I finished the VN in time for the Spooktober VN jam, so I thought I’d write a bit about the process of making it. I made it during September 2022, where I was also in training at a farm. This might have helped me write about animals, but it also meant I had less time to write. And now that the month is over, the training is over too… and I have to figure out what to do next. But let me talk about September first.

Corners I had to cut

There were quite a few places where I had to cut corners to save time so I could finish the VN quickly enough:

• Even though I recorded some sound effects, I didn’t have the time to add them into the VN.
• There’s a couple of things in the art I’d have done differently if I had more time. But I think some tricks I used (more about those in a moment) were pretty good at speeding up the process without making the results look noticeably worse).
• I had some issues with the music and couldn’t re-record it because there was noise outside… until it was night and I didn’t want to wake up anyone by playing music loud enough for my microphone to hear it well. I also had a draft version of another music track that I didn’t have time to finish.
• I had to cut the story shorter (my original plan was to have Al and Clara return to Rock Valley and beat the dragon tamer in some sort of board game).
• I didn’t have time to finish the card minigame, so I disabled it. When I get it working properly I will try to enable it.
• During the casting event, I accidentally copy-pasted the name of a mod instead of the name of one of the voice actors, and I did find out where I could probably have found the correct name, but I ended up just voicing that character myself, and when I realized some of the audio I’d recorded didn’t sound right I just left some of his lines unvoiced.
• I did get someone to fully voice another character… but she got a version of the script that said “the horses need to rest” instead of “the horse needs to rest”. I could have changed the text to mention more horses in other parts, but didn’t.
• I didn’t finish any sprites, and the one I had got to almost work I removed.
• The lack of sprites combined with some characters not having voice acting means it might be hard to tell which emotions I intended for them to convey.

Writing

I think it was fun to write this story, but also a bit odd. I think Al would miss Rock Valley after moving to Scalesby. Maybe even miss the stalker because, yeah, I think that would probably happen. It only got worse by the fact that I had to cut the ending I intended to write and write a shorter one instead.

But one thing that was fun to write about were the animals. I’ve seen sheep and horses in real life, so writing about them I almost had to hold back from making them too realistic (well, you can’t really ride a sheep, and I came up with the idea that since glowsheep can glow they’re easy for other animals to see, so they need to be able to run away quickly but humans have somehow bred them to be huge and because they’re huge they’re also strong enough to carry a human while running. I didn’t explain that in the VN though). And I also seriously considered describing the horse and cart in so much detail you’d maybe be able to tell I’ve seen such things in real life.

And now that the training is done and I’m out job-hunting again, I already miss the animals.

And I feel like I should have mentioned more wild animals. A fox or a hedgehog, maybe?

And one thing I did when writing the story was trying to not directly mention the main character’s gender, that way it’s up to readers if they want to imagine them having one. ANd yeah, in this devlog I’ll refer to the main character with they/them pronouns, but in the story I made sure they only get referred to with I/me and you, and sometimes by their name, Al (which can be short for Alice, Alexander and various other names).

Proofreading

I asked on the DevTalk Discord server if anyone could help proofread the text, and someone replied that they could, but it seems they didn’t have much time and when they finally changed something in the script, they made two changes, one of which changed the meaning so I had to make another change to fix it.

And they didn’t catch the one grammar mistake that was in Clara’s speech, so I think it ended up in the final audio because I only noticed the mistake on the last day of the jam.

Art

I started by taking a photograph of a sheep at an event at the farm, going home, and drawing a picture of that sheep on paper using a pencil. I took a photograph of the drawing under some artificial light that made it look like the paper was a bit yellow and old, which kinda fit the story being set in a fantasy world.

I also went to some forests and took some photographs there, one of which I tried to edit into a path with snow… and there wasn’t snow in real life. I think that’s probably the ugliest background in the whole game.

The Scalesby background is a mix of drawing with a mouse and traced photographs from the forests.

The buildings Rock Valley and Meadowport are 3D models I made and rendered (the one in Rock Valley I just moved the viewport in Blender and took a screenshot) and then traced in 2D to make them look hand-drawn, and then I drew hills and skies behind them. In the case of Meadowport I also drew things in 2D behind the windows and added a bloom effect to the lighthouse.

And one of the trees in Scalesby is actually shown twice, once large and once scaled down to appear somewhere behind other trees in the same image. Because drawing large trees was kinda slow. I also drew small decorations like the cloudlines in Meadowport by making a few variants and copy-pasting them to show each one more than once.

Some things I would probably have done if I had more time are:

• Add an image of the inn from inside.
• Add curtains to the sides of the windows in Meadowport.
• Put something on the table behind the window in Rock Valley.
• Make a distorted version of the Rock Valley snow image to use for the flashback.
• Make the path in the forest look better.
• Maybe change the sheep drawing to something else, but still something that looks like a drawing.

And yeah, this is all about backgrounds because I didn’t have enough time for the sprites.

Music

I generated the melody using an algorithm I implemented during the jam. And I had actually written some lyrics before generating the melody, so I had to make the generator generate something that would fit. And the result sounded kinda like opera, so I decided to sing it as if it was that. That was fun but I think I should have practised a bit more before recording. You can definitely tell I’m not an opera singer when you hear it.

Other audio

There was a casting event, and I tried to copy-paste the Discord usernames of the actors into my notes. But when I meant to copy-paste the name of the actor that I thought did best at voicing the main villain, I accidentally copy-pasted the name of someone that was there to moderate the event. And when I found out, I felt it was a bit late to voice the character. Especially because I had thought whoever voiced that character should also probably voice the mayor, since there’s a plot reason those characters should probably speak with the same accent.

Another thing I did was record some sound effects, such as wings flapping. But I didn’t have time to program them into the VN. Maybe I’ll do that after the jam. And record sounds for those things I don’t have sounds for, such as the chain being put on the back of the cart so that the passengers don’t fall off.

What I might go back and change

I don’t really feel like I should be changing the story a lot, but I do want to get the card minigame working, and I also want to try and add more music. Maybe even make Al or someone else sing another song. Al has plenty of stuff to try and distract themself from, so I guess them randomly starting to sing a song to avoid thinking about the dragon tamer or something like that might work well. And I already voiced one line for that character, so I might as well try recording a whole song for them.

I think a Mac port would also be nice, and maybe ports for old game consoles, since the game isn’t very graphically demanding.

I might also tweak the UI, especially the toolbar in the bottom of the screen.

And of course, I want to add in the language options I initially wanted to have. Danish, Spanish, English and an easier-to-read English version. Translating songs might be interesting (that’s probably easier to do into Danish and Spanish, since I kinda want to have access to a full language and not a simplified one to have more options… but I might try simplifying the song or songs anyway).