My internet has been terrible this last month and we were super busy, so we couldn't keep up with a devlog and just posted out of context gifs on Twitter. The good news is that we made it!
We still need to polish some graphics, gui, an extra ending cg and lines of dialog because we kinda rushed a lot to keep everything in. The process for making the VN looked like this:
- The artist and I met over coffee to hash out the game structure with a paper notebook. I made some branch trees and she made some doodles.
- We made an assets list alongside a priority list. Trello is great for this because you can order the cards and put your must have thingies on top. Sadly we didn't use trello, so I kept our priorities in my head. (Don't do this)
- We worked hard to have a first draft with placeholder art by the end of September, but we actually finished that mid November because life happened.
- We tested the first version with a lot of people and proceeded to fix a ton of GUI, text, graphic bugs. We found out that the battle system we made was broken, but put actually fixing it on the back burner.
- We kept working on polishing.
- I improvised a GUI out of a ton of GUI assets the artist made and it was serviceable, but not great.
- I sat down and watched a ton of old movies that were doing cool things with sound to figure out how you're supposed to use audio in a narrative way.
- I actually put that to good use and picked three music tracks that fit the mood and cut them, so different parts of the game would have different parts of the track.
- We took a demo version of the game to a local gaming convention and received a warm response and tons of feedback.
- I was exhausted, so I asked the friend who designed the engine to help me out with the battle system design. We managed to come up with a clear but challenging design.
- I implemented what we designed and coded inside the game.
- All the assets were done, but not super polished, but we decided to upload them to the game anyway and be done with it.
- I uploaded to itchio and the loading times were crap, so I compressed all of our assets with trimage and that issue got better.
- We received tons of positive feedback from our local community in Argentina, so I would love to translate it to Spanish.
- The whole game was done in Renjs. Which had the disadvantages of using a thing with little development time, but I'm friends with the developer, so I could bug them for help. The end result is cool and I owe them tons of docs and some bug reports.
Every single one of these steps deserves a devlog of it's own, so that's coming once I'm done with more pressing responsibilities in my art and in my life.
If you made it this far, please play the game here and let us know what you think.
Thank you for your time.