I haven't been doing dev logs for the last while because I thought I might as well put my head down and hammer things out. Now, it's a few days since I submitted Acetone. I was thinking about adding music before the end of the month, but I am burned out from doing Global Game Jam.
So here's a Post Mortem!
When I started planning this game, I set out to test my limits, and to learn Ren'py. While I have worked on a visual novel before, and while I have written interactive fiction before, I didn't know a lot about the ins and outs of Ren'py itself. My past experience did not require me to look at the scripts themselves.
Considering that I managed to write around 6.5k words, make four sprites with varied expressions, six backgrounds and four CGs with variants, I definitely think I achieved what I set out to do. I initially didn't think I'd have the time to draw backgrounds or CGs, so I actually achieved more than what I thought I would. However, a factor that I am keeping in mind is that I had a lot of free time on my hands. The last few times I made games for jams before this, I was in the tail end of my university degree, a degree for which I also had to make games for.
As I mentioned in my previous dev logs a couple of times, it was interesting getting into the mentality of writing for visual novels. I was more used to Twine, where you had to indicate dialogue in a more traditional manner, with "said" and the like. My style of writing is also very to the point, which means I had to go back and elaborate on what I wrote to pace it out better. It doesn't help that for Acetone, Zoya is both a very to the point person, and also not a newcomer. She doesn't serve as an audience surrogate. She knows all this already, so it wouldn't make much sense to dwell on things like description or exposition.
I made this a kinetic visual novel because I knew from one of my previous jam games ("Who Knows (Where They're Going)" for Yuri Jam) that a lot of my writers block came from making sure that all choices are equally as rewarding, and have a similar amount of words written for them.
What I did not expect from making a kinetic visual novel is how appealing they are to me. Not only in a sense of "I don't have to worry about choices" but also because they made me think about what I'd do if I added choices. The ending of Acetone is its best case scenario, meaning that by adding choices I'd be adding less good endings or bad endings. And what's the point of that? I definitely want to make visual novels with nuanced choices, but this was definitely food for thought.
I'm really happy with how Acetone turned out! I learned a lot about Ren'py, the changes I have to make with my writing for it, how much I can do for a Ren'py game in a month, and my opinions on kinetic visual novels. And of course, I came away with one more game with an Asexual Aromantic protagonist in the world!