Welp. I’m using ren’py and this is my plot graph.

And part of my face, which looks derpy but I’m not going to bother editing it out now.

…I made one, if anyone wants to join it and play/listen to music.

https://plug.dj/ludum-dare-pdj-unofficial

So… I’ve written half of the script I need to write before I can consider sleeping. Thankfully somewhat horribly, I still have the tea abomination, which is now cold and completely opaque. But once I’ve written the lead-up, I can write the boss battle, and there’s only one ending that entirely bypasses it without taking output from the result of the battle. So that’s my next section. I’m probably going to need to use PyGame, and I have no experience with that. So, um… wish me luck?

And after that:

-The art: Backgrounds, characters, etc. Time-consuming, but relatively easy.

-Actually adding the art. May be harder.

-The music: I have FL Studio and kinda know how to use it, which I suppose gives me an edge somewhat. Hopefully I can make something that doesn’t sound awful. Usually, I’ll spend hours on a track and then trash it anyway. This weekend, I don’t have that liberty.

-The sound effects: should be fairly easy to get. All I have to do is scream into a mic 😛

‘kay, so I’m doing the compo. I’ve never used pygame before, but now I have to and I’m following this tutorial. Does this count as base code if I just paste it in and then proceed to make changes to it? I’m basically typing it in to my file, and I feel like pasting it in, then making the relevant changes would be faster. By the time my boss battle is completely written, the code would be hardly recognizable… and I feel like this should fall under ‘good derivatives’. And it’s kinda like using a third-party library.

Buuut…. it’s code, and not a visual or auditory asset. What do?

I’ve worked out the art style for this game (now named St. George’s Academy for Monster-Slaying Lasses). It takes me about an hour to do three character-emotions, which is fortunate because it means I have time to draw the other characters.

Backgrounds can come later 😀 It’s time to work on the battle!

I just got the Renpy RPG Battle Engine working (not mine). Fighters are my images, background needs replacing in the next 24 hours. And everything needs to be rearranged.

Well, this is what the final fight is going to look like, and other than adjusting the colors of the text bubbles this is probably what it’s going to look like at release.

I spent waaaay too much time on the background 😀

Purple is apparently a theme.

This is late for a compo blog post, but I fell asleep and forgot to write a post about my game!

Linky here. It’s a visual novel about a new student at an all-girls boarding school dedicated to the art and science of slaying monsters.

 

Okay! Here goes!

The first has to be We Missed You by RHY3756547. It’s just… let’s just say I gave it very high ratings in multiple categories. It’s the best damn game I’ve played so far and it looks like it’s not getting enough ratings. And my mind is blown with how it possibly could be made in 48 hours. It’s that good. You should play itgo play it now.

The second is OMNOMNOM by Zupoman. It seems a little weird to have such a simplistic game next to such a polished, insanely good how-did-they-possibly-do-that one, but this game is actually really fun. It’s exactly what it says on the image, and it’s really hard. It reminds me of the flash games I used to play as a kid, in all the best ways. You should check this one out. It doesn’t have enough ratings to place currently.

Honorable mention: Georgette by Skyllartor. It isn’t in a top anything because it’s missing a few elements that I think are important in a game. But it’s great for getting stress out. Play it before finals or something!

Also, I kinda have to plug my game St. George’s Academy for Monster-Slaying Lasses. Please take a look!

 

St. George’s Academy for Monster-Slaying Lasses

Because I had forgotten Ludum Dare was happening, I went cycling pretty much right at the start and came back to a message from killthealias saying “Friendly reminder, Ludum Dare starts in 10 minutes!”

The message was sent two hours ago.

Everything’s a bit more complicated than what went wrong and what went right, so instead of saying that, I’ll cover each section individually.

Art

Characters

If I had a tablet, I would have drawn my characters with one. But I didn’t, and pixel art really doesn’t fit the visual novel category. So, I drew them on paper… and then I figured ‘if I don’t make any attempt to make them look like they’re not on paper, and continue that theme consistently, it’s not a flaw! It’s an art style!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, I did. And people seemed to like it. So I’d say this part was pretty good, though in a perfect world I’d have taken higher resolution pictures of the characters. But since that world is perfect… I’d have a tablet.

 

Backgrounds

I made my backgrounds mainly by taking photos and processing them to hell. Here’s an example of what I mean.

Before

After

And some of them, like the dorm, turned out great. I’m actually really happy with the library and hallway backgrounds.

Others… I didn’t have time to get a new, better, photo, and I don’t like them as much. The problem with these is that if I used someone else’s picture, it wouldn’t be a good enough derivative… so I had to use my own.

Code

Ren’Py

I love Ren’Py. It’s an amazing, flexible framework for building visual novels in. It’s also the highest-level scripting language you will ever use in your life. It’s built on Python… which is already very high-level. So, yeah. I didn’t really have to program much of anything: it was all scripting.

Ren’Py Battle Framework

It turned out well, I guess. I didn’t have the time or knowledge to create a battle engine myself, but I’m going to make my own face-to-face battle engine soon, because it honestly wasn’t completely suited for the situation and I think I can make a lighter version. It didn’t seem very flexible, but I suppose it did the trick.

Sound

Music

There isn’t so much to say here! I made two songs, but… there were going to be more. Six songs, in the least. But music takes way longer than you’d expect (if you aren’t auto-generating it), and I didn’t have time for that in the end. The two that did make it into the game were apparently really catchy, though. So at least that’s good!

SFX

This is pretty much the audio equivalent of backgrounds: find a sound, record it, process it to hell. It worked.

Story

 

I honestly think that this part went great. I spent most of my time writing. I went into this LD with the idea of a multi-path storyline… and I came out of it with a multi-path story line. There were a few elements (no spoilers here) that I foreshadowed and went over so. many. times. testing them, I thought “Nobody will be surprised.” And then everyone was surprised. It was great.

My one wish with the storyline is that I’d had a chance to draft it. All of the dialogue is a first draft: I’d write a section, then abandon it to the wolves. Write another section, abandon it. So it isn’t polished, and a lot of the writing is not-so-subtle. But I think it turned out pretty well! 😀

And that’s it for my post-mortem. 😛