Dev log update #2! - Game Uploaded! And Postmortem

It's the end of the jam, and Data Lion is now available to download! (Although unfinished...)

 🎉 🎉 🎉Yay!

The game has 2 love interests that the protagonist lion can romance, and around 3 endings, plus some gameovers.

Well, now I'm going to take a short break to recoup, but more updates will come soon to bring it closer to completion! :3


Development Postmortem:
 What went right, and what went wrong...
I guess I should do a postmortem of sorts too and go in to detail how development went. When I first started, I had a vague idea of what I wanted, and then put it right in to the game engine as soon as possible to test it. In previous failed projects, I hadn't done that and wrote entire stories in just text form. That never worked out for me in-game, for one reason or another. (Usually scope, but sometimes the story just didn't work as a visual novel.) Writing is my least developed skill, I have no idea what I'm writing most of the time. I think it's what writers call "writing by the seat of your pants" or "writing as you go".  But it worked out.

Here's a not-so-secret secret, the two love interests Rrred and Jetsway were lion OCs I had in an online game called Lioden! (Shoutout to that awesome lion sim! Go play Lioden if you haven't, if you like lions! :3) So I already had an idea of their character. Although how they fit into the story with the main character lion was a bit difficult to figure out. So maybe having characters pre-planned isn't such a good idea. I had to sit down and problem-solve story issues a few times, sometimes for days before I knew how to write them interacting properly in a romance plot. (Especially cold-hearted Jetsway...)

One thing that helped save time was the sheer amount of failed projects I had, oddly enough. There was so much to reuse from failed projects... old GUI, sounds, code, effects... that contributed a lot to the quality and saved a ton of time because from about 8 years of experience (Ok... I'm a bit embarrassed it took that long to finish a VN, but anyway...) I knew 1st-hand what worked and what didn't.