May Wolf Post Jam Thoughts | Future Updates

Hey everyone, Hollow here! Sorry this is so late!

I just wanted to say thank you so much for playing Night | Time Dreading | Fever! It was very fun to meet new devs and got to see so many unique games in this gamejam! Even if my game didn't rank high on any scoreboard, I'm just glad to have actually made something during that month, since I kept going back and forth on whether or not I should even publish it. 

--But hey, I got #14 in Creativity, so that's good enough for me! ^_^

So, Thoughts:

Writing this game has been an experience. Going back to the start I unfortunately had too many ideas to implement at once, wanting to emulate a sort-of "horror themed" style game with a little bit of romance. If anyone is curious about my inspiration, it was from this VN released previously this year.  My goal was to spend the first two weeks planning and writing out the plot for the characters and make sure everything fit well, then use the next two weeks to implement it into Renpy and polish it up. 

Unfortunately, that didn't turn out too well due to IRL complications that took over a week, making me feel drained mentally and then having me try to speed things up for future obligations later on. This caused me to miss major route instances and choices, making the game more streamlined and straight-forward. I also had to change story elements since I clearly decided to place too much of a scope on my back. 

Originally, I had planned to have C.J and Brent have the choice to hang out together versus figuring out the mystery and branch out from there, but I had to scale that back A TON so I didn't damage my mental health. Though to be fair going straight-to-the-point with your work isn't bad when working in a gamejam, but to make everything almost straight forward makes tensions really low, especially with the intended gimmick of the game. 

Speaking of the gimmick, figuring out how to do it and use persistent variables was fun! Learning the basics of Renpy programming was simple, so I wanted to try and see if I could do anything advanced with it, and I'm satisfied with what got!

--And no bugs with it! Yahoo!

I think my only big regret is not speaking to the other wonderful and talented Furry VN makers, who have made amazing games for this jam. They are seriously nice people, and I wish I asked some input on the ideas/story elements I had and wanted to implement.  I'm going to try my best to implement the lessons from the jam for the future and other future game projects. Thank you everyone for playing, commenting and rating the game! Even if I don't respond, it means a lot to me!

Future Updates:

I am currently on break right now trying to take some time off the jam.

However, when I come back, this is the intended plan with polishing the game with the next build:

• Fix the sprites so they aren't clipping off the top of the screen
• Change the character text color to help differentiate each character
• Expand on the Manatee and the Dragon, possibly give them their own short separate sections.
• Fix bugs regarding going into Mark's House 
• Add all bad ends (and possibly expand on some of them if needed)
• Dive more into the "Alien Demon history" for curious players
• Possibly have more characterization for C.J and Brent
• Ensure all choices are working correctly
• Possibly have more NSFW scenes <-- Only if I really feel like it, prob the last thing I'll do

Outside of this plan, I have no intended purpose to continue Night | Time Dreading | Fever afterwards (or at the very least, for awhile if I ever come back to the project). If I continue past the point of polishing It'll be with its own art and music, since without Cody's sprites there'd be none. I'd rather keep going what I have with keeping my interest for the story instead of possibly getting burned out/disinterested in the future.  It's a bit sad, but I'd rather keep it that way so I can think more positively on it, if that makes sense.

As for other future VNs, none yet, but I hope to have something that can live up to or be more improved with N|TD|F being the standard. There may be smaller games here and there but not visual novels, so I'll leave it at that. 

--If you're ever interested in wanting to collab or just chat in the future, let me know (I'm just slow at respondin)!

And (I think) that's everything! Thank you so much for taking the time to read, I hope you have a wonderful day/evening wherever you are! Thank you again for taking the time to play and/or comment on my game! Have an awesome day!