After a long time, I've been wanting to make my own VN, I finally managed one, with help of a small team! And so, now I'm writing this postmortem to... well, first, to lament about whatever I didn't manage to achieve, and second, to give myself a pat on the back despite it, and to remind me of whatever I got to learn during the process. Hopefully, whatever I couldn't get to do yet for this game, I'll eventually able to do in the future as I learn more.

Warning: If you haven't played the VN, then this postmortem will have lots of spoiler for you. I won't be bothered to censor myself, so proceed on your own discretion. You've been warned.

Ideation Process

So... as the game is made for the VNP's internal Spring VN Jam (it's official title is April Jam 2023, but I like Spring Jam better lol), there are limitation and certain themes that the submission VN should abide to.  To sum it up, there's the limitation of: the VN's team and most assets should not be more than four. And then, there are several themes or prompts you can use, and Magic In Your Blood actually started from the prompt: Lies and Truth.

The story premise as I came up with it for the game pitch was like this:

“Vampiric”; There is a rumor spread among students of the magic academy, that the handsome yet reserved teacher of Energy Magic class is actually a blood-drinking humanoid monster from the very old folk tales, a vampire; and soon you might just find out the truth about that rumor.

Although, as I fleshed out the story more, I realized that there is a lack of real vampiric act anywhere on the story line--so I discussed for new title for the VN... although that only happened later on, as we're in the middle of the prep up, if I remember correctly. I don't know if I can say for sure that there's much to the "Lies and Truth" theme either. There are rumors, yes, but it was more of a joke. And there are also news of some assault case with blurred details. But I don't know if there are much of "lies" in there, and I don't know if there are much of "truth" either. Well, maybe there's some (when the player finds out more about Prof. Elias, for example) but to be honest, there would be way more "truth" and plot-twists if I have managed to include some extra scenes...

So, those cancelled extra scenes are my greatest lament about the game project--because I didn't manage to include them in the end. To start with, there are limitation of 10k words to the main story, so I can't put in too much stuff. I had thought about including them as two unlockable scenes, as a kind of reward for completing each ending. They would explain more about who the mysterious young woman seen with Elias, and/or what's the real deal (or hints of it) behind the assault case in which the player get involved in one route of it.

Another thing I just can't help to not talk about, is the story setting. What world-building you can see in the story, was what had inspired the characters and the events in this VN--and it is inspired from a TTRPG game I've been working on for few years now, called "Magic Academy". It's called so, because I'm just a simpleton like that, and I haven't had any better idea what else to call it. The premise is basically, you play as a student (or maybe as a teacher if you've got enough experience) in the magic academy. As what was also mentioned in the game, the magic are divided into five types, and is described as "a mean to manipulate reality". You need to study stuffs about your object of manipulation if you want to be able to perform magic better, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, when will it be finished, or where you can check out more about it. The answer is: I have no idea lol. But I'll surely share it with the world when I already have something playable, like this VN. Oh, and if you are so curious to the point you want to hear more about the world from me, you can reach me on Telegram (@storyhunter28) or Discord (SBHunter#5026).

Prep Up

The game jam duration was supposed to be a month, but got prolonged into over a month, and then one and half a month due to some holidays and to give chance to lots of solo participants... (tbh, our team probably wouldn't have made it too without the extended deadline, lol) The start line was 1st April, but the team recruitment and the prep up had been started since the beginning of March. Each team couldn't have more than 4 members, and I'm truly lucky to get some team members I feel comfortable sharing discussing ideas with.

The prepping up period was mostly used to flesh out the story plot, and determines whatever assets we would need. I gathered references for the artists, and... well, there actually wasn't much to do yet for the programmer. I have started looking for good references of SFX and ambiances sound, though; since our team couldn't fit a composer (and tbh, it feels like composer is one of those rarer class in the community; my own class is writer, maybe also artist if needed, and noob programmer in emergency, but audio composing is not something I've ever tried).

There was actually a lot of things I wasn't sure what to do about, but my morale was still rather high during this time. So I made timelines of whatever assets preps I have to finish by which date... Nearing April our BG artist (Yui) mentioned: we also needed to think of the custom GUI. and I was like. "We do?" I thought we were just gonna modify RenPy GUI a bit and be done with it (lol). But now I'm so glad we made a custom GUI for the game, because it looks *chef kiss* gorgeous. I got Yui to thanks for that.

By the time April started, I'd say the asset prep was... only around 70-80% completed. Again, this being only the second jam I joined (I failed the first one) without much other experience in finishing a VN, I just... couldn't finish and direct my team mates efficiently enough...

Jam Start - Execution

... and that inefficiency still carried on well into April and May, the jam period. Luckily enough, I have at least managed to finish a more or less reliable asset list. I've got the list of BG, UI, sprites, script (listed as parts), audio, and programming.

BG and UI

Honestly, these assets were the most efficiently and smoothly done. Yui were working on them diligently, and each of them finished on time. Being one with more experience in VN jams, her insights and suggestions were very valuable to us (since the rest of the team are all noobs lol).

Sprites

Uh... well. Remember when I said the asset prep was only around 70-80% percent done? Yeah, this is the part that was lagging behind. The sprite. One of the most vital and eye-catching in VN making. I couldn't finish the character ref sheet in time; at first I thought our team wouldn't be able to get a sprite artist, so I had resigned myself to draw the sprites on my own... but late into the prep up period, we were joined by Sunnysinbar. (Sunny joined your party!) There is one thing I'm grateful for about Sunny: is that they know how much I love my characters--especially Elias, since I have had him for half my life if not more. (My scrumptious pretty boi uwu) And so I was very particular about his character design, and Sunny could respect that. (I got to show more of my "children" to them, and they said they also enjoyed me telling more and fangirling about my "children". What kind of OC parent wouldn't be happy for that?)

Although... well. That nit-picking was also what made us late with the sprites X'd To the point that Yui also offered to help with the shading and rendering of them. I think we only managed to finish all sprite assets around... a week before the deadline. 

Script

The script writing went... relatively better compared to the spriting lol, although I still went through few blocks. The first thing is, I underestimated the resulting word counts. I had divided the script into seven parts, each of them having few scenes... I thought that, with my style, I usually write around 250 words for one scene, give or take. So after seeing the plot points, and counting, I thought I'd end up with a script of around 7k words... hahaha, I was wrong.

Few lessons I learned from this is: (1) provide buffers to your word counts, (2) intense scenes (be it action packed or emotional) are harder to write than simple exposition scenes, (3) even if you think you've known your characters so well, it's always a good idea to delve a bit into what each of the character knows and want within a scene, before you start writing. Oh, and of course, do your research. I managed to read a bit about vampire lores, and about how much blood you can lose without dying... I missed one that's more specific about what you'd experience during blood-loss, though (I just found it on a tumblr post long after the game jam end--how annoying is that?? the same happened with references I could have used for Elias character design hhhffffffhhh).

So yeah. During the April month, I saw that ideally in a one month game jam, you should better finish the script by the second week... I only managed it around third week or later, I think. Still faster than the sprites--but these were why I couldn't give any more attention toward the extra scenes; after finishing the script, I had to gather the audio assets, follow-up tightly on the spriting,  prepping up the itch page, reading about marketing (although in the end, I didn't do so much of that) and so on and so forth...

Audio

Compared to the hectic-ness of the spriting and scripting, looking up free-assets for the audio was relatively more chill. I just picked one source, Pixabay, to make it easier--and the good thing about Pixabay is, it has wide range of stuffs already there made by numerous creators. Sometimes I have to be more clever with my keywords, seeing what works better for the audio I want, sometimes I have to close my room's door because the TV downstairs was so damn loud, sometimes I have to take a pause in-between listening to numerous tracks because I also suffer from short attention span as a modern human. But eventually, I managed to collect everything necessary. Half of the BGMs are not really music, but rather ambiances. It helped that I have listed about whatever tracks I want during the prep up period. There was additional few SFX I added into the list after I wrote the script, but those were nothing so hard to look up. and the pros of doing it after the script is also: I got even more clearer idea of what kind of nuances and feelings I want for the ambiances and BGMs to match the scene.

Programming

I actually have even less idea about how long programming supposed to take, but... our programmer managed it in... more or less... one day? It was another hectic one lol. We managed to submit the game just before midnight. But well, to be fair, Dipdip, our programmer, has prepared some... what was it called again... it was not API... Parser? I'm not sure. This thing supposed to convert the script I made (which was written in a certain format, discussed beforehand in the prep up period) into the renpy code. So that saved up a lot of time.

That was the pro. But the con...

Result

The day after the deadline, I finally tried to play our game. We hadn't had a chance to play-test it, after all. And God. It was... helluva... mess. X'D I took note using A5 papers while I testing the build, to see whatever needed to be worked on and corrected. I filled 4 pages. 4. EFFING. PAGES X'DD

Soon enough, I tried to organize those points of correction into few categories: story script editing, functionality, and polishing.

Story script editing includes some lines edit and fixing up typos (better-read, easier to understand sentences, grammar, typos...). Functionality are mostly making sure that the assets are displayed properly, in the right time and place (fixing the branching, picking better fonts (the first we picked made comma looked like period), fixing the UI display, the visual and audio asset display, and so on and so forth). And polishing is of the last importance, that is to make everything look tidier, so to say.

In the end, by the time I'm writing this post (it's 9th June lol) there are things we still haven't managed to strike out from that to-do list of things to improve. But oh well. For now, the game has come to life, with enough functionality to get the story across without giving headache to the players XD

Beyond the Game

The more precious lessons I learned from the jam, however, is about project management. About how having team members to help you is indeed a great motivator; although it has to be balanced with good communication and coordination. One of few notes I wrote to myself is that, next time I should try to better consider my team members skills, speed, and availability so that I can adjust my expectations and planning on what we can get done in certain time period. So said, I also got to learn (or at least, started to learn) about pacing your development progress, managing your timeline... This time, our timeline suffered mainly because we were all newbies; so we still had to figure out whatever we needed to do before actually doing them, and that took our time too. And lastly, there's another thing that I haven't really touched upon working on this project, that is of marketing; honestly, so far, the only thing I do to "market" this game is by sharing them in my friends and family groups.

So, am I going to make another game or VN? Certainly. What or when will it be? We'll have to see. There are life circumstances to consider--most of us are hobbyist, but I have a TONS of story I've always wanted to share with the world, so eventually I'll find a way to tell them, one way or another. You can hope to see Elias again some time in the future uwu) Will I work it with team or try the path of solo yolo? We'll have to see that as well...