Post by sheeplike in The Hero of Shallowcreek comments

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oooooooh wow what a spectacular comment. thanks so much for taking the time to check it out!! gosh.

i spent such a long time on this project (and learning twine) that act 2 is pretty significantly different from act 1, which thankfully sort of manifested in a smooth progression of complexity but yes, having that level of quality all the way through would have been nice. looking back, i really should have done more in the first act especially, but i was determined to release it as a finished project in november, and a number of scenes - even ones that were partially done - just had to go.

also i'm really glad you liked the lizard shaman guy. i think he's my personal favorite deep down!! lenti and oliver bumping into sir griffin again and betraying each other to him would have been SO fucking good oh my god. maybe something for the increasingly-less-vague idea of a future expansion.

a renpy version would be pretty amazing!! and i do think there's a pretty significant chunk of players who see twine (regardless of all the effort i put into visual polish) and close the tab, but gosh, my limited experience working on visual novel projects has made me realize that even my most conservative ideations of art assets is an absurd amount of work that would ALL have to be outsourced. maybe one day!! but probably not for shallowcreek.

thanks so much for playing!! i can't easily express how excited i was to see a comment with your name on it and i'm really happy to hear you liked it enough to play it to the end!!

bitshiftgames1 day ago

Ha, glad it was useful then. No, I totally agree: you work and learn as you go, and if it's good enough for release, you release. Things never end up releasing if you worry too much about polish. Ha, and glad you liked the griffin suggestion. Maybe some day!

And yeah, getting visual stuff in IS a lot of work, whether you do it yourself or pay for some assets. Just wanted to suggest, as it gives a LOT of bang for the buck: even a little bit here and there does a lot to pull people in and keep them in place. People's minds wander a lot especially these days. I guess you could say it's its own form of hypnosis.

But I'm glad you were able to satisfyingly cap this off, and definitely hope you're able to plunge into another big project once you've built up a head of steam again. It's satisfying to get something this big finally done, isn't it? In a way that's just different than smaller projects.

sheeplike1 day ago(+1)

it's certainly very different than my usual project size, yes. this project in particular was very nice, being a lot of individual scenes with huge variety so i could avoid feeling stuck working on the same thing, and i had a LOT of passion for this particular work which made it relatively easy to avoid burnout. releasing it truly felt like nothing else i've ever worked on!! i remember having some mental wires crossed that day - i was getting so much positive attention from friends and acquaintances that i kept unconsciously thinking it was my birthday, haha.

more big projects are definitely on my mind, but i think it'd have to be something sort of like this, where there's enough variety for me to not feel totally stuck. maybe a superhero twine (or something?) similar to shallowcreek, i have a few VNs an artist friend and I are both excited about, maybe a few other things. i've been spread pretty thin on hobbies lately and that makes it hard to commit to anything, especially since it's not my job (sadly) but yes, now that i've had a taste for making something i'm truly immensely proud of i am certain to continue chasing this feeling in one way or another

thanks so much again for playing!!

itch.io

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