing and rewriting stuff was a horror. So sorry for the roughness of this post.

2nd Day Entry

Yesterday's Current Word Count: 5,574

Which means I wrote 1,735 words. Funny enough on the first day of the jam, I wrote 1,700 words. Perhaps that should be a daily goal I aim for?

The plot for now is just introducing the house, the inheritance gift, and the cursed rain forest. Pretty soon the climax will come, I usually "feel" when there's something important coming up. Even though I shouldn't, I want to go back and add some stuff.

Here's Wispna with Símon Álvarez's facial expressions

I also tried sketching out an GUI idea. Basically. I'm going to use a free open font called Alice. And I tried attempting to make the logo with like a rosary bead thing. And well I'm not that good at paint.net.

So the menu buttons are on that one side on the left. Just like the New Renpy Default menu. And then on the other side is going to be a vintage TV with a river in the screen. There's a part in the story where  Símon  sits down to watch TV and is introduced to a program about a beautiful green river, but he's incapable of changing the channel. Also what the hell is with itch.io's forum, I can't scroll down, the scroll bar disappeared?

3rd Entry

Yesterday I did some writing but I was feeling really iffy about what I have so far. So I decided to give this game two endings and bring in some choice menus. This will teach me some renpy coding for sure. But also, I feel like writing linear stuff is kind of boring to me as a writer? Ever since I got into writing interactive fiction, I found that writing stories without interaction or choices has become the most difficult thing to me even though it is also the most stressful thing ever. God, I'm weird, I wish I can make up my mind. But the thing is, having more than one ending, having branching in your stories allows more freedom in my opinion. It allows you to explore your story and it gives you more space for that vague idea you had. 

Also I felt like I was getting into a writer's block, but then I remember that this is an adaptation of a older, unfinished story and I forgot parts like exploring caves, shopping at weird stores or eating rice and bean flavored ice cream.  So I'm glad I remembered that because then I would've hit a block. 

Wispna finished the emotions for Luna's sprites