BAF Postmortem in which I get philosophical about past projects and the gamedev process

Intro

At 5k words, Cleave (I will not add the slashes every time. Their purpose is to give the game chuuni edgelord versimilitude, but they do make the game title hard to type and harder to search for.) is twice as long as Petals, my next longest game, which is itself twice as long as most of my prior games, which tended to hover around 1k words in length. I consider this an accomplishment – I’m a slow writer, as well as a sparse one and generally try to avoid fluff or unnecessarily lengthy passages, which makes it hard for me to reach higher word counts. I’ve also long struggled with writing actual plots. Most of my works consist of a single scene or a single incident rather than a narrative that develops as you read. Blessing of the Flower Goddess is probably the most obvious example of this, but I’d argue Deathtouch on Leaves follows the same pattern. So Cleave with its several tonally varied scenes, flashbacks, action and mutliple endings is quite a deviation and hopefully it’s a sign that I’ve grown mentally to be able to conceive of larger, more intricate narratives.

Xiomara character design concept art

Writing, Art, etc

Looking back on Petals to Petals (my game for SWAK jam this year), there’s a lot I’m not satisified with, and one of the things is the rather plain writing style. It makes sense, since PtP’s perspective character is a plain person. I decided to write with more flourishes for Cleave, embracing the spirit of an edgy teenager who loves every bit of their own work without holding back.

Even so, lack of time meant that there are many passages that just ended up in my default writing style rather than the densely poetic one I envisioned for the game. The dialogue portions especially are often rather casual. It’s a feature in a lot of my writing that words spoken by characters are a little closer to how people might realistically talk while the narration is a little more structured and idealised. But even accounting for that, I don’t think I managed to develop a strong sense of voice for the characters in Cleave.

I generally write out of order as scenes and sentences come to me and then connect things and fill up space bit by bit. For Cleave, I’ve had to do a lot of that "filling the gaps" in a workmanlike manner so that the scenes would connect in a way that made sense. It’s hard to judge your own writing, but I wonder if that resulted in the loss of some of that intensity that focusing on a single idea can provide.

There’s a lot that I wrote somewhat quickly or sloppily with the idea I’d edit it later, and then there wasn’t much time for deep editing (The sort where you question the structure and the writing style, not just single sentences or paragraphs) at the end of the jam. When writing and editing, I very quickly approached a state where I was only skimming through and could no longer appreciate the emotional impact (or lack thereof) my writing might have. I finished the remaining endings and scenes in between relying on my sense of what should be there, but I would’ve needed a break from the text to be able to appreciate it with the eyes of a reader and to get a sense of whether anything from the story would actually "land" emotionally. The sprites and expressions were implemented in a bit of a haze where I mostly just played by ear, going "this line feels like this expression fits" and so on.

If the script had gotten to rest for several weeks and I could’ve looked at it with after a break and with a more developed sense of what I wanted the game to be, a lot might have been changed. But in some ways, the appeal of a game jam is to make you release whatever you’ve got by the deadline and there’s value in putting out this sort of snapshot. Without such a deadline, there’s risk of endless iterating and the end result might be very different from your initial vision. I wonder how I’ll feel about it when I give the game a proper reread with fresh eyes a few weeks or months down the line.

On the art end, I was initially envisioning a style much closer to a lightly retro anime look with a scratchy pen line aesthetic. In the same vein, my planning stage pipe dream was to have a stronger manga feel, with panel-like layouts and moving text boxes rather than the static textbox at the bottom of the screen. But figuring all that out on a technical level was something I simply didn’t have time for, so eventually I simply sat down and did things in a way that was comfortable and familiar to me. The cut-in art was originally intended to be thumbnails for "proper" renditions later, but I ended up going somewhat overboard with them and decided to just use these too-much-effort thumbnails as the actual cut-in art. The art is certainly a bit too chibi for the tone I was going for, but I’m prone to making everything chibi if I don’t play close attention. The character sprites ended up being my default rendered digital style rather than a style I developed specifically for this project. It’s one of those cases where I cut corners in a way you probably aren’t able to tell, but doing it this way definitely saved me a bunch of brain power. I would’ve liked to do expressions that stand out a bit more, but that is not my strong point, alas.

I didn’t do anything too fancy coding-wise, but I’m very lucky that the DevTalk discord has so many helpful and knowledgable Ren’Py users that are ready to help out whenever I want to implement something a little more complex like the screen that shows which endings you already got.

Sketchy lineart of the main menu painting (which was just a random painting I did which got repurposed)

Shounen, and my relationship with the genre

Battle Action Fantasy is a shounen-themed jam, which is a genre I haven’t been interested in for about 15 years. The names of the newest shounen hits pass me by like the names of the current national soccer/football team members. I think back fondly to the shounen I read when younger, but I find little that excites me nowadays (which is to say, now that I’ve grown a little more discerning, my tolerance for works that aren’t willing to treat women or lgbt+ people with respect has gone down somewhat). When brainstorming for the jam, I gathered all the teen edgelord energy I could muster, imagined what sort chuuni fantasy action chaos my heart desired and tried to shoehorn an action scene or two in so I wouldn’t get disqualified (initially, I had planned to make an action scene of the dungeon break-in, but then decided it was superfluous. I did end up adding a fight to one of the flashback sequences rather last minute so the flashback wouldn’t be solely an infodump). It was inevitable that it’d end up gay because it is me we are talking about. Frankly, it’s a meta way to engage with the genre to have gay sex stand in for cameraderie and loyalty rather than loyalty being symbolic for gay sex as is so often the case in shounen works. Working on Cleave, I did wonder occasionally if it could be called a shounen at all, or even a seinen. There’s certainly no rivalry tournament arcs to be found and you’d have to squint very hard to identify the power of friendship anywhere. Luckily, the jam organiser is partial to gay stuff, so I don’t see myself getting ejected.

Choices, Endings, and Characterisation

When I reflected on the themes that snuck their way in, I realised that for all my talk of toxic yaoi and all that, what emerges as central statement is the idea that a lot of good may come to you if you afford others dignity or respect, or put more humorously "You can have a hot boyfriend who loves you if you manage to not be an asshole for 20 minutes". I’m somewhat cursed to have everything I make turn out cute, and it seems the curse has struck once again.

From that perspective, it is perhaps unsurprising that the worst end (at least as far as Xiomara is concerned) is the one where he foregoes the smaller transgression (biting Lucrecio), but then attempts the bigger one (chaining Lucrecio to himself). Being unable to follow through on your lack of morals gets you nowhere, small moments of kindness end up making you vulnerable when the consequences of your actions come to get you (or something like that).

The majority of my visual novels are purely kinetic (i.e. there are no choices and you simply experience the story as it leads towards a single ending). I’ve found that I struggle greatly with writing characters interacting with silent or blank-slate protagonists. A lot of my interest is in character dynamics, in how people influence each other and what they mean to one another. I find it impossible to write that unless both characters involved are well-defined. I’ve enjoyed plenty of games where love interests effectively talk at a protagonist that will make brief responses every few sentences or even scenes, but it’s not something I’m able to write myself.

Having very disparate/incongruous choices makes sense when you assume the role of a protagonist who is somewhat defined by the player, who therefore simultaneously may be a straightforward type and a sarcastic know-it-all. When dealing with a character who is neither a blank slate nor an everyman projection ground, I find it difficult to find places where the same person may conceivably make two different choices. I haven’t been in many situations where I had to decide whether to bite or chain people (even in the metaphorical sense), but I imagine most people have experienced making a misstep and having to figure out how to handle it on the spot. It’s a very human reaction to first be annoyed that the other person isn’t willing to go along with your joke or that they can’t see your humour or your intention, a sort of defensive reaction that makes you want to double down or pretend you never did anything wrong in the first place. It requires inner strength to acknowledge a mistake (even a small, unintentional one) and allow another person’s feelings to have some power over you. It’s not a coincidence that Lucrecio only stays when he receives a (hasty, fumbling) apology.

Ideally, the different endings enhance each other, so that each scenario feels fuller when you’ve seen the other ones. My hope is that Lucrecio choosing to stay feels more meaningful once you know he’s ready to leave in the other endings (and therefore isn’t simply a pushover with no standards).

Since Lucrecio is not the perspective character, we have to guess at what goes on in his mind, what conclusions he draws from Xiomara’s behaviour and what leads to the decisions he makes. Whatever relationship they had was frail and short-lived and the decisions Xiomara makes during the dungeon breakout will paint things in very different lights for him, whether he can attempt to have faith that Xiomara is on some level capable of caring for others or if he is dangerously self-absorbed after all. (As an aside, I’m not all that convinced by the romance ending I wrote. I don’t think the events themselves are a stretch, but I haven’t quite found the right words for them)

Time Management/Effort

When I think about Petals to Petals, I mainly remember what an uphill struggle against depression the entire thing was (the jam was in January, which isn’t exactly my best month). Cleave was comparatively easy going, fortunately.

BAF jam lets you work ahead rather than restricting you to the jam period itself, so a decent chunk of the writing as well as character designs were done around Mid-May. But the first half of June was quite busy for me, so I probably ended up with about a Month’s worth of jam time anyway.

Despite having all that time, things are kind of unfinished in a lot of ways. Most noticeable is probably the UI. I recruited a team member for the UI and unfortunately they weren’t able to complete the very neat concept they came up with (which is fine – I had told them up-front I was treating this as a low-pressure project and wouldn’t be mad if things didn’t work out). When it became clear they wouldn’t be able to finish the UI, I was planning to make a simple but consistent UI based on their concept. However, I ended up just grabbing their textbox mockup and doing some awkward reskinning of the Ren’Py default UI elsewhere. The script could have used a few more editing passes (the version I sent to a couple friends for playtesting was missing half the endings) and I generally had to trust past me had figured things out while squeezing out the last few sections I had planned. I added sound effects almost literally last minute. The art was all made on a very "I’ll just do it like this for now, I can change this later if I want to" basis. On the other hand, I was able to include  a bunch of clearly unnecessary but fun stuff like Xiomara's transformation sequence and second outfit, which a sensible person would have scope-knifed out, so I didn't lose in every way.

Aside from assorted life stuff in May and June, I found out that there were a bunch of neat events and exhibitions happening in my town the last weekend of June (i.e. just before the BAF jam deadline). I went even though spending hours out in the heat meant I wouldn’t have much energy left to work on Cleave in the evening. I don’t regret that – they were cool things and it would’ve been a shame to miss out. I was still able to get all the crucial parts done. The script is complete and I’m happy with the amount of cut-in art as well as the music even though it could all have been more polished. So in the end, I don’t really consider that a failure and more of a success in setting priorities. I’d certainly like to be more driven and give a project like this my absolute all, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to dev in moderation either.

Thank you for reading this frankly pretty disorganised and chaotic devlog/postmortem and giving my projects a chance! See you in the next one, hopefully.