Jam Dev-Log

When going into this game-jam, I wanted to experience making something complete. In the past, I’ve made little unfinished visual novels, written various stories and worlds that I haven’t really put down on paper, and so on. I love creating things and have many things in my head, but I’ve never put something out there for others to see that is really… ‘complete’, if that makes sense. So that, and gaining more experience with Ren’py and game development within a set time frame was my goal for this. I have experience with minor coding in both Java and Python, but I still don’t know much about the program.

To express the stories in my head, in the past I’ve liked making drawings and doodles of them digitally, so I’ve made pixel art before. However, I’ve never made pixel art backgrounds or sprites, and I had to learn how to make sure all of the visual assets were the right dimension for the screen (in this case, 1920 x 1080)...  I also had to figure out how to put the images into the game via the code, and I liked using my old unfinished Ren’py games as a reference for code that I’m rusty on. I made use of this tutorial to help me with editing the main menu! It was incredibly satisfying seeing the art I made for this game on the screen with the text I wrote, to be honest.

I’ve also never uploaded anything on Itch.io before, so figuring all this out is definitely an experience.

I wish I could’ve taken the time to make some chiptune music, since I’ve made little tunes in the past via music makers, but I didn’t have the time due to missing the first two days combined with other life factors. If I could do it all again, I would most definitely try and make some music, make more sprites, add more choices, and above all else: make cute little pixel-art ending CGs! When I have the time, I know for sure that at the very least I’m going to try and update the game to have some ending CGs after the voting period. 

Thank you for the experience! I’m glad this was my first game jam, it was a great thing to try out. While my perfectionist streak flared up a little during the jam, I managed to push through and at least put something out-- and in the end, being able to make something I can show at all is more satisfying than not finishing it. This was lovely. I hope to join more game jams in the future!

Sorry, this is probably a bit disorganized, but I hope it makes sense.

-PoE