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 (Dawn of the Damned), 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 GS, I knew I wanted to make sure I had some options for players to pick the protagonist and their partner. I knew I'd be able to implement that in this project, unlike in DotD, because I knew the writing for GS wouldn't take half as long as DotD's writing.

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 able to add as many bits and pieces to the script as I would have liked. For example, in Limbo Line, I added and changed soooo many things that it ended up becoming something else entirely of its own by the end of it xD Whereas with GS, there just wasn't going to be enough time for me to run wild with it. I knew that I'd need to largely stick to the original episode script and just try to make as many alterations and additions as possible.

I needed to try and create some alternative endings that fit alongside the end in the original script, so I came up with those first and worked backwards from there with adding choices and additional dialogue that would ultimately lead to one of the 3 endings. On top of that, I also added some inner monologue narration lines to make it feel more as though you're playing as the protagonist rather than just watching a story play out in front of you, and I tweaked and edited bits of the original script here and there too.

I knew I wouldn't have time to make extensive soundtracks for both this and DotD, and since the original episode I chose to adapt is quite an atmospheric one, I decided pretty early on that I wanted to attempt to build a lot of the atmosphere with SFX and ambient sound more than relying on BGM tracks. This meant I didn't have to worry toooo much about making tracks for this one early on. The track that I ended up using in GS that I named Fortunately/Unfortunately, was actually one that I made and intended to use in DotD! I felt as though it didn't quite fit DotD's tone as well as it would in GS, so I took it away from DotD and made an alternative track to take it's place.

[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. Despite that, I was doing most things on DotD first before switching to GS afterwards. This meant that as I changed the way I worked on DotD, I also changed the way I worked on GS. 

For example,  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.

I didn't do all of the above in one go. That took place over the course of the jam. So I would get to one point where I'd finish a big task like adding all the facial expressions in DotD, and then I'd switch to GS and do the same there. Basically mirroring the process. It got quite mindnumbing at times, haha. But it certainly felt more efficient than the way I started out :3

[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. 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. Granted, GS's UI isn't as complicated or eye-catching as DotD's and there are a couple of reasons for that. One being that there just wasn't enough time to come up with and implement fancy UI design in two different projects on top of everything else I had to get done (something I really underestimated when telling myself making 2 short projects would be no harder than 1 long one... making x2 UI is no easy task xD) and the other being that I simply ran of steam to work on UI once I'd finished implementing my ideas for DotD's. I did also want GS's to come across as kinda clean and simple, while still having its own style, which I feel like I pulled off successfully at least!

And I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to make it seem like there was lightning on the title screen by learning how to code in something to tell the game to saturate the background at random intervals x3

I was also extremely happy with all the SFX, haha. I used a huuuuge mixture of stuff from free sfx websites and from packs that I've previously purchased in Unity asset store sales, and I edited almost all of them. Sometimes it was a case of putting multiple sounds together in Audacity and adding additional effects to them to get them just right, other times it was just doing something simple like adding a low pass filter to the sound of rain to make it seem as though it was further away/muffled when sat inside the car! Small details like that bring me so much joy, haha. And to hear it all come together was just bliss :3 Especially some of the creature noises I combined with scraping metal sounds to get the sort of effects I was after! I always find it fun as well to try and make certain sounds into the things you want them to be. For example, a lot of the SFX for scraping on the car weren't actually SFX for car metal scraping. They were things like bin lids or swords xD And the SFX for shaking the hand warmers was actually someone shaking a can of spray paint that I edited, haha.

[WHAT WENT WRONG]

I wouldn't necessarily say that anything went severely wrong, but I'm not 100% happy with it. I would have liked more time to be able to write more in the way of extra choices and dialogue. I'm happy enough with it having 3 endings, but if I could've gotten some more choices in there, I could've had 4-5 endings instead. And I feel like choices during the Fortunately/Unfortunately part would've been pretty fun! 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! It's my own fault for attempting to make 2 shorter games instead of just picking 1 idea and concentrating on that.

I have some niggles with some of the ways I had to construct stuff that really bother me. For example, the opening/ending scenes that consist of a CG, voiced monologue, and subtitles were a giant pain in the backside, haha. They look like videos, but they aren't. I wish they were, because that would solve all of the problems I have with the way they are in the game, haha. But since a small number of players in the past have informed me that, for some unknown reason, games that I've included video files in throw up a blank screen for them instead of playing the video, I've chosen not to add video files ever since. I just don't know what caused either an mp4 or ogv file to not play for some folks. So I'd rather go through the pain of coding all the components in-game to make a kinda fake video that everyone can actually see. The trouble with that is, it creates other sorts of problems T_T

Firstly, because those particular scenes are designed to play automatically and user input is blocked throughout (unless you hit force skip), I can't assign the voice lines in the same way that I do for the rest of the game. The only way I could get it to work is by adding the voice as an SFX instead. But if you get players who happen to want to turn the SFX down or mute em for whatever reason, it means that you won't hear the voice lines in those scenes >.< On top of that, because it's all done in a way that the voice lines are timed to be in sync with the printer revealing the subtitle text, if a player happens to change the text print speed in the settings, that will mess up the careful timings I made for the scene x3 

I don't know how to fix either of these things currently, so they're going to haunt me long past Halloween, 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 >.< 

One thing that caused me a major headache that I didn't realise until Rebecca was helping me to test was one of the lines referring to Volkham being vegan would only be seen/heard if the player made a particular choice. If it wasn't seen/heard, it would mean that one or two lines that come later in the script would have seemed a little bit off. Thankfully, I was able to create a quick fix for this by splicing together some of the existing voice lines to make a new line that solved the problem xD If that hadn't of been possible though, or if she hadn't spotted it in the first place, I would've kicked myself!

There were also a couple of issues I had with the timing of SFX that I wasn't quite content with. I'd tried to change them previously but still wasn't happy with them because I knew that they would either play too early or too late depending on if the player is skipping text or waiting for voice lines to finish playing. I knew it wasn't a major issue, but it still bugged me. 

And I would've liked to have moved the Shearsmith sprite towards and on top of the Volkham sprite for one particular scene because it would've looked better, but I refrained from doing so because of my fear of a weird bug that popped up in Limbo Line last year. Basically, the horizontal movement of Acheros' sprite somehow caused a game-breaking bug that caused the game to crash upon trying to save if you skipped through the text on-screen while Acheros' sprite was on the move. Ever since then, I've been scared of using too much horizontal movement with sprites xD I still have no idea what it is about the combination of skipping text and moving sprites sideways that causes things to bug out! T_T

[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!!!