Another Spooktober done, and not without kerfuffles, despite for once being three hours early before the submission deadline. Remember the word submission; I'll come back to that later.

I wasn't going to actually participate in Spooktober this year, but I had an idea left over from last year. I have wanted to try and make a visual novel from a public domain story, and I found one that had a suitable length: Hume Nisbet's Vampire Maid. It's about a young man who traveled to distant moors in search of inspiration but found a mysterious girl, who turned out to be a vampire. Being less than 3k words long it would make the perfect test subject.

A list of art assets formed:

• Train BG with moving scenery (recycled from the moors BG)
• Villages BG
• Moor BG (day, afternoon, night)
• Cottage exterior BG (morning, afternoon, night)
• MC's bedroom BG (evening, night, window open)
• Dining room BG (evening, morning)
• Ariadne Sprite (sick, healthy, bat monster version)
• Line of corpses CG
• Ariadne biting MC CG

Nice-To-Have (but not essential):

• Mrs. Brunnell sprite
• MC sitting on the train
• MC & Ariadne kiss CG
• MC & Ariadne in a dream CG
• a bunch of cut-ins of smaller moments

I set off by implementing the script in Ren'Py. It wasn't as straightforward as I thought, since the story isn't fully chronological; the main character refers to meeting the girl before he has described the meeting. The author also overused the semicolon, making sentences very long. I decided early on to modify the text so that it would be more chronological and with shorter sentences. I mean... yeah:

This contact seemed also to have affected her as it did me; a clear flush, like a white flame, lighted up her face, so that it glowed as if an alabaster lamp had been lit; her black eyes became softer and more humid as our glances crossed, and her scarlet lips grew moist.

I had a lot of fun with Ren'Py's new speech bubble system though! Initially, I made the speech bubbles with a bubble background, but then I opted for a minimalist way of displaying the text and left it out. I had some trouble with making the text readable with background transitions, but it's good enough. I should figure out if it's possible to make several different bubble backgrounds, so I could make something that works with both light and dark-colored backgrounds.

After implementing the text, I made simple placeholders for the backgrounds to see what I would need. I had counted that I had five locations, most of which had day-night variations. Testing with placeholders was great since I found out that I don't need a day-night version for the dining room, for example. Here's the placeholder for the above background:

Another way I used to save time with the backgrounds was using sliced backgrounds. I have used cut-ins in the past, and I figured that I could use a similar technique to make backgrounds faster. Drawing a full BG of a village would take more time than painting a faraway village on a slice from the moor background. Add some tints and you get a sense of time progression.

I decided to make my backgrounds from filtered photos I downloaded from Unsplash. I used Gimp and G'MIC Qt plugin's Corvo's Painting to filter the photos first, and after that, I painted over them in Clip Studio. Filtering the photos made it possible to heavily alter them before painting over since the filter would hide all the little imperfections. Here's how the bedroom came together:

For all the artwork, I used Pinterest to search for references for 1880s buildings and fashion, and for sprite poses. I did get a bit carried away though, since I made a full board of pins for sprite poses... 

Through my research I decided to make Ariadne's dress more like it was from the early 1800's, since she's likely been a vampire for a few decades at least. This made me think that her mother, Mrs. Brunnell might not be her real mother, but a familiar. Her clothes would've been closer to the end of 1800's, since I assume the events take place before 1900. It's a shame that her character has been described with so much detail, when she doesn't have an active role in the story. That made me scrap the idea of drawing her a sprite. 

 I pondered how to make Ariadne's sprite, since in the story she's first sickly, like undead, and later she becomes pretty. Nisbet's description of Ariadne with "...she appeared younger and almost beautiful" sounded jarring to me. I didn't know how to depict a character that had "velvety eyes" and "moist scarlet lips" but was almost beautiful. I decided to start with the sickly, undead version, and gradually made her prettier. It reminded me of making a sketch of a person, and gradually fleshing them out. I think it worked alright in the end. The monster version was the biggest challenge, though!

I finished the essential art assets a week before the deadline. I had a good momentum going on, but then I got sick. I was in the middle of finding sounds and music for my game, and progress slowed down. I decided to do a small task here and there while I was recovering. I had a lot of trouble with music this time around. Or, I've become too critical of what I have available. I think I should try to learn a program to make my own music, since it would be nice to have a coherent soundtrack with leitmotifs and all. For this game, I settled on CC BY piano and violin music. Sometime it would be nice to try and make a game by selecting its soundtrack first. 

In the end, I got all the essential assets and sounds into the game that I wanted, and uploaded the build three hours early. I tested that everything works, and went to sleep half past two in the morning.

I woke up at 6:30 am, and since I couldn't sleep, I started checking out the submissions since the deadline had just passed. Then a horrible realisation came to me: I hadn't actually submitted my game to the game jam! I had joined the jam, but I hadn't linked the game to it when I was finished. I was disappointed, of course, but I wasn't expecting to win anything, so my only loss is the lost visibility for my game. Guess I have the unique opportunity to see how many views my game gets outside of a jam. 

 Next time I'll make the game page through the jam page, since it seems you can submit a draft page to a jam...