It's my first time writing postmortem wahahahaha!

Man ... this game isn't the perfect materialization of my ideas; but it's fine and it's good enough for me, at least! I don't know how to convey the idea itself and struggled for years to write it down (more about it bellow), so looking at this game right now I feel freed from this crazy idea at long last www

So, first, as new game developer, I still have so many things to learn and this game is one example of how I learn to familiarize myself into game developing. I learned so many thing I can do with the engine, Ren'Py, like the splash screen, imagemaps, and customized quit screens (yeah, that one that prevents you from closing it before you finish it www). I learned about utilizing music as an atmospheric stage even though I still need to learn more about it,  and the best of all: zooming transition! It's still clunky in this game, but I think I have a good grasp about how it works and definitely will implement it more in my next project!

Second, about the management itself. I never think about managing myself; I just do whatever I want and whenever I want. The laid-back me thought I can manage it alright, but I was wrong. When I made the short and stupid demo version of Xenofeli Detective Agency, I just do it. It doesn't have structure or any vision about the story itself; it just my first attempt to use Ren'Py. It only uses the backgrounds I have prepared, the sprites I have drawn, and the music I have chosen. It's just it, nothing more. And then I made this game with the loops www I needed to reorganizing things for like every minutes and kept adding sprites or backgrounds more and more, and be like, "eh, should have planned what's going to come next" but I didn't (大草原). I even needed to make a test build for this because I kept looping on my own loops (talks about trapping oneself). It's great that I work alone, I can't let other people drowning in the mess with me just because I don't know what I'm going to do for this game www.

Third, I want to talk about the idea behind this game. I said it before in DevTalk Server. This story is based on my own (recurring) nightmare. "Man, you must be so stressed you keep dreaming about it, huh?" I was. At the time, I was a university student majoring in forestry (silviculture, to be exact) and it was tiring. So many  assignments kept coming everyday, and I (still a freshman who love math and logic science than life science) couldn't grasp the hell my own study was. Then, at the time, we had this one month long  field-trips, learning about habitats and forest types from the shoreline to the top of the mountain, and it was great, but tiring. We walked to the study site at morning and finished the daily assignments at night, everyday. I can't say how tired and stressed we were, but yeah. And oh, I almost fell off the cliff of the mountain about 2000 meters above the ground (luckily my friend caught me before I free fall), and as I have acrophobia, it haunted me whenever I have a nightmare. The chase too, albeit weirder in my dreams, was something linked with my own stress at the time. So I thought, "Hm, I should write it down and make a horror short story out of it!" Great idea! But I never finished it.

Then, as I was stumbling around to find something to do with my game code, I saw this Spooktober VN Jam post on Ren'Py server, and finally I can use that idea and make it into a game!

I got so inspired at that time. And I thought about making it into some intense psychological-horror by using a cold-hearted, almost psycho narrator who only does its' job, like the narrator of The Stanley Parable game, and then adding "failing is sometimes more exciting than success"  approach of Henry Stickmin game. It was fun to make a rough concept about it, even though I got a bit slower in writing the script. Then I was thinking about adding some kind of mini-game because I saw people added that to their games on the discord server chat, but in the end I realize I don't need it because I have been playing with the player heart all the entire game wahahahahaha!

And finally, I could finished it a week before the jam ended!

Yes, happy end!

... not that fast~

When I wrote the script down, I realized how brutal this story can be. At first, the fear of being trampled down is enough to keep the player running, but the more into the game, I knew the fear itself need to be amplified by seeing the result of being trampled down. The part when the player see a woman falls down and ... being stepped on, is much more gory than what I released in the game. It's much more unsettling and I feel like it is too unnecessary to put it there, so I decided to cut it and tone it down. That part was slowing me down, to be honest, and maybe the biggest mistake I never considered before. But hey, it's fine in the end,  so all good! And maybe I'll release the brutal edition later, let's see.

Oh, right! I forgot about the monster creation! It's there only to spice thing up, nothing more XD But the creation itself is my another spooky story. It's definitely a strange story, I might be in delirious state at the time, but when I was a child around four years old, I was down with high fever and then I encountered this monster (that famously kidnaps children here in the local myth). I vividly remember how it wriggling out from the door, tried to grab me, and it's not once, but three times because my mom kept coming to check me as I screamed. Most of the monster design in this game is coming from that monster, though I deliberately tone it down because 1) I'm a scaredy-cat, 2) I don't want to accidentally summon that monster again, no way.

There are many things that I want to improve from this game but I can't with my skill at this stage. I regret many things that I should  have done, I needed to do, but simply can't, and that's okay. This game is a learning tool, a new step of improvement for me. And I think it's a good enough as it is despite the flaws it has.

And the thing I want to learn next is marketing, yes. Wish me luck!