SpooktoberVNJam 2021 Postmortem

Halloween Scrooge

After a week of rest, it’s time to get back to work on Halloween Scrooge ahead of my completion deadline (end of October, ideally the 26th to give people some time to enjoy it pre-Halloween). Before that, I thought I’d take a minute to write up a postmortem for #Spooktobervnjam and my very first solo VN project, Halloween Scrooge. Thank you to everyone who has downloaded/played, followed, rated or left a comment! 

Overall, I’m pretty proud of the demo I released and I think it represents a good vertical slice/preview of the final work. I would have liked a little more polish regarding things like the GUI elements, lack of sound effects , music etc, but overall the assets I did create were definitely up to the standard I wanted. 

What I ended up creating for the jam:

• logo 
• custom textbox ui 
• 4 character sprites + multiple expression changes for each (6-10 minimum) 
• 6 backgrounds (3 are iterations of the same bg, so 3 unique settings overall)
• sketch for 4th setting (will be in final edition)
• Character promo sheets (x3)
• Social media promotion banners 
• Itch.io gamepage headers / screenshots 

Things done right

Beta readers:

• I wasn't initially going to have beta readers (I didn't think I'd have time to wait for feedback while working), but it was a HUGE help to have people read over my script + give feedback, I’m immensely grateful to my friends and siblings for doing that and I feel that it really improved the overall quality of the final game. 

Backgrounds:

• Creating moving truck/day/night version of the street background was a wise decision, created immersion with low effort investment

Promotion:

• Setting up the Itch.io game page well in advance of the submission deadline ensured I already had the necessary info (synopsis, banner, genre, settings etc) inputted and that it was styled nicely for the deadline. This prevented any need for scrambling at the last minute.
• Transparent logo and different types of PSDs saved (banner size, sprites) made it easy and quick to create a new promo image anywhere I needed it
• Creating character info cards to give people a sense of what each character was going to be like.  These were great for me to gauge interest in each character as well (for my own interest), since people could be visually introduced + see character personality at a glance.

Things I could have done better

Graphics

• Should have created backgrounds in higher resolution natively. I wasn’t really sure if ren’py could resize images, and I thought resizing backgrounds would be a pain later so I worked directly in 1920x1080. Scaling them up isn’t an issue, but I’ll definitely work bigger going forward.

• Obviously a time issue, but for GUI I would have liked to figure out how to separate the pieces of the textbox so the name plate can be its own item + can be resized. That might not be possible in the final iteration of this game either, just based off how I designed the UI. It's worth investigating for future games though. 

Things I should have done

Preparation

Conceptualizing locations and characters took the longest and arguably slowed me down the most, as I didn’t really prepare much for the jam in August. I would definitely change that for next time, since having concept sketches done ahead of time would have been a HUGE help. Each character sprite took a few days from sketch to ink and colour/expressions; time I could have used on other things. By the time I got into the last 2 weeks, the backgrounds were taking me significantly less time though, so that was a big plus. 

Promotion

I didn’t start promoting until the last 10 days, mainly due to the fear I might not finish the project. I should have been more confident and promoted since day 1. 

Reflection

Making your first VN is somewhat weird, especially as a solo creator. I wanted to approach this project the way I approached the Duality jam game I created with my friend Rabid: create all the potentially needed assets first. But as I was working, I kept realizing “hey, it would be good to have a different expression here”, etc. Even though I had a list of assets I knew I needed to make, that list expanded as I went, so it was good to have flexible file setups so I could quickly throw things together.

I wanted to approach the story writing like the way I wrote novels for NaNoWriMo, but I found I ended up writing directly into Ren’Py because it was easiest to program + write + think of ways to use the sprites / choices that way. I’m not 100% sure what the most efficient method is, I might benefit from joining a team jam at some point in a singular role so I can observe what other people do. 

It’s pretty wild to see your work come to life in an interactive form though. I’ve been a fan artist for a long time, and I’ve written my own novel drafts and fanfictions. Being able to pair my writing + art in an original work and have people actually play / enjoy my story and characters has been super thrilling an I can’t wait to be done this story so I have one project under my belt! 

Thanks for reading! You can follow development progress at the Hamilton Hour twitter!