Hello, everyone!  I'm going to keep track of the development of my project on this thread.  Is that okay?  Great.

My submission is called Smart Technology., and it is a short game about a smart house.  It's based off a nightmare I had: I was hired as a housesitter, but the AI running the house saw me as an intruder because no one besides its owner had ever been inside the house before.  I wrestled with the idea for awhile.  Scream Jam game me an excuse to finally make the game!

The game is written in the style of those old choose-your-own-adventure novels.  I used to have a whole shelf of them.  I loved how each book was its own self-contained adventure, with a variety of twists and turns that unfold based off your decisions.  Of course, most of those decisions could and would lead to your grisly end.  Those sometimes were more memorable and fun than the good end!

But RenPy is great for that type of story.  You can easily jump from room to room, unlocking options and endings with the click of a button.  And for me, its easily to organize the program into bits and pieces that correspond to each room of the house.  Good thing, too, or else I'd get lost in my own script!

As for the visuals?  Well, if you guys followed my project during Devtober, then you'll remember that I have issues with my artstyle.  Nothing a little practice can't refine!  But unfortunately, no time for this project.  So I turned to this website, which I had discovered while looking for backgrounds for my Devtober project.  High-quality public domain photos that you can edit however you wish?  SCORE!  I put a black & white filter over each picture that I wanted to use, to give them all a unifying look.  Might go in and add a film grain filter, to REALLY go for that 50's b-movie horror show style.

I'm also using music by Alexander Nakarada and sound effects from Zapsplat.  Two other amazing free resources that I am highly impressed by.

Anyway, yeah, that's basically everything I got done yesterday!  I'm very excited to be putting together this game for Halloween!

...oh, and if anyone's interested, my first commercial game will be releasing November 6th and I'm very excited/nervous about it.

Things have been going pretty smoothly (except for the pain in my dominant typing hand, is that normal?).  Touched up the photos to make them look even more like an old movie.  Found a font that fit the mood better.  Got pretty much all of the rooms except for the last two done.  Played around with locking specific dialogues and choices until they're unlocked by something else.  Wrote up a couple more bad ends, too.  Very brutal bad ends.  And, one thing I'm extremely happy with, is an attempt to take a nap that ends in a brief glimpse into how Agatha (the AI) actually manipulates the house (see photo).  It's a very atmospheric scene, and I'm surprised that I'm the one who wrote it.  

Writing this game has been very strange.  Usually, I need to do some extensive planning to figure out what happens next.  With Smart Technology, though, I've just been saying, "So, I'm in this room now.  What if this happens?  Or this?"  And then the next thing I know, I have five pages of stuff written down.  I go from having absolutely no idea where to take the story to having the story almost done.   THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN TO ME UNDER NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, HELP.

Hopefully, I'll be able to keep up this momentum for the good end.  I have no idea how to pull that off.

My game is now basically done.  Which is a surprise.  I didn't think I'd be able to get it done within ten days, let alone three.

But I'm using the rest of the time to fine-tune it.  Add sound effects where they're needed, correct grammar errors, fine-tune the game layout, etc.

But yeah, I'm feature-complete now.  ^^  Just a matter of perfecting.

Game has been revised and revised and I'm losing my mind staring at the same words and listening to the same music loops over and over.  Not to sound like I'm complaining.  I love it!  It's just that I have to force myself to stop nitpicking at it.  Otherwise, it will never get released.  

So I'll probably be releasing it tomorrow.  Tuesdays were traditional at-home media release days when I was younger, so it seems like a good day to release.  Spend the rest of today editing.

I also already have my store page stuff ready to go.  Trailer, screenshots, description, etc.  Dialogue is sliiiiiightly different in the trailer than in the final release, but I'm fine with that.  Lots of trailers use older cuts of whatever they're advertising.

AND IT IS HERE!

The game has been uploaded to itch.io and submitted to this game jam!  You can find its page here.  Or you can check in the submissions tab.

It's been a fun week, and I hope folks enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it!

Also, here's the trailer I made for the game: