♥ Week 1 Devlog ♥

Hi Everyone! This is my first Devlog for Yaoi Jam 2022, as well as my first time participating in a Jam. 

I'll be attempting it (Mostly) solo, Doing all the art, coding, writing and GUI. (With a little help from my sister in the form of a character design and ideas person.)

I'm gonna be doccumenting the process as I go, partially for accountability, and partially for giving an insight into the process of trying to make a Visual Novel in a Short(ish) Period of time. 

Special mention to katy113's NaNoReNo devlogs, which were an inspiration to doing this. 

-Initial ideas-

I decided to join the Jam about a week before it officially got going. 

As of writing this, It's been a couple weeks since publishing my second Visual Novel, Sherbert In A Bottle. 

I figure the next step now I'm confident in using Ren'Py would be to involve myself in something a little more community focused. Upon deciding this, YaoiJam was just about to start, and after looking at the requirements I was pretty quick to come up with something that met it's conditions.

I wanted a game about shipping 2 characters together, over playing as one of the characters and trying to date the other. Personally I've just felt more for two characters I think should kiss more than I have trying to fictionally date a character, and I've already made something close enough to a "single route otome game" in the past. 

I'm imagining something like "2 sides of the same story" with (roughly) the same ending, but nothing's set completely in stone as of now. 

( Top secret plans)

I was very excited, staying up until 2am my time waiting for the Jam to start. Was time well spent, drawing the image used for both my game announcement post and this devlog's thumbnail. 

-Scoping it out-

I usually have to watch myself when it comes to the structure of the game- I don't get too caught up in scope creep issues as they'd be traditionally defined (Too many words, too many characters, and too much being added to it as time goes on, etc) But I get very excited with Ren'Py capabilites and things tend to get unnessicarily complex as a result of my desire for a varied experience/potential replay value.

There's a reason a lot of these projects haven't seen the light of day.  This time I'm focusing more on having a story with words and pictures first, and fun codey stuff second, as best as I can. 

I'd barely had the idea before I jumped in, but the idea felt solid enough I could make something out of it. Watching 2 idiots get together? I'm pretty sure I can make that happen in two months.

-General report- 

Week 1 going pretty strong!

I'm about 8k words into the first draft of the script and the overall VN's taking shape quite nicely. Everything's sort of in nice little event chunks I'm planning to expand upon, and later I'll better string them together into a cohesive story as the Jam goes on.

Initially I was thinking the VN in total'd be somewhere around 7-12k words, and I certainly wasn't expecting to hit that amount during the first week. What I've written so far only needs the assets I'd planned for, so I'm not concerned by the larger-than-expected word count.

I write within the Ren'Py script file itself most of the time (no outside editor) though I do have issues with hand pains that prevent me from doing too much in one go. 

My workaround is to type in notepad on my phone (trying to indent the code as needed through counting spaces in lots of 4) and then sending it to myself through twitter DMs to then post into the script.rpy file directly.  It works surprisingly well! My thumbs are a lot more resilliant than my other fingers.

Visually, Things aren't going too bad either. Here's a couple of screenshots of where everything's at currently:

I'm already in love with how the 3 characters colors all go together.

I have my 2 character leads, Hayden (Pink)  and Arley (Green) , as well as a character my sister designed, Nanala:

Their dynamic works out pretty well! 

As per the rules of the Jam, no actual assets were started on before the July 1st, but Hayden in particular is a character that's been sitting in my Ren'Py WIPs for quite a while. I just sorta re-stumbled upon him while looking through my old projects and decided it was time to give him a boyfriend.

The basic gist is that I designed him back in early 2020 as part of a group project that ended up getting shelved, so I had a disproportionate amount of concept art for him.

I definitely want to use that cute winter jacket if I can, I was onto something there.

His personality's changed a bit to fit this story, but his design's essentially gone untouched, other than maybe rounding out his hair a little and giving him a tie. 

Becuase of this, Hayden's the character I'm most confident in, so he's getting completed first.

As for Arley?  Well, I have this, which was doodled right as I decided Hayden should have a boyfriend:

(I liked the colors, But the face didn't feel right. It doesn't even look like current Arley!)

Aaaand that's it. 

Here's where all 3 of the sprites are currently at.

The actual sprite is fairly close to being done, but this is currently the only expression he can make.  Nala and Arley are still just sketches, and I'll be fixing that in Week 2.

I'll wait until the script is more fleshed out before adding anything else, becuase I don't want to go overboard and put time into assets I won't end up using. (It's usually an area that trips me up- I get excited and make far too much.)

I'm going with cell shading for the characters, and I'd like to give them white borders to stand out from the background they're on. I'd also like heavy use of tone dots, and maybe do something stylish with the backgrounds (Flat, maybe bolder colors, or something to that effect). 

Backgrounds are low on the priorety list right now as first I feel I need to finish the script to work out exactly what I need for them when the time comes.

Currently I'm using some of Uncle Mugen's backgrounds as filler, but I'll more than likely end up using his 3D models as a starting point for the final images later down the line. Right now I'm looking at about 4 backgrounds I don't think I could do without, which is very manageable, especially if I cut out some of the work with 3D.

For the GUI, I'm reusing an asset from an old yugioh fanart (Which I checked with the hosts it's ok to reuse!):

I don't think I'll be going too hard with the GUI, or if I'll touch the main menu at all, but It's important to me to at least have the textbox sorted early. (Font currently is a placeholder, I think I'd like something a little less varied.)

I think I'd like to have a custom stat screen for a bit extra flavour, but that's purely in the stretch goals camp right now. (I'm using code from https://zeillearnings.itch.io/ (Thank you very much!) which I'd like to heavily customize.)

Music's another one of those things I'll worry about once the script's taken a more solid shape. I'll more than likely use entirely CC music made by others, but it's always been a dream of mine to one day try my hand at making my own soundtrack. Maybe for some sort of Non-Jam variant in the future.

- Snake Adventures -

I'm unsure of how much this will effect the final product, but especially with RenPy updating to Python 3, I'm trying to better impliment Python into my Games. I'll be using Classes to keep track of the character's variables, which should allow for that fancy stat screen I mentioned I'd like to work to. There's also a Calendar, but that's purely for aesthetic/ GUI theme purposes.

I wouldn't call these things super relevant, but it took an afternoon or 2 out of the Week so I figure I'd mention them in the devlog too.

Something slightly more amusing  (and maybe even practically applicable to other Ren'Py devs)  is an "Ah hah!" moment  I had with using Arrays to store names I don't want the player to use.

 I'm finally getting to the point where my "Wait, I think this would work" thoughts do, in fact, work.

It was getting a bit ridiculous before that, naming every variation I could think of in 1 long  string of "or"s:

To now having a seperate list containing the names, which is then checked after a name is inputted:

Looking at this again, I realize I need to add in " " into the forbidden names. Blank names currently work LOL

A big thank you to @/KaiSchallenberg on twitter for pointing out I could make my life even easier by converting the names to lowercase before checking them- before that, I still had duplicates in the list x___x 

- In Summary-

• - 8k words of rough first draft written
• - 3 character sprites sketched, one of those finished
• - Plans for Backgrounds made, general style of the VN decided upon
• - Textbox part of the GUI made
• - Music will be worried about later
• - Silly Python additions built, lightly implimented

- Looking forward -

Plans for Week 2 are to just...keep on truckin'.  I'm comfortable spending another week before I start refining my plans for the final product.

By the end of Week 2, I'd like to:

• - Have Arley and Nanala's sprites to the same point as Hayden's
• - Have a tighter plan with the script ( maybe hit between 10 and 12k?)
• - Have the silly stats screen made into something polished enough to justify keeping?  Or cut it entirely
• -Have  the player character designed.

Currently the player character just. Don't have a face at all. I haven't decided upon one. Nor have I decided upon a gender, though I think leaving that up to the player and having concequences as a result of that feels a little too far out of scope.

CGs are off the table for now. I might need one at the end of the game, but I'll consider it in Month 2 once everything nessicary is complete.

And that's everything so far! 

Happy Jamming to everyone also taking part!  I'll have another (and probably MUCH shorter) devlog at the end of Week 2.

Thanks for reading! ♥