I have finished my first asset pack for Make Visual Novel Assets Jam! What a ride.

I like melancholy games and the Victorian era, so I wanted to make some assets that would encourage devs to make more games in that setting. I have one problem though: my temporary workhorse is a 10+ year-old gaming laptop, and I have no drawing tablet. I decided to work with what I have and go for a pack of filtered photo backgrounds. 

The theme was clear: I'd find a bunch of Victorian-era mansion photos and frankenstein a background pack from them. The challenge was to make them not look like AI-generated garbage. That's the problem I had with Legend of Astera Stone's filtered backgrounds. I made them before the Gen AI tools came out, and they looked interesting with their wonky squiggly lines... but looking at them now, some of them look painfully like AI art. I wanted to avoid that this time and make the filtering more subtle.

(The Legend of Astera Stone's filtered photo background that's been heavily edited)

Most of my time was spent collecting photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. I spent most of my time in Unsplash until I got fed up with their search system. Inputting keywords in the search bar rarely brings up relevant free photos, but a lot of paid photos somehow hit the mark. To find free ones, I need to click a free, somewhat related image, and scroll to the photo's "similar to this" section, where I can click another relevant photo... It's like playing that game where you try to find a certain Wikipedia article by just clicking through other articles. I ended up using Pexels since their search works better.

(Unsplash search results for "Victorian bedroom". The plus icon marks a paid photo)

I got sucked into searching and downloading photos. I ended up with.. -checks- ..1169 photos in total. Yup... I sorted them crudely into "yes", "no", and "maybe" folders. Then I sorted the "yes" folder again into categories by location or action, like music room, tea time,... The photo downloading was by far the most time-consuming part of this jam. I don't know how to stop myself from overdoing it, but I get fixated on repeating tasks like this...

(All the locations after sorting the 1000+ photos)

To remedy the time loss, I made a priority list of the most important backgrounds in Trello. Then I started chipping away at it. The filtering process was familiar work. Some of the BGs were easy to make, while others took hours to complete. I took some breaks to document the steps, which turned into a tutorial pdf. 

The pack was ready about 12 hours before the deadline... but I had forgotten about the "demonstration" requirement of the jam. I could make a few mock screenshots, but why should I, when I could just make a short game..?

I took a risk and started a new Ren'Py project, aiming for a "house tour"-like experience. I started with just the backgrounds and text, but it looked too empty... I didn't have much time to start searching for a free character asset (not to mention getting sucked into that sidequest!), and I couldn't draw a sprite without a tablet, so I decided to try making a sprite out of stock photos. I first thought of an old Victorian portrait, but the sprite's expressions would be hard to change. Then I figured I could use a person dressed up as a ghost! To make it look more friendly, I just picked a ghost photo that had sunglasses on.

(The ghost turned out fine and dandy!)

I have already made so many games in Ren'py that scripting isn't too difficult, but I always go back to my notes on how stuff worked again. I whipped up a simple plot on-the-go and finished the demo a few hours before the jam deadline. Then I polished the itch page (for which I had wisely made a draft a few days earlier). I went to sleep an hour before the deadline.

While I'm happy with the result, I didn't get to make everything I had planned for the pack. I wanted to make a few more rooms (like, more bedrooms and private rooms for dating sims) and cut-ins, since I'd like to see them more widely used. I thought about parallax too, but I think it would be too labor-intensive with filtered images.

I thought of adding more stuff to this pack, but after Devtalk's Stella said that there might be another VN asset jam coming later this year, I might make a Gloomy Mansion Pack vol. 2 instead. I still want to make nighttime versions for the existing pack though.