This postmortem contains spoilers!

I originally made The Fall of House Misra for Yandere Game Jam in 2022 but I wasn't happy with its unpolished graphics. I worked on some new graphics, but life happened and stopped the progress. I also made a few other games in between. 

This year, I focused more on my unfinished projects to feel better about my games. When I finished working on The Legend of Astera Stone in April, I was inspired to do more, so I decided to try and get The Fall of House Misra done during Otome Jam 2024.

Writing Endings

The old version's four endings had a lot of repetition. Many routes led to the same ending, and ending #4 had eight routes leading to it! I had to cut some routes and plan new endings to make the game feel less repetitive.

When I started writing modifications to the routes, I realized some of them would organically lead to happy endings! (Or somewhat happy since the game is still called The Fall of House Misra...) I had been asked about happy endings for the game before, and at the time I didn't think it would work out. I'm happy to have been wrong! I'm especially pleased about Faris's happy ending since his fate in the original game was so bleak. 

I used Milanote to keep track of each route, though it's still hard to keep track of what leads where.

Graphics

The past me had made most of the new graphics for the background, but I was missing some expressions and the CGs. Working on the expressions was fortunately easy since I had for once made the work files for the sprites easy to navigate.

The original story had only two CGs planned, but with the new endings, I needed two more for the happy endings.  I planned the extra CGs in a way that I could use the same pose for Shani in both of them.

Music

The original game had only two music tracks and leaned heavily on ambient sounds of nature to fill the silence. I wanted to use more music for the game and searched more music by Turku, Nomads of the Silk Road in their Free Music Archive page. I edited parts of Turku's CCBY music to make looping themes and I'm pretty happy with the result. I found out that the original game used a track that wasn't ok to use commercially, so I swapped it as well.

Conclusion

Overall this jam went quite smoothly despite the lack of schedule on my part. I didn't have to crunch, so that was a bonus. There are still some things I would've liked to add to the game, but they're not vital:

• colored versions of the assets (the grayscale art style was a scope decision I made during yandere jam)
• side images of family crests to differentiate better who's speaking
• new GUI, especially the text box
• ending graphics
• more accessible content warning page
• maybe a route map, unless I make a walkthrough later
• fine-tune the character dialogue to make them react more believably in some scenes

I might make some of these additions at some point, but for now, I'm content with the game.