Clove's Story: O2A2 VN Jam

Clove finds herself in the principal's office at school after engaging in a fight with her step-brother Jibu. She must talk her way out of detention with her homeroom teacher Ms. Kurano.

Should she lie or tell the truth? Help Clove navigate her way through this interactive visual novel through choices!

🎮 Play the game here:

Keeping motivated and making progress on personal projects has been a bit slower this year, so I decided that I'd take a break from everything and do a quick game jam over the past week! The "Only One of Any Asset" (O2A2) Visual Novel Jam on itchio is super limited forced me to keep things very small and simple. This was a way for me to finish a quick project and also learn a new game engine: Ren'Py.

The Process

I spent about 5 days on the project, but really only a few hours each of those days during the night after work. So probably less than 20 hours overall. I'm going to go through what my process was to create this game.

Day 1:

So I started out by brainstorming a bunch of ideas in a Notepad document. I was trying to think about short ideas that could be accomplished in 1 scene. So I settled on 5 ideas that I sketched out thumbnails for in my sketchbook.

From there, I narrowed it down to the top 3 that I felt had the most potential. I went through some royalty free music I had downloaded and started to pick out some potentials for ones that fit the moods so I could start to get that down.

I recently learned how to program in Python at work over the past couple of months, so I felt ready to finally dive in and see what Ren'Py was all about.

I downloaded Ren'Py and then started to look through some of the documentation to figure out how it worked. I used the base project and edited some names to at least understand how to launch the game and write basic dialogue. It was pretty straightforward. I had a test project I made about 10 years ago but I didn't really remember much of how it worked, so I just looked at my code and the test project to try and remember how some of it worked as well.

Day 2:

Then I went through and typed out the whole script! I decided to go with the Clove's Story idea. I didn't worry about syntax too much and was mostly focused on just writing. I came up with 4 different endings based on your choices as well.

Then I started to translate everything into the actual syntax needed for Ren'Py. I tested out the first couple of choices and got it functioning.

Then I threw together some quick assets so I could at least have placeholder art in there to test that the images were appearing properly.

I made the final character and background art. This included a few different expressions for Ms Kurano, the character who's visible in the game.

Day 3:

I came up with a layout for the title screen, then I lined and colored it. I decided I would add the final shading later.

Then I started to work on the GUI. I started by editing some of the Ren'Py code files. I updated the options file to hide the game's name on the title screen and then updated the about to include credits.

I looked around for some fonts and then imported those into the gui file. I also updated the name box so it was centered instead of left aligned.

I worked on some of the GUI image files next. I started with the dialogue box and made it more paper-like to go with the school theming.

Then I made the choices boxes to match that style.

I changed the colors to work on lighter colors instead of darker colors and made a basic image for the preferences menus.

I updated the title screen to add the title text and then also made the GUI for it.

Day 4:

I started this night by finishing up all of the game progression on the coding side. This included adding all of the choice progression, variables for choices, and conditions for the multiple endings. Then I added the code to change the character expressions throughout the game.

I also updated the assets so the name box is a separate image file from the textbox so I could make the narrator textbox not have the name box. I also updated the narrator text to gray and italicized so it's more clear that it's a narration.

I decided which music I wanted to play and then updated all of the phone asset files to match the regular ones. I also added the final credits scene, where I learned about transitions, line breaks, and solid colored backgrounds.

Day 5:

I finished the title screen and shaded the characters!

Then I exported the game and finished up my itchio page. I made both a web build so it could be played in the browser and a Windows exe file so it could be downloaded.

And then the game was done! Overall this was a fun little one week project and I mostly used it as a way to learn about Ren'Py and take a break from my other projects. It was very spur of the moment idea, but I'd love to do more mini-projects like this throughout the year to keep myself motivated and finishing projects regularly.

Thanks for reading about my little game jam project! I hope you'll enjoy playing it, or even just learning about my process.

The Nays Origins Devlog 8: The Final Game

I finished my Game Boy game, The Nays Origins! Though I know it was technically done during the previous dev log, I tied off loose ends and actually finished it up this time.

🎮 Download and play the game here:

Here are a few final screenshots:

Now I'll get into the final dev log progress.

To start off, my friend Jinny playtested the game and only ran into one game-breaking bug. It was one that would randomly happen so I haven't tracked down why that is. But she was able to restart and progress. While she was playtested, I watched and took some notes. I was able to fix up all of the notes and nothing major had to be implemented.

So at that point, I did a final export and put it on the Game Boy cartridge for the last time. I also made a web build of the game and tested that so it can be played in the browser on itchio. I made the itchio page and created some custom assets to brand the page as well.

Then I printed out the final versions of all of the physical parts. I went to FedEx and had the instruction manual, box art, and sticker all printed. I wanted to make sure it looked polished and the printer in my apartment just wasn't doing it. So Jinny helped me cut out the pieces while we were there and then I was able to fit the final box art into the case!

I also printed a bunch of versions of the sticker page and landed on one that I liked the most. I stuck it onto the EZ Flash Junior cartridge and fit it into the case. It's starting to look official!

Then I put the instruction manual together. At first I was having trouble figuring out how to staple it properly so it wouldn't be bound too unevenly. Eventually I found this video that helped me figure out the method I needed to use. I used a push pin to poke holes where the staples would go, then I took apart two staples to fit them in, and pushed them back into place with an eraser. And then the book was bound together and finished! And it fits perfectly into the case.

And from there, everything was finished and ready to go! I uploaded the instruction manual online here.

Then I took a bunch of photos and then wrapped it up to give to my brother for Christmas.

So overall this was a really fun project and I feel very accomplished. I learned a lot and am excited for what's next. I plan to make a dev log video at some point to talk about my entire process all in one video, to summarize and show it all. This has been a fun journey talking about my process through blog posts though! I hope you enjoyed reading these.

The Nays Origins Devlog 7: Playtesting and Physical Assets

The game is officially done! I have a few more things I want to go back and polish up, but those are mostly wishlist and if they don’t get into the final version, it’s not a big deal. But took a couple of months off after some of this and then came back to finish up after I finished some other projects.

So I started out by finishing up playtesting. I was able to get through the game from start to finish with only some minor bugs throughout! I did some intensive debugging to iron out some of the parts that were having weird issues but weren’t technically game-breaking. So overall A LOT OF TESTING. Though I was taking notes and it was played throughout the day, I’d say it takes about 3 hours to complete the game from start to finish. So it ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be! No wonder testing has been taking so long. This might be the longest game I’ve ever developed.

So I ended up fixing all of the bugs I ran into, including some of the music-related ones too. And everything is pretty much good to go. I would like to go back and add color if I have time, but we’ll see if I end up getting to that. I also was looking into the Super Game Boy borders for a bit. I’m not sure I’ll put a lot of time into fixing colors for the SGB, but making the border won’t take long. I started by doing some sketches for what it might be. I was leaning towards one of the more candle-like ones.

So I took a very short side trip to try and implement a Super GameBoy border because I thought it’d be cool. But then I discovered from some research that SGBs don’t play well with EZ Flash Jrs and my game is technically a GameBoy Color game to bypass some limitations, so it probably wouldn’t work on one anyway. I at least didn’t spend too much time on it, but was an interesting thought.

Then I did some sketches to figure out the cartridge and case artwork. I was also thinking about coming up with a more detailed logo and seeing how I can incorporate it into the existing title screen as well. One idea I came up with was that I’m going to add a QR code to the back that takes you to the itchio page instead of a bar code.

Then I looked at some instruction manuals. I was mostly inspired by Pokemon Red/Blue and Donkey Kong Country 2, since those were ones I remember fondly looking through a lot when I was a kid. I wanted to create fun themed ones like those ones were. So I started to sketch out some ideas and wrote up a Google Doc with some of the text/rough ideas for what all I want in there.

So then I took all of the sketches I drew on paper and brought them into Photoshop. I was mostly working on the whole instruction manual. I resized them and then used this Figma template to lay out all of my pages.

Unfortunately it ended up being not the actual print size so I had to remake them and recreate the roughs in Photoshop. But it at least helped me with lining things up and I used a few of those.

I spent a lot of time doing printing tests. When I was first starting, I was going downstairs to the printer pretty much every day to try something new. I haven’t printed a book on my own before, so this is pretty new. I’ve only printed on Blurb where they did the actual printing for me, so this has been a learning experience.

I started with figuring out the pages and which ones I needed to print together. There was a PDF booklet setting but it didn’t print at the size I wanted, so I ended up manually pairing the ones I needed together. I cut out little pieces of paper and wrote numbers on them to get a feel for how many pages I needed and which ones paired together. This was actually really helpful as a reference!

I did some different size tests and eventually got a ruler to really measure everything precisely. I ended up with 4x4 for the instruction manual. So I ripped out papers to fit the sizes so I could test and make sure before completely resizing everything.

So as mentioned earlier, I got these exact sizes down in Photoshop with my templates. Then I proceeded to work on the case art. Luckily the instruction manual cover, box art cover, and cartridge sticker all use the same art, so I just had to design it for the largest one, the case, and then that art was good to go for all of them.

I designed the entire box art to include the GB side (and I reprinted it to make sure it was sized correctly and the logo was facing the correct direction). I also made the back cover with the QR code like I mentioned earlier.

I was going to print a test print before the final, but unfortunately the printer didn’t have any color ink. So I just had to use the black and white for my first test. I got a final black and white test print and learned that I probably made the colors a bit too dark for the print, so I learned that at least. I also made sure it fit into the box exactly as I wanted, so that was great to see!

Then once the color printer had ink, I was able to print a final version of the box art. I still want to reprint it a little bigger so it can fit better, but it was a good first color print!

And then I proceeded to work on the final art for the instruction manual! I was heavily inspired by the early Pokemon watercolor concepts, so I tried to emulate that style and used some of the same color palettes.

After I finished the art, I did a final test print of everything and then had a few things I wanted to change, so I made some changes and need to reprint. One of those being that I printed them on the wrong sides so when I compiled it, it didn’t line up with the pages in order. But it was good to test printing all the way through with the front and backs. I also needed to fix some of the pages that didn’t quite line up.

And then I got some feedback from my friend Jinny on making the logo bigger and so it stands out more. So that was really helpful!

That’s it for this time! Like I said, I took a quick break and then came back to this project, so it’ll all be wrapped up next time. Though when this is posted it’ll be next time, back in CUPdate time, I paused a couple of months. But the next devlog will be finalizing and wrapping up the game! I’m just going to ask my friend Jinny to playtest it for me, then I’ll be good to try the final version on the hardware and in the browser. I’m hoping to have all of the final prints of the physical aspects at that point as well.