Preamble
Work for Seriously Senpai I GOTTA get that Seven Senior Suitor Story! STAT!! or more simply, Seriously Senpai! STAT!! began in 2016 as an intended project for Yuri Jam, an annual jam hosted with the intention of creating more games about relationships between women. I had been working on a bigger project within the Seriously Senpai series and had many characters designed but was far out from completing a game. I was convinced to take what I had and to try to create a smaller prequel game that would serve as an introduction of my characters, in hopes that it would garner interest into my bigger project. It was also my intention to use the experience to improve my skills in development coding.
Fortunately, the character designs very quickly got the attention of many talented people who wanted to work on a game. So talented, that the work they were producing for it started to feel wasted on such a small project. My desire to get more use out of their work grew and in time, Seriously Senpai! STAT!! grew in scope too large for the jam. Although most of the rest of the team were able to finish up what I had asked them in time, we decided it would be okay to delay the game until I had completed something that I felt best utilized the assets they had made for it.
Life Comes At You Fast
What was meant to be a small, month or two delay became an ever increasing multi-year delay. I went on a personal bad luck streak that involved costly repairs and replacements of living and work utilities, injuries to both legs keeping me from being able to walk properly for nearly a full year, getting into a car wreck and eventually being forced to evacuate my ever deteriorating home. It's not that I never got to work during any of this but there was a lot of stop and go and outside stresses were leading to a lot of quick burnouts. Several months were taken off at a time and when I returned to work, I was often unsatisfied how I had previously left things. Worse yet, the longer I left everyone waiting on the game, the more I felt I needed to justify the now ridiculous amount of delaying, creating an endless cycle of expanding the scope and further delays.
New Springs
It finally came to a point that I had to make a decision, either cancel the game or move it from a free game meant to market a larger commercial game, to being a more fully realized commercial game itself. No longer a prequel but a proper part one of a two part story. Deciding to take my chances, the first thing I did was negotiate backpay with everyone else who had worked on the game. Once that was done, I discussed with them if they were interested in returning to create more content for the game. To my delight, almost everyone involved in the jam, so many years ago at this point, were able to commit to finishing up this new and final version of the game.
Refocusing on my original desire to become a better developer, I decided to take head on the jumbled mess that my game engine had become over the years of start and stop development. Rearranged, refactored, renamed and rewrote. Whatever didn't fit, I took a cleaver to. I acquired the habit of commenting all of my code, so I would never again be left wondering how something I worked on two years ago was even working or worse, accidentally reinvent a component that I had already made but never got around to using.
It took a while but the yields were worth it, as I was finally able to tackle some of my engine's deficiencies and wishlist and got them done in a far more timely manner than I had ever been able to.
For the rest of the team. this year we ran a successful Indiegogo
campaign for the game (it was a fixed funding, all or
nothing campaign). Everyone has been at work since, creating new and
re-imagining old assets. It is all coming along very well; they too
are coming to this with more years of experience and improvement. I couldn't be happier with what they have been showing me and I hope to be able to show everyone more as we get nearer to release.
Recent History
Over the last couple months, my artist have been hard at work on scenes involving the bedroom of the main character of this story, Miley PJ Clarke. This has been considerably difficult, as this particular room has required a coordination effort between four people, while half of us live on a different hemisphere. The sprite work for these scenes is different from the rest of the game and involves more flexible parts, to create a more intimate and lively scene between Miley and the player. The background and CG both have their dynamic elements, as well, which will evolve as you play the game. Coordinating these elements together was a really difficult process but this work is nearly done and I am very happy with it. I think the player will appreciate the extra efforts as well.
Myself, I have spent a good part of the year polishing up my game engine. While the full game mechanics are in a bit of a limbo state between a mostly realized concept and actual beta implementation, the engine itself doesn't need a much of any work to implement whatever the final rules of the game will be. Making it all fun and rewarding is what I would consider to be the biggest challenge remaining.
One thing I have been in sorely need of and could only recently implement was a new sprite and shader effect sorting system. I've finally been able to remove myself and human error from the way thing are drawn per frame, along with greatly reducing GPU stress (yes, I realize this is not an intense looking game but I have my pride and scalability will be important in future games).
In my latest build, I have implemented FMOD for music handling. This is currently on an experimental basis and might not make it to the final product. That said, I am impressed with what I have seen (or heard).
In future devlogs, I might get a little deeper into the formation of the engine (it's not THAT deep) and why I personally prefer to work on it rather than ready made engines for story centric games and visual novels, such as Ren'py or *Maker engines.
