I wasn’t really planning to write a postmortem for the game jam, but I think it might be good for me to look back on later. I also hope (if anyone else actually reads this) that it may encourage others to just fucking go for it if you’re interested in making a game. A lot of this isn’t going to be game specific, but about my journey leading to joining the jam in the first place.

I’m 38. Up until a couple months ago, I hadn’t written any fiction or drawn anything since high school, and I graduated in 2003. I hadn’t ever done any sort of programming unless you count writing stupid calculator programs for my TI-80-whatever in high school and I don’t. Honestly, I felt really stuck for a long time. For years, I kept thinking about making a game because gaming is one of the things that makes me happy even when the rest of my life feels like it’s falling apart. I kept putting it off though- too many decisions and never felt like there was enough time.

The end of 2022 I got a new job. I hated my previous job. I’m very introverted and it was a call center position and lemme tell you what’s not a good job for someone who would be ecstatic to go days without talking at all… I should’ve found something new years ago, but sometimes you don’t realize how bad things have gotten while you’re in it. Anyways, I started playing more games rather than doomscrolling to distract from my misery, and I found some newer otome games that I just absolutely LOVED. It reignited my love for the genre, and I knew now what I wanted to do- I want to make visual novels.

But there’s the aforementioned lack of skills. First I got hit by Blooming Panic brainrot and wrote some fanfiction. I meant to just write it for me initially as a practice run, but I thought some of it was decent (some is awful, but oh well) so I posted on AO3 and, hey, some people actually read it! It ended up as a whole series and I wrote them as one shots, but a few got extra chapters later because it just felt like there was more to tell.

Next I downloaded Ren’Py and looked through the tutorials, then poked through the scripts for Blooming Panic (thank you Robobarbie for leaving everything open rather than archiving stuff!) and realized I needed to learn some Python. Hey, there’s a ton of free python courses you can take! I took a course on Coursera- it was a 7 week course and I was so fixated I finished it in 8 days. This was the end of June. Then I spent some time fucking around with the Blooming Panic code figuring out how to add stuff in. I would like to take up the infamous Onion mod, and the original mod team was kind enough to share what they had built already. I got most of the programming stuff figured out, and all the scripts the original team wrote have been formatted properly so they actually run in game, but it needs art and the story needs to be finished so it’s got a ways to go. I want to do it justice so it's on the back burner for now while I improve.

Once I had gotten some programming stuff figured out I realized I wanted to be able to do my own art. Like I said before, I haven’t drawn since high school. I’ve always liked creative stuff, but the closest I’ve gotten since was basically just pixel art when making cross stitch patterns. Mid July I got a Wacom One tablet (it got delivered to me on 7/12), I downloaded Krita and started practicing. I hate like 90% of what I’ve drawn so far, but I’ve always been hard on myself so that probably won’t change any time soon.

I had planned on spending more time practicing art since, you know, VISUAL novel, but when the Velox Fabula jam got announced I was intrigued. I also happened to have a week of vacation already scheduled for August, and I was able to adjust it to coincide with the jam. Now it felt like there was no reason to NOT do it. It’d force me to actually finish something, which is something I struggle with.

Problems I ran into and will do different next time- I will admit, after the theme was announced, it took me 2 days to come up with a story. I couldn’t come up with a way to work the theme into any of the vague ideas I’ve been adding to a spreadsheet since June. I wasted a lot of time looking for premade assets that I could use if I wasn’t happy with my own art- a couple premade backgrounds were in the game until the last 2 days of the jam when I decided they made my backgrounds look worse in comparison and replaced them with my own that were drawn the night before the jam ended. I neglected the music until the day before the end of the jam and regret that I didn’t spend more time finding music that fit better. The game didn't have a name until the last day- it was just called Velox in Ren'Py when I was building it. I didn't think about things like a game menu graphic, or a cover image for Itch, or screenshots for the game page, or a game icon- all of those were made in the few hours before I uploaded the game (or in the case of the screenshots, taken as I was setting up the game page). I will say I was good about self care during most of the jam time- I ate properly and slept at my normal times until the end. I was awake for the last 36 hours of the jam though, I was so focused on extra things I hadn't thought of before I don't think I could've slept if I tried- like I didn't feel tired AT ALL at the time, but I slept for about 12 hours when I did finally fall asleep that night after the jam ended.

I think there will always be a little part of me that regrets my first game wasn’t an otome game, but the ending of Myth and the Dragon just feels right to me for this story. I had so much fun coming up with ridiculous premises for the stories told by the others in the tavern, particularly the bard- it felt like they would be the most likely to embellish the story for the sake of entertainment. I did want to add CG’s for all the ‘endings’ of the dragon but ran out of time. I might go back and add them in later, especially so I can learn how to make a gallery and stuff, but I haven’t decided for sure yet. 

TLDR : Who cares if it isn’t perfect?!? At the end, even if you aren’t totally satisfied with the individual pieces, I think you will be happy that you made something and put it out in the world. I am.