Team Origin Story

Months ago, I was talking with Shiroek about my at-the-time jam project and mentioned that I was going to be doing another jam. She suggested that we work together on it, and I thought that sounded like a great idea! Sure enough, a few months later, the time for the jam came around and she started asking me about it. Since I had just finished working with Nicole and Shield God on Saving Grace, I set up a chatroom in my development Discord for this new project including the two of them and Shiroek.

Week of Rest

Some people in the Toxic Yuri Jam server suggested I take a break after crunching on the other game. Shiroek and I agreed that she would start working on character designs with minimal involvement from me while I rested.

My rest wasn’t total, as I did spend some energy putting together worldbuilding and plot outline material that I shared with everyone.

Plot Outline

From June eleventh to the twelfth I was working on the plot outline for the game. I can’t remember what exactly inspired me to eschew starting at the beginning of the story, but the first scene I added was the one where Malthus and Abaddon have their meeting in the bank.

Then, I let the plot flow naturally. I didn’t have a strong sense of the characters, just the worldbuilding I had put together and some general themes. Originally in the outline Malthus was going to have a little extended adventure, but I realized I needed to scale it back.

The thing is, even when actively trying to keep the outline from ballooning to a ridiculous length (and actively trimming stuff), I managed to make a very long outline. There were a total of twenty-five scenes by the time I felt like I was happy with it, around the twelfth.

Manuscript First Draft

The Monday after a nice long Pride weekend (June sixteenth) I started writing the scenes themselves. In the beginning I stuck to the same order that I wrote the outline points in, for the same reasons that I did then. Sticking Malthus and Abaddon in an (un)locked room together just seems like a great way for me to learn about both of them.

Drafting is a hard process. I’m doing it right now, creating a draft for this postmortem, and you feel like you’re one of those icebreaker ships that has to clear its own path to get anywhere. There’s no correct answer. I’m fairly certain I went mad for the next few weeks while drafting this thing.

There were three stages of characterization, Shiroek’s fantastic design/notes, the characters’ contexts (based on their social positions and skeleton of behavior), and finally their own voices developing as I wrote them. I languished on this scene a bit, my log says that I finished it on the twenty-fourth, so a week after I had started. There was a combination of fatigue from the last jam (even though I had rested), vile perfectionism, and a dissatisfaction with the voices of the characters I was developing.

I sketched, erased, sketched again, striking and striking the page until finally, the characters I knew were buried in by evil little heart leaped out. At that point, I didn’t feel like I was performing or writing the characters as much as I was channeling them. That’s when I knew I had hit my mark.

Referring to my work log again, I submitted the manuscript to Nicole on the fourth of July. While it took a read and prepared notes for me, I got to work on the in-engine portions of the game.

I’m noticing a recurring issue with my development process, and that’s spending far too much time trying to get a script that I’m perfectly happy with. It’s left me in situations where I’m scrambling and crunching. I need to give myself sub-deadlines in the process to ensure that I’m not too far off track, exposing myself to unnecessary physical and mental stress.

Moving to the Engine

It wasn’t too long until Nicole came back with helpful suggestions for me. I applied them to the script on July seventh, then after my day off on the eighth, started to move my markdown manuscript to Ren’Py script.

This involves creating a new file for each scene, setting up a label for it, and then pasting my manuscript text into the file. From there I fix the indentation and apply some text replacements, changing things like “Malthus:” or “Abaddon:” into “m” and “a”, before finally making sure to wrap the text in quotes and properly escape any pre-existing ones.

This is a long, manual process, and it would absolutely be worth it for me to spend some time coding up a markdown manuscript -> Ren’Py script transpiler.

While I was doing this, I made sure to leave comments in places I thought I could add sound (spoiler, I didn’t do that), text effects, or reminding myself of CG placement.

Backgrounds

Once I finished moving the final scene in, I took another pass through the story to add backgrounds! For convenience I went straight through the game, linearly, searching through my available backgrounds for images that I could edit for purpose. Some of the standout moments I remember from this are feeling very smart for using an outdoor area as Abaddon’s indoor throne, and the discovery of applying a dither after blurring. I started to rush near the end.

Character Art

Then, I made another pass through the story to display Shiroek’s character portraits and change their expressions properly. I also had to play with the default transitions when hiding and showing the game window, and I’m still not quite pleased with the result. Ideally I would like to not have the NVL-mode background at all, but that would require some other method of keeping the text readable.

It was a lot of fun seeing Abaddon speaking her lines.

Finishing Up

By this point it was 9pm on submission night. My bomb collar was due to go off unless I took drastic measures. I started going through the game to add statements to clear the screen, but realized I didn’t have time. I instead configured a “max statements per screen”, had it scroll infinitely, and manually fixed the few times text managed to overflow. Good enough.

Then, I set up the Itch page, slapped together a cover (which I’ve since replaced), made some builds, and gave the Linux version a test before uploading them to the page.

I would like to say I passed out after that, but I think I stayed up pretty late. I was wired.

Closing Thoughts

Next project, I’m going to leave more time for the implementation half. I’ve shown that I can write a good script, I don’t need to agonize over it to the detriment of the project and my own health.

There are some updates I’d like to make to this project before I’m happy with it, too. Overall I’m pretty pleased, and the people I’ve heard from seem to really like these two characters. I will keep version one (the jam version) available when I make those updates, I think having a copy of the game as it stood when I submitted it is important.

Right now I feel tired. I’m going to go get some rest. Thanks for reading.