As you can probably guess from the title of this post, this is gonna be quite a ramble, so if you plan on reading all of this, you should probably grab yourself a coffee or something first x3

I'm writing separate ones for this + the other Spooktober VN Jam 2022 project that my team and I made (The Graveyard Shift), but the section at the start titled Spooktober VN Jam Past & Present, along with Signing Off at the end will contain a lot of the same stuff. I might even just copy/paste those two sections since they're relevant to both projects!

Spooktober VN Jam Past & Present

As any of you who know me are likely already aware, Spooktober VN Jam is my favourite game jam of the year (although, now that Yandere Jam is a thing, there's competition between the two to steal my heart!) Spooktober VN Jam combines two things that I absolutely adore: horror/spooky stuff + visual novels :3 So of all the jams out there that are tempting to take part in, this is the one I find the most appealing.

Both horror and visual novels are such a huge part of my life. For that very reason, having Spooktober VN Jam in September for the game-making stage, and then having general spooky season in October where I can visit all my beloved scare attractions + binge horror movies + treat myself to playing everyone else's spooky jam games = two months of bliss against what is often another ten of being mired by depression >.<"

Since discovering the jam back in 2020 when it was sadly too late to participate (I found out about it in October, so the game-making stage had already finished >.< I made Impostor for Scream Jam instead), I've been totally enamoured with the concept. In 2021, my love affair with the jam truly took off when I managed to put together a team (with the help of some wonderful friends :3) and worked away like a mad woman on a project for the jam called Limbo Line.

The entire team worked so hard to get it all finished in time for the jam deadline. Probably too hard. And that's where I should point out that despite my immense love for the jam, my relationship with it (and other game jams) hasn't been entirely healthy! This year especially, it seems as though many devs likely overworked themselves for the jam, myself included >.< It has produced some super stunners for sure, but I feel like we all need to be really careful with how hard we push ourselves for these things.

This year, I made the decision to challenge myself to make 2 games for the jam instead of one. Not one of the wiser choices of my life, admittedly! I don't think I'd be tempted to do it again, and I wouldn't advise anyone else to do so either, haha. It went against everything I initially told myself back in August. Heck, in August, I was in two minds as to whether even try and make anything at all for the jam! I so desperately wanted to, but as usual, my anxieties were causing me fear of failure. It's only my sheer passion for the jam that allowed me to push past that and participate.

Once I'd vowed to make something, I considered the previous year and how I felt working on Limbo Line. It was some of the most fun I've ever had in my time as a dev, but at the same time, it was extremely exhausting. I remember getting very little sleep. Forcing myself to bed at 5am and then forcing myself to rise at 8am. It felt good... until it didn't xD Towards the end, everything started catching up with me and it was a struggle to push through. The stress during crunch time in the final week was intense. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to put myself through that again.

So, with that in mind, my original plan for Spooktober this year was to work on 1 shorter game. I thought to myself, if I work really hard in the beginning and try to keep it much shorter than Limbo Line, then I won't have to push quite so hard to make sure I get it completed by the deadline. I can actually reclaim my evenings and get some proper sleep throughout September.

That did not go according to plan x3 In fact, I wasted most of the planning stage in August constantly flitting between different ideas without really managing to settle on anything >.< As August began drawing to a close, I began to panic.

Part of me just wanted to work on another Inside No.9 adaptation of some sort and leave it there, but another part of me wanted to make something wholly original. I started to feel guilty for even thinking about working on a jam game when my main project hasn't been updated in heck knows how long. That's when it hit me. Maybe there was a way that I could create a short sort of origin/backstory for characters that would hopefully one day make it into Darling Duality. It would solve two problems because it would mean absolving myself of that guilt for being so slow to update my main project, along with fulfilling my wish of working on an entirely original piece. What it didn't do was satiate my desire to create another No.9 adaptation xD

And that's where I went down the slippery slope of toying with the idea of making 2 games for the jam, haha. I can't even remember the number of times I went back and forth arguing with myself about it. One side said don't do it, it's madness, you'll massively overwork yourself, and for what? Just pick one and you can make the other some other time! But the other side said, sure, it'll be hard, but you can do it! Making 2 shorter games can't be any more difficult than making 1 longer one. As long as you make sure to keep the total word count of both projects less than or equal to what you did for Limbo Line, you'll be fiiiiine!

Well, I don't need to tell you which side won in the end x3 Whether that was the right decision or not, I couldn't say. All I know is that I don't regret it :3 I started to in the final days of the jam xD but now that it's done, I'm just proud to have completed the challenge I set myself, and even prouder of the team for coming together to create both games ^-^ I certainly couldn't have done it alone.

And speaking of the team, that was something which worried me since I'd left it so late to even decide what I was doing about the jam >.< I was so anxious about approaching anyone that I didn't really reach out as much as I should have to people I know and have worked with before, and I kept a draft post for the DevTalk recruitment channel on my PC for almost a week before working up enough courage to actually post it x3 

I was really concerned that I'd left it too late to build a team, but thankfully, Eufasy and Tsuki (who made the awesome, InSomno for last year's Spooktober) got in touch after seeing my recruitment post and saved the day, along with the amazing Aru, Croc, and Bun, who also joined the team shortly afterwards :3 Then there was Rebecca who reached out to me as well (who I worked with last year as she played the part of Nyari) and finally the team was all coming together ^-^ The other voice actors who came on board were all recruited from the incredible site that is CastingCallClub.

So when August drew to a close and September started, I was finally raring to go :3

THE BEGINNING

I actually worked on both projects simultaneously by alternating between the pair of them rather than finishing one first before starting the other. A risky move, I know! But it was the right move for me personally as it turned out that being able to switch between them actually aided my concentration. Every time I paused one to work on the other, it's like I gained a second wind just by working on something different :3

For DotD, my initial plan was to have it be the same way as things are in DD where the player would be able to choose Morgen and Dämme's genders. This swiftly went out of the window during the beginning of the jam after it all kicked off in September as I realised it just wouldn't be feasible. It pained me to drop it, but I knew it was the price I'd have to pay for choosing to work on 2 separate projects instead of just 1. There simply wouldn't be enough time to create a version of DotD with those gender options alongside the other project.

Writing the main script dialogue + UI work were the first things I was able to complete, thankfully, on schedule (yes, I actually made myself a proper schedule this year, haha). I wasn't entirely happy with the writing, but I figured I didn't have time to mope about it because I needed to get scripts to voice actors ASAP in order to give them the maximum amount of time to record as possible. I could write narration lines and such as I built the game, roughly following my outline.

I worked on BGM tracks throughout the jam, with some not being finished until quite late. Others were finished early on, and I used these to help me with additional writing because I always find listening to tracks with the right sort of atmosphere can help me pull a scene out of my head and get it down in text form :3

I was actually away from home on holiday with my family for 4 days near the beginning of the jam. For that reason, I made it my mission to get writing largely finished and scripts sent to VAs before we went away. And then while away, I took my laptop with me so that during the night in the hotel, I could continue jam work in the form of making some BGM tracks (my laptop isn't capable of much else!) I also tried to make a track or two in the car on the journey there and back, but I didn't achieve much because I tend to feel sick if I look at a screen in the car xD

I know when you're taking on so many tasks, UI probably shouldn't be one of the priority ones to get finished fast, but the problem is, it irritates me immensely to look at Nani's default UI when doing mini-tests on stuff as I'm putting games together + I also tend to dread making and getting UI to work, so it's something I'd just rather get out of the way as soon as I can, haha.

THE MIDDLE

Again, I was flip-flopping between the two projects, so everything's a bit of a blur as to the order I worked on stuff in. I tried my best to build DotD piece by piece, adding all the background art, sprite art, SFX, and stuff as I went. I wasn't pleased with the speed of my progress at all. It felt slow. Too slow. That's when I decided to change tactics and complete one task at a time.

From then on, instead of trying to add everything all at once and test it as I went, I split things up. First, I added all the dialogue text to the game, followed by inserting sprite facial expression changes into every single line of text. Then I moved on to adding backgrounds, followed by BGM, and then SFX. As voice lines began to be delivered, I worked on cutting and editing the audio in Audacity + adding any effects required, but I left adding the lines to the game as one of the very last things I did since I tend to use the method of voicing in Naninovel where if you change the text in a text line that a voice line is attached to, it breaks association with that voice line, meaning you have to add it back in again. For that reason, I wanted to wait until all the text was checked and closer to being finalised before adding the voice work.

THE END

Towards the end of the jam, both games worked well enough from start to finish in the few quick tests that I ran, but they were still missing little details here and there, like extra SFX where I'd left myself some notes to not forget them! I'd managed to put placeholder sketches that the artists had sent of CGs into the game so that I could easily swap them out for the finished versions when they were ready. And while I waited on the last of the voice acting to come in, I decided to work on making an extras section (something I absolutely dreaded, haha.) During this time, I also did a little work on the game pages, something I left far too late last year and really wanted to try and have finished before the final hours this time around!

Final testing over the last few days was a slog >.< I really felt like I was losing my mind at one point, haha. I was just trying so hard to eliminate as many bugs and typos as possible before hoping I could send test versions to the team, but in the process, I became so sick of looking at it all. Occasionally, hearing some of the VA or seeing the beautiful CG art cheered me up, but I began to despise my writing and doubt every word of it. The more I played the game, the more I both loved and hated it xD

Thankfully, there was just barely enough time to upload a test copy to the team, who were able to notify me of a few issues that I was then able to fix.

I'm not going to lie. In that final week, I didn't feel particularly well. The cumulative effects of very little sleep and sitting at my PC staring at my monitor all day/night were finally beginning to catch up to me >.< I had essentially made myself ill. I began getting daily headaches that refused to budge. My left leg kept going numb because I didn't get up off my butt and move around enough, and I started to feel physically sick on and off. Sometimes I'd be in the middle of working and I would have these strange but brief dizzy spells. I did drink plenty of water, made sure to eat properly, and even kept up with my daily exercise (though I reduced it from 35 mins per day down to 15 so that I could get more work done!) So I wasn't entirely unhealthy. However, the way I worked throughout September could hardly be described as healthy. 

It was a mixture of single-minded determination and focus along with being dangerously idiotic. I could tell I was going downhill fast in the final days, but I didn't want to let myself or anyone else down, so I just kept telling myself to keep going, to push through. It'll all be over in a couple of days, and then you can take time to rest and recover!

WHAT WENT RIGHT

Surprisingly, most things xD I honestly expected a lot more to go wrong, haha. So it was a really nice surprise to have a majority of stuff go smoothly this time!

One thing I was extremely worried about was UI. I feel like this was my most complicated UI design yet, and with no dedicated UI artist on the team to help me out, I did wonder if the whole thing would be a disaster, haha.

It's not perfect! There are still things that irritate me, like not knowing how to make clickable areas any shape other than square/rectangular boxes >.< It means that having menu buttons on the title screen in the shape of the butterflies wings, the clickable area for each wing is a box, so you can hover over and click the button without actually being directly on it because the wing shape is surrounded by a box. This is something I've tried to look into in the past, and it seems so incredibly complicated T_T I was pleased at least with how it all came out aesthetically on the title screen and main menus :3

I had a few issues getting the wheel of magical writing to spin the way I wanted it to xD I am no expert when it comes to Unity's particle system, but it's something I've been trying to get better at, so this and other FX I created for DotD were good practice, and I'm happy with how those turned out in the end as well.

Speaking of which, I adore Schrat's floating butterflies :D When we were all discussing the CGs and how we could create different variations with different layers, I asked if it would be possible to get the butterflies on a layer of their own so I could attempt to make them slightly animated. Croc drew the line art, and Bun coloured them in, so when the finished layer was sent to me, I got to work trying to make it happen. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to, but it turned out that it wasn't too difficult to work from some of the pre-existing effects in Naninovel as templates! I used the SunShafts one more than anything. By changing the image material to butterflies and messing around with various settings, I was able to make it work the way I envisioned pretty easily ^-^ The only problem I couldn't solve was my first variation of the effect not hanging around for long! No matter what I changed in the time settings, it despawned within about 15 seconds, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why! Thankfully, my second version with noise stayed spawned indefinitely until I told it to despawn :3

Then we come to the soundtrack. Making BGM for my projects has rapidly become one of my favourite parts of making VNs ever since I first decided to give it a go during Otome Jam in 2021 when I worked on Apartment No.9. It's difficult to describe, but it's just the most fulfilling feeling working on tracks, seeing them come together piece by piece ^-^ I don't actually know anything about composing. I have no education in it, so I basically just dabble. Having picked up some music producer asset packs in Humble Bundles along with discovering looperman.com I now have a pretty big library of loops and samples to draw from! Every time I make a new track I feel like I'm learning, and I'm just really pleased with how DotD's soundtrack turned out! Even if I did maybe go a little overboard with the number of tracks, haha.

WHAT WENT WRONG

I wouldn't necessarily say that the writing went wrong, but I'm not 100% happy with it. There's a lot of stuff that was in my head which didn't make it into the game, and it's difficult for me to determine how much of that information players could've done with knowing, haha. But I've made my peace with the fact that it's jam writing and ya kinda have to boot yourself up the butt and get it done as best as you can within a tight deadline!

There was an issue with camera zooming that caused me hours of frustration. No matter what I did when zooming in/out on some CGs, the camera did this weird sorta pop, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was causing it. It turned out that it was actually a bug in the version of Nani that I was using, and that it had been fixed in the most recent release of Nani early in September. Had I thought to question the software first rather than myself, I would've saved myself quite a few hours, haha. I just assumed it was me doing something wrong >.< Of course, the moment I discovered that, I downloaded the update, terrified that it would mess something up in the process (I did make backup copies of everything x3) Some stuff did get a little screwy, but the camera bug was indeed fixed, and it only took me a few hours to get everything working as it was before I updated. Still, it was stress I didn't need at the time, haha.

Testing didn't exactly go according to plan either. I was actually hoping to submit both games on/by Thursday 29^th September because I had planned to go to Fright Nights opening day with my dad on Friday 30^th! I wound up abandoning that hope in favour of more testing, and I feel like it was the right decision. I still got to go to Fright Nights the following Friday :3

But yeah, testing was just an absolute nightmare. Every time I thought I'd fixed everything that I could, I discovered something else that needed fixing >.< And on the final night of the jam, I uploaded some builds to itch but kept the page in draft mode while I continued testing because I was afraid of a repeat of the previous year. When I was trying to upload Limbo Line, my internet went down at our house. Thankfully, it came back in time, but it was a hell of a lot of stress, so I wanted to have at least some form of build uploaded, even if it wasn't the final one.

One thing that caused me a major headache that I didn't realise until the last minute was the title screen. The way I had placed the credits button and popup didn't quite cover the whole screen, so you were able to click on the menu buttons while the credits were displayed, causing the game to break >.< Alongside that, I had started testing on our family potato laptop alongside the PC I was making DotD on and found issues with the loading time of the extras section.

On my PC, the extras section loads almost instantaneously, but on the potato laptop, regardless of whether the extras have been unlocked or not, it was taking well over 30 seconds to either load the message telling players to complete the game to unlock, or loading the section if it was unlocked. To make matters worse, while it was loading, you were again able to click on the menu buttons, also causing the game to break!

It became quite clear that I needed to add a proper loading screen for transitioning from the title screen to the extras. I wouldn't have discovered that had it not been for testing on the potato! The first way I tried to do it was a failure, as the load screen still didn't pop up fast enough. I had to make a sort of bridge between the two Nani scripts in order to get it to appear right away. It's still a horrifically long loading time on the potato, but at least there's a loading screen for it now!

That's something I'm clueless as to how to fix though, long load times on custom UIs and menus that I've built myself in Nani. All the template UIs load pretty snappily, no matter how much I've modified their appearance. But when actually creating something like an extras section from scratch, it always seems to take ages to load on slower systems :(

SIGNING OFF

In conclusion, working on both games for the jam was an absolute blast :3 even if it was exhausting! I had such a wonderful team to work with, who not only produced incredible works, but who also helped and supported me throughout September <3 I couldn't have done it without them.

Part of me wonders if I should stop participating in Spooktober Jam in the future purely because of how hard I keep ending up pushing myself. I love it so much, but I also realise that it's not particularly healthy to work the way I do.

When I try to dig down to the 'why?' side of things, as much as I take part because of my love of spooky season and making VNs, I also worry that perhaps I'm trying to prove something to myself. And if that is the case, I'm concerned that I'll never be satisfied, no matter what I end up creating. I know that I'll enjoy myself, have a lot of fun, and most likely feel proud at the end of it all. But I don't think anything will ever feel enough for me to stop putting myself through what I do to get these projects finished for the jam.

I wish I were the type of person who is strong enough to simply be proud of what I've done without requiring further validation, but I don't think I am, at least not yet. Even now, 13 days after the submission period, I wake up some mornings with a smile on my face, happy with everything I achieved throughout September, and on other mornings, I wake up wanting to cry, talking myself down and telling myself that I should have done better. That the team did fantastically, but that I personally didn't do well enough.

It's a fight I have no idea how to win when I'm basically just battling myself >.< All the super sweet and lovely comments and reviews that people leave certainly make a difference :3 They can turn bad days into good ones, and help me remember that just because my stupid brain tells me I'm not enough, others don't see me or my projects that way.

Sometimes, those kind words are the difference between me brushing away those negative thoughts and carrying on, or turning towards giving up. So thank you. I appreciate every single one of you who takes the time to play my stuff and say such kind things. It means more to me than I can even put into words ^-^

Hope you have a very merry spooky season!!!