Visual Novel retrospect

Cirno’s perfect summer vacation

I had a wonderful time creating Cirno’s Perfect Summer Vacation. This was the first time I had ever published a game to a major distribution platform and I feel so proud of it! I feel that creating this had taught me and the team so much, now we feel ready to take on the world with our feature-length visual novel.  Below are my notes for our post-mortem, what worked, what didn’t what would be better for next time!

What worked:

• Getting an early start! We started working on this game right away, setting up an itch.io placeholder page and just building a base visual novel
• Jumping around between chapters: While writing we would write in whatever sections came to us with inspiration. This allowed a lot fewer writers blocks
• Open source assets; We had lots of great character designs and free music to use, this saved us a lot of time from having to create fresh assets ourselves
• Editing photos for backgrounds, they looked gorgeous and were quick to make.
• Daily project working after work at the cafe: It was really nice to be able to work together with my team each day. It kept us motivated and in motion
• Very successful on Android platform
• Working with Ren’py made things very easy to work with
• Cute new sprites for Moka
• Getting the game available on Google Play

What didn’t work:

• Taking on too much work on my own: One of my constant struggles is that I take on much more work than I can handle. I ended up doing too much on my own so our story was lacking polish
• A mixture of tense in words; Unintentionally I was mixing a lot of the writing between future and present tense
• Sprites were different sizes and sometimes intersecting with each other
• The story was initially too long, had to be cut and smushed together
• Character intros too long, the meat of story too short
• Some backgrounds didn’t really go well with the scene
• Mixed up image naming convention
• File size too large

What would be better for the next visual novel:

• Early on divide up work for the entire team
• Keep consistent image naming convention (‘this_name.png” for filename and “this name” for the image variables)
• Check sprite sizes as you develop and scale them if necessary
• Compress images or spit up a sprite sheet
• Write everything in the present tense
• Keep the story a comfortable length
• Have someone edit the story and check for flow

In conclusion, this visual novel made for the Cirno 9 jam gave us the full development life cycle within a short period of time. Next time we will have a lot more experience and create an even better visual novel!