Postmortem

I’m very exited that “Running into the Unknown” is launched. >.<

This year I discovered the amazing world of Visual Novels and I haven’t stopped to participated in jams with this kind of game: Global Game Jam, NanoRenO, Island Jam VIII, Otome jam…

However this game is the first that I’m almost the solo developer, and the one where I put the 200% of my heart. In put on it all the lessons I have learnt this year:

1) In crecendo…

From Elysian(NanoRenO submission) our (dream) team prepared a storyline that have “cut by this dotted line” marks. In other words, there was a schema and we can add more fragments if the development time allowed us.

I tried to follow this concept, the narrative of “Running into the unknown” was shorter and I was adding more and more story if life allows me.

2) Break the 4th wall

Something that I actually actually hated from my no-submission to the Otomejam was a character with too many internal dialogue. After that I did some research with popular titles like Fire Emblem 3H and Phoenix Wright. Those titles can run between 3-5 lines per character before something changes on screen (another character enters, the character changes their mood, camera transitions, decision point…) Which keeps the player from falling asleep from reading so much. So I was decided to apply this knowledge to the o2a2 submission.

So now, I need two characters: the sprite that is allowed to this jam and the player theirself. Ok. I can work with this. But the words of my friend Kyeru (game designer of Elysian) were dancing on my mind “I would like to make a metagame where the interaction is also with the real world, in other words, with the computer of the player”.

I love this Idea sooooo much. It’s something that reminds me to Doki Doki Literature Club. That is the reason behind the mention to “unity” and “itch.io” and the fact that at the end of the game automatically generates a letter from a character.

I would also to “extend” the world of the game to the real world that it’s the reason of mention the pandemia and all the series of misfortune events that we suffer these two years.

3) Programming VN is easy but testing takes A LOT.

As programmer I have used 3 frameworks for narrative systems in Unity: Fungus, Yarn, Naninovel. All of them make the programmer easy peasy but they have their own features.

Fungus(used in my game “Adulthood - a short story”), is a very visual narrative engine. It have a lot of UI by default. It was free, but now (or at least the last time I used it) it was deprecated.

Yarn Spinner, (used in Elysian and Inevitable) this is more programmer-oriented narrative visual novel. It’s free but it doesn’t have as many default components as Naninovel has. You can delegate the scripting to the writer and focus in the programming with it’s always a plus. The localization system was cool and the documentation is great for programming. The main down it’s that Yarn doesn’t have support for editing while debugging or you cannot rewind. I still feel sorry for the terrible amount of time that Kyeru spent testing Elysian.

Naninovel, it’s not free alternative for creating visual novels but it’s the best 64€-investment I have done this year. You can delegate the script to the writer, it has a lot of features by default like saving system, log, autoplay…, also you can edit the script while visualising the game in Unity, you can rewind. But it doesn’t mean that you have to spent a lot time testing, actually as now you have more tools to short the development, you spent the saved time in polishing.

4) SFX, GFX and … TFX !

Also this year I’m trying to learn more about “game experience design” and not only covering my tasks as programmer but care about how the player is feeling in every moment of the game, guide them, reward them and challenging them.

I started this way with “My Cozy Place” a minigame for relaxing with a “pop-it” mechanic. I tried to keep mechanic simple and work a lot on polishing and game feel so I started to pay attention to Sound Effects (SFX) and Graphic Effects (GFX).

But with “Running into the Unknown” I had also the chance to care about Text Effects. And I proved a great way to emphatise the feelings and the personality of the characters. I spent a large amount of time adjusting the size, the pauses and the formating. But since it’s the first time I do this I would like to recieve your comments.

Those are the main points I have learned this year so far. I’m pretty happy with the results, I discovered that makinig visual novels helps me to free my creativity, and also wakes up memories of the time I wanted to be a comic artist.

I hope you like the game. Let me know in the comments.