Woops I accidentally took a nap for more than 500 hours and ended up working on other projects since the last devlog, quickly shouting them out before I delve into the postmortem:

• The Batchelor by Misha
  • To get more comfortable with coding in Ren’Py, I volunteered for this project as a programmer. Check it out for a fun time with queer and silly vampires.
• Hydrangea by Meiri Games
  • I helped out on this project as the UI artist! Meiri is an amazing lead and the rest of the team did such a wonderful job bringing this game to life. Please play it when you can!
• Galaxsea Games and Lunar Bloom
  • Galaxsea Games is a newly established studio that I’m leading, currently developing Lunar Bloom for Blossom Jam and Otome Jam! Lunar Bloom is a Visual Novel with stat-raising mechanics centered around reviving an old farm on the Moon. It's still in the early stages but be sure to keep an eye out for new updates regarding social media platforms, dev progress, and potential campaigns 👀

Now onto the postmortem!

The Good

Let’s start with the wins - Stuck by Design has been downloaded over a hundred times! Thank you for playing this game, enjoying it, rating it, giving feedback, or even following me, I appreciate the support. 

While a hundred downloads isn’t a massive number, I’m still proud that I got anything released at all, and that people are enjoying the game despite its flaws and shortcomings.

What I Learned

I learned how to code in Ren’Py!?! The development encountered a lot of hiccups during the programming phase, and I partly take responsibility for why it got so bumpy.

Since I was in charge of producing all the visual assets (backgrounds, UI, sprites, CGs…) AND most of the writing, it took a lot more time than I anticipated to get all of them done, leaving little time for the programmers to implement them. Programmers came and went for varying reasons, either through conflicting schedules with other projects/personal lives, and I had to pick up where they left off and find other people to fill in their roles.

At this point, I was desperate to get the game finished, so I bit the bullet and decided to try my hand at implementing the dialogue. I followed tutorials on YouTube, referenced coding on past projects I worked on, posts on Reddit and lemmasoft, and one way or another the roughly 10k of words were in the game. Also going to take this time to give the biggest thank you to afuera for taking the mantle of implementing the GUI, she was an absolute godsend during the final push and this game probably would not have come out at all without her help.

I guess the major takeaway from all of this is that I think I bit off more than I could chew, to say the least. For my first time leading a project, I think I could have been a little less ambitious and written a shorter but more impactful story that required fewer visual assets. As much as I love Yuki, I think he could’ve been a more interesting character that got more development outside of simply being a love interest. Alas, these things happen so you can learn, and learn I did!

What’s Next

I won’t lie, things have been pretty tough since finishing this project, lots of job rejections, some health issues, and the government-mandated existential crisis that comes with turning 25, but there are a lot of exciting things to look forward to! I’ve gone on to participate in more game jams as stated above, and even started my first steps toward establishing my studio AND leading another game. 

While there’s part of me that wishes this game was more polished or had more downloads, it’s been the biggest step I’ve taken in my journey as an indie VN dev, and I’m SO incredibly thankful for that. If you made it all the way here, thanks for reading! I hope you’ll continue to follow me on my journey as I release more games in the future 💙