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.