1st Version

I don't even remember what initially spurred this idea but I sure do remember this being a mess of a month.

The main stipulation I had for this project is that it had to be completed before the end of March. That way, I wouldn't waste a lot of time worrying about what was always going to be a low-quality project in an engine I was using for the 'first' time.  The first time I used this engine had been back in high school for about 50 hours apparently and I remember not really being able to tackle anything well because... school. And first time trying it. 

When I was deciding how to accomplish this project in about a month, I always planned to use the RPGmaker assets and to make original art + SFX only if they were necessary additions. To make sure the original art fit in a little better, I decided to make little edits to the RPGmaker assets too. Although I definitely saved a lot of time, I realized I had to adjust the story draft a lot and couldn't entirely do what I wanted.

Because of that, I really bullshitted a lot of the story and characters in the moment. To be fair, I DID expect that I would have to be flexible and so I purposely didn't try to have many hard-coded moments, character traits, or world-building. This 1st version really lacks cohesive pacing and development as a result but surprisingly I found myself writing a more grounded version of the original story. The world-building also changed a lot too. Now I wonder if I should create a different project that follows the story of this version? Maybe we'll follow S this time! But that's all for later.

Anyways, thanks to the bullshitting, adapting to the RPGmaker assets, and also trying to get a wrangle on using the engine for the first time, I ended up making a deal with myself that no matter how shitty this project feels I can make a 2nd version that will make me feel like I made up for it. I'm pretty excited about it since I had a lot of 'goodbye' moments to different things I really liked.

Writing for an RPGMaker game was also a new experience! When I wrote short stories and even Visual Novels, those allowed for a lot more prose. With this game, so much more of it was in the art and the movement of that art. Of course, I also had to write more dialogue too which is... not really something I do in a lot of my stories. I worried a lot that my dialogue would sound cookie-cutter and would just be plain un-fun and I think it is! Too bad for this time.

I also realized when I was trying to write some kind of draft for the first day that I actually needed to make a draft of the map first. I mean... I had no idea how my characters would look, interact, or feel in a world that wasn't made from my own art or intentions. Like... it was difficult pulling so many all-nighters to draw for Unforgotten but it was also a lot easier writing the story draft because I knew I could draw whatever I pleased. I knew I shouldn't have freedom for this project.

In the end, I would take about  a week or more to draft out everything and test it for each day of the story. That's map, story draft, art edits and additions, code all the dialogue events, and bug-test the day. It's a lot of time and very little. I'm seriously lucky I decided to make such a short project for February but WHY do I insist on separating my projects into four parts?

Not to mention as I got more comfortable with the engine with each new day, I started adding random events and dialogue that you, the player, may never see if you don't explore the area well enough or don't go back to old things. For a while, I wasn't sure if I wanted to make characters repeat the same dialogue in case the player wanted to re-read something or  just reiterate the player's next task... and well there's just a confusing mix of both.

Thanks to those new random events and dialogue (for the most part, you can interact with a lot of things in the game and C will make some kind of commentary!), I was deeper in the rabbit hole of contingencies in case a player did Thing X or didn't do Thing Y. Because it's just common sense that a character would reference that thing, right? And I think it's more fun too. I suspect a lot of errors I haven't found myself will come from the logic breaks in the if statements. Sigh...

And if you made it here, did you know that you can actually meet D all 4 days? Generally, I hid D's hiding place near S but on Day 3... well, let's just say that one is probably a lot easier than you think. Oh and also there's a little spookscare on Day 2 that's only accessible after you've spoken to S for the first time that day.  If you went to go find M for that optional errand (and didn't find him yet)...

Oh and M, that piece of shit! I actually hard-coded from the beginning that he would change spots after the player speaks to S for the first time in the day. Thanks to that, I had a lot of hardship trying to figure out how events look so that there wouldn't be DOUBLE M! M x 2 was a complete nightmare... but thanks to that, I got a lot more comfortable with Autorun events and conditional statements. It was also great for learning the engine automatically has 'characters' turn towards the player when they're spoken to and then they automatically return to where they were looking before. Plus,  they are automatic obstacles so the player never runs inside them. Neat!

I also learned pretty late what the Jump to Label command does. Whenever I had a block of dialogue that would have a single interruption in case of an if statement I always had copy-pasted the rest of the dialogue after the interruption into the else part... Oh, I could have saved so much time NOT editing what was essentially the same dialogue 2 or 3 times. Even worse when I would bug-test and realize I could phrase something better...

Then I spent pretty much the last day of the project (yesterday) finishing leftover art like S's blanket and D's animation and making a final decision on what RPGmaker map music and SFX to use then finally bug-testing. Previously, I had only bug-tested each day indiviudually and so I had to do  a full playthrough to make sure they all lined up correctly. They did not. Multiple times. Not to mention I still found a lot of visual errors and dialogue branch errors. Goddamn M came up the most in these errors. Surprisingly, Q did not have that many bugs in total despite showing up way more often in the main storyline. I love you, Q <3.

Then after doing all that shit, I accidentally exported the finished version INTO MY PROJECT FOLDER... I forgot to change the title of the project so it was just the working title "Change" on the initial screen!!!!! That's FINE but a little ON-THE NOSE. LIKE THE TITLE I ENDED UP CHOOSING ANYWAYS.

Well, the only real difference is that I couldn't play-test the game anymore in the engine thanks to the 'packages.json' being overwritten with a version meant for the Game application. There was no real screw-up with any of the programming or other parts of the game. I didn't realize that until later plus it was a bit much to re-export the game every time I had to  make a little edit anyways since I still planned to do like half a playthrough just to make sure the game actually did run as intended. I just wanted to understand what the exact problem was too. It took a lot of Googling... because most people don't mess up the way I do.

Still, I actually wasn't that emotionally ready to upload the game at the time either plus I was in the middle of realizing that I couldn't just export the game for Mac like I was able to do in Ren'py. There was a little extra finangling needed for the game to actually run on Mac. In the end, I was able to realize the issue and was so exhausted at the end of that like 20- hr day that I just gave up with the Mac thing.

Anyways, I really learned a lot from this without being overwhelmed by what I don't know yet. Now I really feel confident that I can tackle the next project decently. From that angle, this was a successful experiment even if the end product isn't all that great.

Oh by the way, I think it's fairly obvious but everyone's names are short for something about them. If you look through the art pngs in the game folders, you can see most of everyone's names. The exceptions are C for Change and F for... so. Originally, it was going to be Food but then I realized it would be a lot easier and more fun if I made F for Fisher instead. Then I could place him by water and there'd be a little water feature in every map. But then I realized it would be odd for a fisher... not to have a fishing rod. And I REALLY didn't want to edit all his poses to have that fishing rod. So it just became Fish instead... because I made the impromptu decision in like the first dialogue he has of the game AS I WAS CODING IT IN THE ENGINE that F is terrible at fishing but fish are his passion in life. By then, I had already named his sprite png "F". Yep. Just one of those things I 'adapted' to.

Edit: I forgot to say my total RPGMaker hrs on Steam are now 143 so I added 90 hrs just for this game :D