I never wrote a proper (public) postmortem before and I like to take jams as opportunities to pick a few new things to learn, so here we go.

Work Ethic

I did most of the jam work A) in the first week and B) during the last 10 days, which is how things tend to go with my brain (and to be fair, I had a bunch of personal stuff to deal with mid-January). I do think a bit of productive procrastination is permissible and having something I should be working on somehow makes it easier for me to work on other things that I might otherwise not have the motivation for. I made some paintings I like as a result, so I'm not too mad about it. It's a bit suboptimal and chaotic, but I try to work with my brain and not against it where I can. I did successfully convince myself January only had 30 days, so I essentially had a complete game on the 30th and only did some minor touch-ups based on people's feedback on the 31st before submitting.

I wasn't as deliberate about it as I was with some other jams, but when I start planning my game, I pick a few things that are important for me to get right and where I want to put extra effort in (or new things I want to learn) and for everything else, I let my average perfomance be enough. If I expect everything to be my absolute best, I get psyched out and then nothing gets worked on. For Blessing of the Flower Goddess, I had a very specific idea for the art and I was also doing slightly more complicated stuff in Ren'Py for the first time, like point&click elements. As a result, I kept the writing simple and mostly used it as a means to present the other elements.  For Deathtouch on Leaves, I spent a lot of time developing the aesthetics (both of the art and UI) and ended up just going with whatever my first attempt at some of the cut-in art ended up looking, even if I wasn't 100% happy with it. That sort of approach helps me focus on a few elements to do well and get better at while accounting for the limited time and energy available during a jam.

Sol character design concept art

Art and Writing

This time around, I picked an art style that was relatively easy for me to do (traditional art is a lot easier for me than digital, and drawing tends to take fewer of my brain cells than painting). So the background art, CGs and sprites didn't take me too long and I could include more of them as a result. I ended up with more CGs than intended since I kept adding a few that weren't technically necessary. On the other hand, Valen ended up with only one sprite because I don't like how his happy and neutral ones turned out. That's the sort of thing that'd get a redo if I wasn't on a time limit.

Since the jam was called Sealed with a Kiss, an on-sceen kiss was a requirement. I'm not really good at drawing kisses and had to practice a bit, and even then I don't think the kiss CG turned out that well, but it was good to be pushed to learn like this. And I did get to include a silly frog kiss scene as a result as well.

One of my goals was to make a slightly longer game. I'm a slow writer and my ideas are often for a specific scene, or multiple scenes that I struggle to connect into a proper plot. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but I do want to be able to write longer stories that peple can really dig their teeth into. Some of my games are O2A2 submissions that have a limit of 1000 words (unlike most participants, I don't generally struggle with staying under that), but even those that aren't don't tend to be much longer. At around 2.3k words, PtP is still pretty short, but it's almost twice as long as Deathtouch on Leaves, my second longest game :') So I'd mark that off as a success. I think in the past year, I've gotten a little better at wrting both faster and coming up with longer stories, so that's progress, even if it's slow. One of the big struggles this jam was that I think I'm hitting a point where I'm better at evaluating my writing but I can't actually write better yet, so it's all kinds of frustrating. Unfortunately, the only way is through, but hopefully I'll have a bit more skill by the time I'm through this slump. The people of the DevTalk server were very encouraging during that time and happy to (kindly) yell at me whenever I hated everything I made :')

Little test doodle to figure out the colours and aesthetics

Working with a Team

One thing that happened sort of accidentally is that I actually worked with people instead of making the game entirely solo this time around. Specter kindly offered to do the UI, which was a load off me because I'm definitely no expert in that. I was able to throw a decent UI together for both Flower Goddess and DoL, but not having to freed up a lot of mental resources. (And the UI turned out really nice!) My music-making friend Beau offered her help when I shared some in-progress screenshot, which was also amazing because I had really been struggling to find free music that fit. I threw a bunch of my "kind of but doesn't quite fit" selection and a vague plot description at her, and she somehow came up with a music piece that suited the story really well. And then I bugged friend shibalist last-minute to make me a logo. All my previous logos were basically just the game's title in some font I liked, so that's a big improvement and my game's marketing definitely looks prettier for it.

Leading a team is definitely a skill in itself, and it's one I realised I'm lacking somewhat :') There were times when I was a bit lost in terms of understanding what sorts of information and instructions people needed from me, or when there were some (minor) miscommunications. It turns out the main theme in the game was still a WIP because I thought it was done, but the music person was actually still waiting for final feedback from me :') The music shall be updated together with some other tweaks I intend to make.

Sol warmup sketches I drew before working on sprites and CGs

The Final Result

I'm overall not as happy with the game as I could be; I don't think the story is quite convincing, some of the art turned out pretty eh, overall it just doesn't really have the impact I would like it to have. I would generally like to have a proper, complete first draft game and then do extensive edits on every aspect next time around, but that's probably more suited for a non-jam project. I also realised once again how hard it is for me to imagine what things will actually look and feel like in-game while I'm working on assets and that iterating is pretty important, especially in terms of making everything nicely cohesive and immersive. I definitely want to work more with sound effects and animation/transformation language in the future. I was kind of stressed and didn't handle feedback super well, which I think was in part due to the time limit. Ideally, I'd want to be able to determinedly work on a project until I'm satisfied with it.  But in the end, it's good to complete something and I'll use it to practice not giving up on creative projects for months again just because something didn't turn out how I wanted it.

In any case, thank you for reading all this, and for playing my game! It does mean a lot when people give my silly attempts at making something a chance.

What's Next?

I'm planning to submit Petals to Petals to Queer Vampire jam as well. As usual, my energy for working on this game has dissipated somewhat after the jam has ended, so there'll only be a small update before I do so. The plan is to:

• Add a gallery with concept art, sketches and some of my thoughts
• Update the music with the properly mastered version
• Maybe update the main menu (and the game banner) with some dedicated art
• Maybe give Valen more sprites