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. 😛