Whoa, 1k Plays! Thank you!

Once again, thank you for everyone who gave this a try, and to those who shared their thoughts and experiences with it. I did not expect this to get as much attention as it did, but I'm glad to find that some folks have resonated with it, and hugs if you need it 🫂. Have this little sketch as a sign of my love and appreciation for you all!

Anyway, now that I've had a week of break, I think can more clearly look back at the process of making this game, and the things I've learnt from it. Let's go over it shall we?

What went right?

So, this was actually a pretty smooth-sailing jam. No me getting sick, no unplanned events, nothing. All things considered, I pretty much did everything I wanted to for this game (outside of editing the game that is.) I did make a few cuts here and there, but nothing too major. Hell, maybe I cut out too much considering I finished this a few days early ^^; For a game that basically started with no planning, I think it turned out okay. It's not a super impressive game  nor a super polished one but I think that's okay. I'll cut myself some slack, and besides I'll get better with more games experience anyway, right? o<<

But yeah,  I think overall, I did pretty well as a team of just one person, with whatever limited time and skill I have. I scoped appropriately, stuck to my schedule well enough and did what I could. I even fooled around with some ATL stuff, and had some fun making silly SFXs. I'm happy enough with this for now.

What went wrong?

First thing that came to mind was that I took way too long to write. During this jam, I pressured myself to only write before I do any of the art or GUI or anything else, this is partially because I jumped into this without planning at all, and I needed to have the story done before i can scope out all the other assets I needed. I don't think that was the right thing to do, since writing is difficult for me, and not seeing any of the results in engine until 20 days in really threatened to burn me out. I was unsure I could do all the art and music and all that in the remaining days (but I did! a bit insane for that, honestly.) 

But yeah, the longer i forced myself to do nothing but write, the harder it was to write, and I ended up wasting a lot of time just staring at VScode and hoping some kinda text will appear. If I had used that time to make the art or GUI or audio, I probably could have polished those more than what I have right now, and I would have hated my own writing less than I do at the end of the jam to actually go back and edit it. (but that's okay! we're getting this edited post-jam anyway! everyone say thank you to haunthill xD)

^^; This is why pre-production matters I guess.

Where do we go from here?

Well, after the judging period ends, I'll be getting this game edited, and I will be adding back in one ending that I had to cut out. Outside of that, I'd continue working on other projects such as Candied Hearts, or other smaller games  jams ^^

Some things that I want to do in the future however, is to polish up my HTML vn engine a bit (because I'm insane like that), make a game in a different engine, as well as make stories with more complex branching in the future, but these are pretty relaxed goals, so don't expect them anytime soon ^^; I also want to play around with the new speech bubbles with the new renpy versions, as well as learn how to use layered images.

TL;DR:  That is to say, I'll keep making games I guess, and I'll keep learning to make them! There are lots of things I wanna play around with and so many things i want to make. Thank you for being here and playing one of those games ^^