A Jam-Packed Adventure??

Wow, when was the last time I've actually written a public Devlog?   It has to have been years. I'm the host of the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam competition and the developer of its... educational comedy? visual novel.

We've been working on the visual novel for a little over six months at this point with a modest budget of around $2,000 total, thanks to our generous sponsors and contributors for the 2023 Spooktober Visual Novel Jam.  We asked ourselves, "How can we take $2,000 and make a $20,000 visual novel."  Well, we still don't really have an answer but we're pretty proud of it thus far.

Why Live2D?

We decided on using Live2D for the character sprites because, despite the additional initial time, money and energy investment, it would ultimately result in the creation of highly expressive and emotive characters that we could get a lot of mileage out of.  However, if we were unable to create these in-house, we'd likely not have used Live2D at all.  Being able to create and work in Live2D isn't strictly a high demand in the community we're in, but it is elsewhere,.  Thankfully, PumpkinRogue, the original illustrator of the girls, had the background we needed to make the girls live in Live2D.  With the girls included, she's made around 8? 9? different Live2D models, including the one I use on Twitch and during server events.

Also the other reason is that... not a lot of other people are really doing it and it's pretty cool.  We're considering releasing some packs related to Live2D as part of the Make Visual Novels! asset pack series, but we're not sure how interested people will be so we'll probably hold off until we know for sure.

Why 3D?

Historically, I've not been a huge fan of 3D in my visual novels, but realistically it was the most likely way for us to come in at or under budget with the amount of scene diversity we wanted to achieve within the time frame we aimed to achieve it.  We saw what some people have been able to achieve with stylized 3D scene in their visual novels and seeing 3D being executed in some unexpected and frankly stunning ways that we thought we'd take the plunge with it and do it ourselves too.

-- Admittedly I am not the best with it, and the majority of what you'll see in the visual novel is stuff I've collected over the years or picked up as part of an asset sale.  I think it's turned out pretty good, though it's clear I've still got a lot to learn about it.

Why Everything?

We wanted to put together something fun that we could also use to help promote and talk about the competition to folks outside of the dev spaces.  So yes, this is an advergame, or a game whose main reason for existing is telling people about another product or service.   It's kinda like that one Cool Spot game from the 90s, only Lemon sells Lemonade, not soda, and it's not a platformer.  Or like the old school Saturday morning cartoons whose whole purpose was to get kids to want toys.

That said, we still wanted it to be a fun read and wanted to really flex some of the creative muscles that have been sleeping for 10,000 years, so we took that budget stretched it to its near limit.

What's available right now is a preview that's... around 80% complete?  This includes the first two scenes from the visual novel, and probably about a 10th? of the total work.  There is still some work left to be done before we can release the rest of it, chiefly audio stuff and cleaning up background scenes, but we're aiming to have the whole thing done before the end of the year, bare minimum before August next year.

The good news is though that in our current state, the game is eligible for an entry in a few places that are really important for this and future years, and that's fairly exciting.  There's some details on this year's jam page if you're curious.