GRAARRWWW!!!!!! GRARRWWRWRWRRR!!!! KILL!!! DESTROY!!!! – The monster

Hello Ludum Dare people!

The monster is a visual novel that tells a story of love between a monster and a girl. Maybe, don’t quote me on that.

I started programming the game before the compo because I was testing Luxe one of the libraries from snöwkit.

This is all I did before the compo. It took me like 4~5 hours while exploring the library. The background is from here.

I thought that doing a visual novel game would be an easy way to participate in the compo. But I can’t art so I had to find all the sprites and backgrounds. This and having code before the compo that I forgot to upload forced me to join the jam. And that’s good. At the end I had only a few hours a day to work on the game and I wouldn’t be able to finish anything as “polished” as the final product for the game.

I wrote the story while implementing new things. “Oh! it needs choices!!!” and implemented it. “Oh! let’s make it transition!” and implemented it. So, while I tried to keep a somewhat coherent story it… it isn’t.

I was really lazy (and had little time) to work on it so I chose the easier path… everything is a callback! I don’t even know how it doesn’t breaking in thousands of bugs, but, eh, it works so that’s fine.

Working with Luxe was really easy. The engine doesn’t force into a way of doing things and let you choose the best approach for yourself. To prove that to myself I did a little of everything, components, subclasses, a little of events, states,…  It’s a really nifty engine but the documentation can be improved, then again, I don’t think there is a project with good documentation in Haxe so…

She is waiting for you.

When the compo started I already knew I was going to do a visual novel, but the theme didn’t clicked me until a few hours later. The code was all in one place and it wasn’t really organized. Because I knew what type of game I was doing I started to write the script without anything planned.

The second day, I organized a bit the code and keep adding features. Also, the snöwkit guys released mínt a minimal, renderer agnostic ui library for Haxe. And, of course, I had to use it! It’s was really easy and had the choice code done in less than a couple of hours.

In the same day, I wasted some time in a few non-important things like trying to get the game working on Android (I had the Android SDK and NDK outdated so I had to update them) but, after that, I just had to select android as a target and, BAM! the game was running on my phone!

I was short on time by the third day and kind of rushed the story (as if it weren’t rushed already…) but I like the end result. Now, it won’t be a bestseller, that’s for sure.

I had a lot of fun making and writing the game, a visual novel was something I always wanted to try to make and this LD was the perfect excuse to make one!

For the future, I may work on the engine (from scratch?) again and make a good visual novel. I’m not sure yet, but if you are interested on it, let me know it on the comments or contact me on my webpage!

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that this post-mortem has more text than the game so I will end it here! Don’t forget to play, comment and rate it!

Bye!