Hello! Thank you so much for playing “A Tome in the Attic”. I’m Zac (JamKats), the solo dev for this project. 

Before getting into the post-mortem, I wanted to talk a little bit about the design of the visual novel! I'll also later get into the productivity system (?) I used while in development. This is a lengthy post, but I hope you'll enjoy it nonetheless :)

Design & context

As mentioned on the game page, I created this visual novel to submit in the Only One of Any Asset game jam (the 2023 queer edition!)  I developed it within 7-8 days. It’s the first game I’ve created in a few years, and the first one for a game jam! It was very exciting! I truly haven’t experienced the entire pipeline- especially in all positions lol- since early 2020!

I heard about the game jam from a dev I admire and respect. Npckc retweeted a post about it and I thought I’d check it out! I’ve been meaning to join a game jam for the longest time, but as someone with limited programming experience (and a bit too shy to reach out and join a team) I never got around to it until now. I am very glad that O2A2 was the jam that motivated me to finish something~

I originally started with a completely different concept than the one I ended up writing. At first, I had written a story loosely based on an experience my wife (Jenni) told me about. But writing it wasn’t going the way I planned. I have a tendency to be critical of the things I write- I worry a lot about being cliche, and superficial... Even writing this post mortem makes me feel a little awkward!

A friend of mine read over my original outline, edited and even added some dialogue to it, but I still wasn’t satisfied… So I played some games submitted to previous O2A2 iterations for inspiration!

I noticed a good chunk of games I enjoyed felt like character-studies (if that makes any sense), usually spin-offs of other projects. The issue with the original script I wrote was that I had no attachment to the characters or storyline- I was just writing to write. It also doesn’t help that I remembered an interactive fiction I really resonated with and was almost desperate to create something similar to it! I kept comparing my writing to it! Of course I was getting frustrated!

So I scrapped it :P

Because I thought it’d be fun to do a character study, I tried thinking of my own OC’s and the first one I thought of was Allin. I don’t have a lot of OC’s to begin with. I don’t really consider myself a writer, especially in recent years, so all of my OC’s are from when I was in high school (or younger!). I googled my old dA account, found my only illustration of Allin, and learned I didn’t have anything to go off of other than their name. 

But it was enough. I immediately got to thinking “how can I write a story for this guy?”.

One of my biggest inspirations was this random post about “less thousand-year-old vampires falling in love with high schoolers, more thousand-year-old vampires falling in love with grannies”. Or something like that. Allin was a character I created as an (edgy, pseudo-emo… because I was actually kind of a prep, much to my dismay) teenager. I’m sure I designed him as some brooding demon that would probably find love and be saved by whatever self-insert character I had at the time, but I'm not as invested in those kinds of stories as I was back then. I wanted to make a game that seems like it could be a dating sim, but it turns out that this demon isn’t actually date-able, they’re your grandpa!

(That last part was vaguely inspired by the Saint Spell game, because the character I fell in love with from the get-go ended up being a character you couldn’t actually date lol…their good end is actually watching them get together with another NPC!!!)

Anyway, I fell in love with Lin even more as I wrote about him. I started with writing character profiles (for the player character, Allin, “Grandma”, and “Mom”). It helped a lot! I got a feel for the characters and their relationships to each other, and it helped guide how I wanted to present them. Of course, I couldn’t fit everything I originally wrote in the game, and some of the original lore makes no sense now that I’ve edited the game’s script a few times (there were a lot of inconsistencies with the timeline of events back when I was brainstorming), but I’m sure I’ll be able to return to it again in the future when I decide to write another short VN for Allin.

As for his design, I kept most of it similar to the original! It's very fun to put them side by side and see how much my style has changed and how I re-imagined them. Originally, their ears were covered by their hair, but I changed the shape of the cut and let pointed ears peak out from the overgrown layers. It's also just a personal preference, but I gave them piercings too! I still wanted him to keep his beauty marks, but kept it to two on his cheek and one on his collarbone...

I'm terrible at designing outfits for my characters, but I still wanted the collarbone to be visible... Instead of a boat neckline, I decided to change their shirt into a well-worn, stretched out loose shirt. I think Allin doesn't care too much about their clothes, so as long as it's still wearable, they won't throw it away. I'm sure when Hope was alive, she would baby them a little and dress them up! But now that she's gone, Allin's falling back into old habits (and not changing their shirt).

Other thing to note: as I was writing Allin’s dialogue into the game, I changed their pronouns to they/him! It’s not super important to the the story, since it isn’t directly addressed, but making that change made me personally a little happier :D 

Anyway, I feel that that’s enough text for now.

Onto the formal Post-Mortem stuff! 

Because I abbreviate it a lot: BDC stands for “Burndown chart”. I still use the same spreadsheet that was given to me during my degree program! I’m sure the current generation has a more robust version at their disposal, but mine works just fine :) I use the BDC to track hours planned/worked and help me get an idea of the scope of the game. The chart is accompanied by scrum(agile) development.

What went right

• Writing character profiles first!
• The decision to redraw Allin’s sprite. I like it a lot more than what I started with.
• Using the BDC. I didn’t have to relearn how to use a new methodology or technology!
• (with previous) I have a decent understanding on how long it takes me to do art-related tasks. Even though I ended up adding several things to the BDC as I went along, updating my scrum and logging my hours left me feeling efficient and on-task.

What went wrong

• I originally didn’t explore a lot of ideas or concepts during pre-production, which originally made brainstorming difficult.
• (with previous) I originally kept comparing my previous script to a game I think is fantastic, and was hyper-critical of it, which demotivated me for at least a day.
• (with previous) I had to redo my BDC a few times, since I changed the scope of my game alongside changing the base-concept.
• I managed to submit to the Queer Games Bundle via the Google Form, but because I dragged my feet on submitting it to their game jam page, I feel like I lost a good exposure opportunity

What I learned & I’d do different

• Spend my time before the jam/during pre-production more thoughtfully. Specifically regarding brainstorming and filling out BDC tasks (as mentioned previously, I added a lot of “planned hours” DURING development)
• Not feeling too pressured by the timeline. I was ahead of schedule for most of the development period! My personal goal was to finish and submit a week ahead of time so I could save the rest of the week for testing and/or polish! Since meeting my goal and making an update for 1.2, I haven’t been able to implement anything into the game due to being burnt out (from external factors, but I’m sure speedrunning the dev process and staying up to work on the game whenever I wasn’t at my day job didn’t help me)
• I’d like to talk in the discord server more! And maybe make a few more posts during the dev process rather than waiting until I was close to finishing.

Burndown Charts

These are a little confusing to look at... And they're messy because they are designed for multi-person teams ^^; I've edited them a bit for my own use, but didn't want to mess with it too much in case I broke something... But if you're at all curious! This is what they look like!

NOTE: I stopped logging hours after the 15th (when I uploaded ver1.2) because my day job and personal life got really hectic... TT

By Person

There's only one person on this project! But the hours assigned to each person are shaded in the colour alongside their initial on the right.

The green line labeled "On-track line" is which helps you get a grasp of how much work needs to be done before the deadline. You generally want to stay below this line.

The black line labeled "trendline" is one that I added myself. I vaguely remember a version of this BDC having a built-in "burndown velocity" trendline, but I couldn't find a clean version of that template before I started production. Ultimately, it gauges the average amount of hours you've been working per day, and shows your projected completion date, assuming you keep it up.

NOTE: It's very possible I'm confusing terminology, and that the green line is the supposed "burndown velocity" that I am remembering.

The red line labeled "DateLine" is the date line. I'm going to be honest, I don't remember this line existing on the BDCs I used during my degree program, or why it's necessary when the dates are on the bottom,

By Rank

This one isn't labeled at all! But essentially, it shows how many hours were assigned to each task and groups them by ranking (1 being most important, 4/5 being least important). From order of most important to least important, it goes as follows: red, yellow, green, blue. 

The black line holds the same purpose as the on-track line. Like the green line on the By Person chart, you want to make sure you're completing tasks to stay under this line.

Logging hours

Here is a snippet of how logging hours work. I overestimated how long it would take me to complete a lot of the tasks because it's always better to have that padding! But I honestly did spend a lot of time on this project :) My total hours estimated were 102, and hours remaining as of writing this post mortem are 16- most of which are low priority tasks that I never got around to.

As mentioned before, I stopped logging after the 15th (or apparently after the 16th in this screenshot), so hours worked on this game isn't accurate after that date, but I did spend a lot of time working on it!

Conclusion

Ultimately, I created a short visual novel that I am proud of (and readopted a demon OC in the process lol). I am going to take another short break from game jams next month– there is an asset jam I’m interested in participating in– but hopefully I can make another VN again this year! Hopefully with a team! As fun as this was doing solo, I’d love to make more friends and join a team!! So that’ll be a minor goal for me this year :)

Thanks for playing again, and reading through all this if you did! I hope you’ll be back to chat with Allin in the future. I currently don’t have any concrete plans for them right now, but I would like to explore their world more in a separate game. 

As for this version, I have a draft of a background that I would like to finish at some point, but with my other (non-game) projects, I’ll have to push to the backburner. I also think it’d be nice to clean up the GUI and customize it a bit more. 

Since this game was created for the O2A2 game jam, if I end up expanding the existing narrative and/or giving the player more endings, that will be done on a separate game page!  

Other stuff

I’m currently attempting to add all of my WIPs and behind-the-scenes for this game to an album on ko-fi. You can also support me on that page as well! I’m trying to be more active on social media in general… for quick links to more of my stuff, please go [here]!

Many thanks again!