The Postmortem

Hello Everyone!

I'm Chanda with Visual Butterfly.
I hope you are all well and safe.  I just wanted to share with everyone my experience about NaNoRenO! It's very hard pacing yourself in any environment in planning for a game. I think game jams can really test how well you plan as well as do well under pressure. For me, I had written out a timeline with 7 major points to run through. I had to cut out 4 if I wanted to make it through for NaNoRenO!

I did not at all stick to the timeline as well. It was more so there as a guideline of what the game could look like. The timeline also doesn't look like it's in depth. It's short little post its almost to be honest. It's not so much the detail, but the main points I've included in it! I think it was great that I got the timeline written because it did help me keep the goal realistic. It worked well for me organization wise! 

After getting the timeline done, I wanted to recruit people, but I really had no idea where to start. I posted on lemmasoft, in devtalk+ discord's channel. I had a crowdforge page up and someone had joined. Her music was beautiful and very much in the style of what I wanted. Unfortunately, around the time the virus hit, her internet connection was lost and I had to replace her with someone I have worked with before: Danny Dice. He's a pleasure to work with and is really easy to talk to!

About a week into the game, I went to previously game jams I participated in and I remember Red Lily because her art really suited the image I had for the game. I asked her if she wanted to participate in NaNoRenO and she was quick to reply! I really didn't think about a background artist at the time, I went to pexels because I know I could use the images as references as well as a last resort if need be. Hence why none of these backgrounds really fit the Ancient Athens style! That feast/banquet scene? THAT SHOULD ALL BE STONE NOT CHAIRS! I hope this will all be fixed when we get a BG artist on board with us!

I didn't want to bring in someone to edit an unfinished script, so I waited to finish the script before bringing in Medium Pigeon. The uncoded script itself came to about 29 pages of 6k+ words. If it were to be what I had originally planned, I can only imagine what kind of prologue it would be! I think I like where I left it off considering what I had to cut out, but it will need to be changed to make sense as far as a prologue goes!

While Medium Pigeon was editing the script, I opened casting for VA. Everyone was very understanding of the deadline I had for NaNoRenO and that made it all very easy. 

If I had to say anything that went wrong, it was really just the coding in Tyranobuilder. There's no real easy way to code in the platform and I had to try and find shortcuts to make it easier as this my first big project. The buttons would work one day and then make the whole game lag the next. I thought it was just the platform, so when I exported the game and the lag remained was hard to understand! I was remaking the game from scratch and saving the coded script in various places. I think the best app ever created for something like this since Tyranobuilder offers the drag and drop feature is Evernote.

The reason why is because copying and pasting is a big part of what I had to do when redoing the game. I would sometimes have to copy and paste 5 pages of code. In Evernote, if I click a bar, it highlights the whole text and I could copy it. I could also color code things and it made it easy as far as which route was what. Yellow for Zeus and purple for Hades!

*This has been such a long postmortem and I thank anyone who takes the time to properly reads this much as I really enjoyed writing this!

You can expect a survey regarding the game to be posted for those haven't completed the game to be up by the 20th!