Spooktober VN Jam is finally over, and I made it! I finished a visual novel before the deadline, though it’s missing some CG images and sounds. I’m planning on adding stuff to it later.

The Idea

I wanted to make a small, spooky visual novel for Spooktober, but I had trouble figuring out an idea. I ended up making a prequel to my O2A2 Again jam entry Vampire†Hunter.

The Plan

• Max. 10K words
• 4 characters
• 2 branches/endings

I planned on writing the script during the first week since it’s the hardest part of the development for me. I didn’t plan much for the sprites and other art assets besides the backgrounds, which was a mistake.

I wanted to test my arms, which have been suffering from nerve pain during summer to see if they can handle a more relaxed game jam. Partly because of that I decided to spend more free time doing other things than the jam (which didn’t really work out the way I intended to).

Preparation

I took great care to prepare for the writing task. During O2A2 Again, I had prepped the story outline beforehand and it had been a great start. I did so this time too, and it was great.

I also looked for free photos from Pixabay and Pexels, because I wanted to save my arms while making the background assets.

I didn’t prepare for any music or sound effects this time, which was a mistake.

Development

I got off to a great start because I was hyped up about the jam and I had finished the outline beforehand. Writing the script took me a little over a week. I decided to make the story linear first, and save writing the second branch for last if I had time. It was a good call.

After the scriptwriting, I felt a little too accomplished, and the project pace got lax. I did make all the backgrounds in about a week or so with the help of LunaPic, which is an online photo editing and filter app.

Photo without editing:

The same photo with LunaPic Sadness filter:

The finished background image after editing:

I love that site, but I have to find another way to use filters (or make my own?) because I can’t rely on it being available forever. For a game jam like this, it was great.

After the second week, the development hit a wall. I had IRL stuff to take care of and I didn’t have a grasp of the scope because I hadn’t planned the sprites and other art assets properly. I implemented the story and the backgrounds into Ren’Py, which helped a lot with understanding what was still needed.

My spouse went on a trip for the last week of September, so I decided to use the time to crunch the game together. It didn’t miraculously make the scope smaller, though I did use the scope knife and culled some CGs with clever use of sprite animation. 

The pace had to slow down for a while because of arm pain, but I made it to the finish line. I published The Legend of Astera Stone in time, though missing a few CGs and all the sounds. I plan on adding the missing stuff later.

The Good

• Food prep. I cooked during crunch only once!
• Writing story outline and finding bg photos before the jam
• LunaPic filters for the photos
• Clip Studio Paint’s vector layers made resizing line art easy.
• Saving the images in 4K and resizing them in Ren’Py. I could make impromptu zooms whenever!
• Making the Itch-page and its art assets a few hours before the deadline
• Saving the images as .webp to keep the game file size small. Helped when uploading to Itch, and for future web build
• Ren’Py’s layered images. I could throw in extra expressions easily during development. There’s a good tutorial for it by Tofurocks
• Starting sprite work from least used characters to test the pipeline
• Using a lot of references and tracing

The Bad

• Not scheduling the sprite and other art asset work
• Not scheduling small amounts of work for every day to save my arms
• Didn’t prep any sounds, so didn’t have time to implement any, either
• Spent too much time on Vincent’s sprite; he has too many expressions and a pose that’s only used once
• Didn’t schedule for the GUI
• Spent too much time on some lesser CG stuff (looking at you, cross necklace CG)
• No character sheets or turnaround references. I need to learn 3D to make my characters so I can draw them from any angle...
• Crunch week. I went to sleep at 7:30 am on deadline day
• Not enough exercise and my back feels it

I hope I'll be wiser next time and read this postmortem before development. :D