Early Spooktober Recap
Spooktober is Devtalk/MVNA's annual Hallowen-themed Visual Novel Jam. It's arguably the biggest VN jam in the Anglosphere with a definite theme (as opposed to collection-style jams like SuNoFes, which allow you to submit any VN/IF-adjacent piece). This post is a bit preliminary because the game is actually still in playtesting phase and not yet submitted, but for the large part it should be done. I don't intend to muck around with it anymore unless a gamebreaking bug occurs.
Spooktober lasts the entire month of September, so the resulting games can be played during October. Last year, a moody swing from starting a new job and balancing business trips found me working on a project on a whim, two weeks into the jam. I started around the 14th or the 16th (ed: my previous devlog confirmed it was the 16th). To top it off, I decided to try out a new engine. I finished the entire thing in around 9 days and pretty proud of the end product, which snagged me an Honorable Mention.
This year, everything is more lowkey. I've gotten pretty lethargic and melancholic over the state of the world, plus the undercurrent of burnout that comes from sustaining one project a month. I didn't submit to any jam in August, but I was commissioned to work on a commercial title because ends had to be met. Initially, in light of these, I actually intended to skip this year. However, I ended up joining an acquaintance's team. We agreed from early on that I wouldn't participate with the concepts too much; I'll just give my input on what might be possible and impossible given our timelines, and stitch them a game when they give me assets.
I usually do my own scene direction. In my circle works, I also take the role because it's just easier to do when you're familiar with the programming capabilities and limitations (it works for us. It would be different in other circles/groups). I value having creative freedom, but sometimes it's just nice to work on something mechanically. Screen directing takes a long time even for short scripts. I usually start with a rough sketch or a thumbnail for every scene and sort of describe how I want them to move/change on paper before moving onto the implementation step. Afterwards, the finetuning process can be finicky, as it may mean agonizing whether a fade should be done over 0.5s or 0.7s. This time, I can just eyeball the extra notes: fade to black, sustain for 5 seconds. Okey dokey cap'n.
In reality, I did adjust some things based on my testplays (always testplay as you go! It's akin to unit testing), and took some liberty in filling in the gaps rather than asking every single thing back and forth (which would necessitate a lot more waiting and be a snag in the road). This is within the boundary established in the team, because I was the only one familiar with the engine and VN programming in general. Some things are easier to catch when you have them together as opposed to loose collection of assets.
Obviously it was my fastest run yet, even accounting for the adjustments. The entire thing took about one workday from start to end, including implementing the GUI. Usually my projects would take at least twice the time. It doesn't look too shabby (game jam please-do-not-look-closely disclaimer attached), even if the basic layout is the default Ren'py layout (a typical concession to make in a jam). I told the team that I would not design them a GUI from scratch (but I did reskin stuff to make them less generic). As far as I know the team lead is happy with what we have (this is their first VN) and I hope that they would continue making more in the future.
Side note: someone saw me coding this in an LGS and he seemed interested to learn that you can use Python to make VNs. We ended up inviting him into our EDH games. It might be fun if he becomes a regular, even better if I can convince him to try making one-- Hey, if I can convince even one person to start a creative project, that's my win in this world's sorry state of affair. Honestly, I miss tutoring sometimes.
You can't access this yet, but if you read this post in the future (say, in 2-3 days) you can check it out.