The Cookie Project Postmortem

Thank You!

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to download, play, rate, comment, donate and share this game! I'm so grateful that you would take some time out of your day to enjoy my work, and I appreciate it immensely as an indie dev. At this time, The Cookie Project (TCP) has been downloaded and played in browser a combined 1500 times, which is truly more than I hoped for in the first week alone. I hope you had a good time with Cepheus and Four.

Soundtrack now up on Youtube!

I thought I'd start the post with some art of Cepheus and the insufferable brother he mentions (but you never meet) in the game, for those who don't follow me and have never seen my other art of them!

Index

This postmortem will be broken into the following sections:

• Initial Goals for the project
• Stats/Assets produced
• Challenges
• What I learned/what I did right
• What I would have done differently
• Reflection on growth

Initial goals for the project

When I first conceptualized this game, I had the following goals:

• Keep it accessible for non- Destiny 2 players but still comfy for D2 players.
  • Manage exposition by using a civilian main character. Address plot holes and use humour/thought provoking points for D2 players.
• Allow for options re: the romance, to keep it open to players who still want to enjoy the game but may not be romantically inclined.
  • Furthermore, in the romance route I wanted to allow some room for players to have choices re: flirting styles (bold, shy) and physicality (you don't have to kiss Ceph at the end of the game, and he doesn't think badly or weirdly of you for it or for rebuffing his double entendre joke earlier on). That being said, this was also just true to his character though, as he's comfortable with sexuality but also receptive to others feeling differently. Were it a game about another character, options might've been more restrictive.
• Stay true to Ceph and Four's character.
  • I thought this would be easy at the time, but I didn't realize how big of a challenge this would turn out to be. As far as OCs go, they live in my mind and I thought I had a very clear idea of their personalities or how they'd react/speak/interact with others, but my knowledge of my own characters turned out to be superficial. This was eye opening! I've developed two other games, and in making those I was fully prepared for the challenge of carving out character personalities, mannerisms, speech patterns etc. from scratch, since those characters were created JUST for those games. Ceph, however, is an OC I've had for 6 years! I've made tons of art and comics about him and Four, and I thought it would be easy to write him in this project. The nature of VNs being dialogue-driven narratives exposed that misconception in a painful way lol. Ultimately, I think I succeeded though.
• To have choices that would be remembered, and natural conversations/relationship building.
  • I wanted Ceph to feel real. If you're flirting with him, he responds in different ways to different styles of flirting. There are things he finds especially cute, and he'll react more or differently to those actions. It's not that there are "right" ways to flirt with him; it's a reflection of his personality just like real life. Also, the friend path isn't simply "romance path without flirting"; there are unique conversation topics and jokes/comments he makes that give you insight into his character. No matter which ending you go for (friend or romance) I wanted you to come away feeling like you're at the start of getting to know him.
• To have expressive sprites and immersion re: alternate poses and outfits.
  • Since the game was small in scope, I figured I could splurge here to up the immersion factor. In the past I didn't really know how to make the best use of layering, and I think I limited myself as a result. Ceph is a character I've drawn a lot, and I already knew what kind of faces I wanted to include, and what his overall clothing style was (still had to scope down a bit re: different styles of clothing, but I liked the end results a lot).

• To play with dialogue bubbles and an off-centered player dialogue box to show off the sprite and display the recipe cards, ingredients, cookies etc without hiding Ceph.
  • Most of the people who follow me for D2 art are familiar with my comics, so the dialogue bubbles felt like a fun callback/way of having Ceph and Four "speak" more directly to the player. They were an absolute pain to deal with (more on that later), but in combination with the offset dialogue box, they gave me a lot of room to work with using screen space.

Numbers

The following assets were produced in the span of December 10 – January 8:

• 10,744 words
• 2 backgrounds – bakery (night, day), kitchen
• Oven asset - 2
• Recipe card assets – 4
• Cookie assets – 7
• Cepheus sprite – 2 poses with various hand positions, 4 outfits (shirt + pants), coat, multiple expression assets (honestly I'm too lazy to count them)
• Four sprite – 5 different "expressions" via combinations of expression assets
• Custom GUI + menu key art
• Itch page headers + cover image
• 5 music tracks (menu, 3 main-game themes, credits)

Challenges

Everyone needs a break

On one hand, I didn't really produce much last year creatively. Development on 3 Seasons' DLC had stalled (we've all been busy, but devlog on that coming soon). I wanted to jump into a project to take my mind off my mental burdens, but as it was a solo project and I'm working full-time, I couldn't begin right away when the jam started (Dec 1^st). The end of the year is an extremely busy time for my workplace, but I knew I'd have time off for the holiday break (from Dec 16-Jan 2nd) to do most of the work. I started making rough draft sketches on the 10th.

The game ended up taking around 5 weeks of development time, and I used up my much-needed holiday break working nonstop on it which… in hindsight, may have been foolish. I do love the end result, and I don't think I could've maintained the motivation to work on it in small bursts over a longer period of time… Jams are useful to me in that sense for a burst of hyper focused creative energy with a set deadline. It was tiring though. By the end, I just wanted to be done and free to relax… and then of course, I had to go back to my day job. I don't think it's sustainable to solo-dev games in 1 month jam periods like that if you have another job. Even a small scope game like this took a considerable number of hours to produce. Further, although I made the right call to release the demo and delay the launch, I didn't account for "rest time" I'd need after working non-stop for weeks, thus leading to a second delay to avoid crunch. The problem here is my own eagerness/guilt to get the game into waiting hands, and my inability to recognize the toll that working towards a deadline has on me. If I'm going to delay, I should pencil out rest days and overcompensate setting the new date, rather than assume I'll be able to keep working at the same feverish pace until release.

Speaking of time…

Admittedly I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting things I wanted to add that I ended up cutting anyway. This is an unavoidable side-effect of being too ambitious, and also lacking comprehensive knowledge of python.  

Writing Woes

Although I had the game roughly outlined from the start, pacing was still very difficult to manage once I got into the writing process. I got to a point in writing where I felt increasingly like I was boring the readers to death (BOTH the D2 and non-D2 players) and running out of viable conversation topics. With a sweetie like Ceph, I was worried he might come across flat and uninteresting. It's very much a dialogue driven game with little "action", set in 1 location. Adding any other locations introduces massive scope increases and additional assets (backgrounds, etc) so that was out of the question.  I made a decision to shorten the number of days to address the lack of "content" I was struggling with. I think this ultimately helped immensely.

Those dialogue bubbles

The dialogue bubble system... oh the dialogue bubble system. It was both a godsend and the most frustrating tool to work with. Having a simple dialogue box is one thing, but dialogue bubbles are so finicky re: line breaks, positioning, player name length, AND they reset if any edits are made to the text line or the sprite attributes. They also usually affect any dialogue bubbles on the next screen, so I was constantly resizing them throughout development. It was hellish and took up an insane amount of time. I think if I were to ever use them again, I would have to investigate how to stop them from being so finicky because I did NOT anticipate how much time I'd waste fussing over them and I didn't have the python knowledge to know how to fix it. I don't regret including them but I didn't account for them being a massive time sink.

What I learned/what I did right

• Implemented a layering system for sprites.
  • What a relief! On 3 Seasons, Webmelon set this up and handled the programming so it's not something I had personally done myself. Halloween Scrooge, my first and only other solo game, used FULL SPRITES with expressions baked in. Not only did switching to layering reduce the file size massively, it allowed for a lot of mix and matching: not just for expressions, but also outfits! I'm definitely glad I picked this up and I won't be making games without it anymore. Setting it up myself also gave me insight into how to better prepare my sprite art files going forward.
• I'm happy with the index card and recipe "mini game" feature. I think it adds a lot to the experience rather than just having players select from a choice menu, and it was worth the bit of extra effort to prepare assets and screens for them.
• Originally, I wasn't planning to have a web build at all, but the game ended up being so small in file size that it was worthwhile to set up the web build in lieu of a mobile port.

What I would have done differently

 Writing, writing, writing. It's always the damn script not being done in advance that ends up bottlenecking the whole project.

 And the thing is, I outlined the whole game out pretty early on, but when I outline it's a higher-level view of the day + scenes, and a lot of the ideas re: scene restructuring or pacing adjustments happens when I sit down to do the writing (and sometimes I do that as I'm programming in Renp'y, outside of my script document). Writing the actual story itself was so challenging that my pace was like molasses. This links back to my issue about pacing and my worries about boring the reader with the exposition-y conversations. Just once I'd like to make a game based off a fully written script that has been prepared well in advance. I wonder how many changes I would end up making as I go.

Reflection on growth from Halloween Scrooge

and 3 Seasons

 Finally, the end of this post. For all the criticisms I went over on the development of this game, ultimately it was a massive learning experience for me and a very worthwhile one too. My first foray into indie game dev was Halloween Scrooge in 2021, and that was a solo project as well, so I feel that I've come a long way with this recent project. I was faster at producing the backgrounds, assets and sprites, and knew what I wanted to accomplish/expand on from my first game as well as what I wanted to do differently. I had a better understanding of where to find help and solutions, and I was far more confident in myself and my ability to manage my workload and goals. And of course, the end result is a self-indulgent game for one of my favourite OCs! I'm very happy with it.

Thank you for reading! I hope this postmortem was helpful in some way to you.