Weekly Summary 2023/30

Hello everyone! How are you doing this week so far?

This week has been particularly an exciting one for me! Lots of interesting things happened!

I spent my weekend by playing Planetarian VN (1816) and wept a lot. I was already warned that the last part is tear-jerking, but I already wept since the beginning of the second half. I'm glad that I experienced Planetarian. You should too, if you haven't.

I also did a Meet the Dev doodle (1817); you can see it on this Twitter post!

Then, I worked on Tuna Rice: an impulsive silly little VN that I did for O2A2 VN Jam. I talked about this jam a few times in several weekly summary posts before but I never planned anything concrete (commitment scared me; from my sad Otome Jam over-expectation experience). I just thought: if I don't have anything until the third day of the jam, I'm going to forget about it.

Then bam! – Tuna Rice is born. 😋

Tuna Rice was released yesterday! I hope you enjoy it:

Tuna Rice process + release!

It's a strange production process! I'm used to work for a much bigger project that I didn't expect how exciting and fun such a short project is! I initially whined about the 1,000 word limit because of how many times I gasp each time I check Blooming Chimes' word count after editing (it's currently close to 50,000 now ahaha 💦); I thought it's not possible for me to squeeze stories I'd like to tell with such limitation.

Actually, now I'm able see the point of O2A2 VN Jam – the limitations are there for great reasons!

Tuna Rice definitely pushed me a lot to maximize my script writing in different directions so that I'm packing the most impactful story-telling out of such limitation. There are dialogues and scenes that I had to scrap away, which I was sad at first but now that I think about it, it's actually a really good decision from my point of view.

One thing I'm still doubtful of is that I had no room to introduce the human at all. I consider this a quirk, that there's no way to know who is he besides of what he shared to you. He happened to not share his name to you, or he did at some point, but you weren't listening.

This was the progress that I went through for Tuna Rice. Total time: around 4 days.

• Writing/scripting: I did the writing in Ren'Py format directly, so I complete this part of the work first (1818). I talked more about the storyline in post (1819) + name drop for the human!
• Drawing: both sprite and background were done rather fast. There's only one for each of them, and I purposely used limited palette! (1820)
• Scripting sprites + background + audio onto the build: this was done rather fast as well!
• GUI: this took me the longest – 2 full days, and I felt like I didn't really produce much during those two days. I talked about my frustration in post (1821).
• Lots of back and forth testing with my co-writer; beta reads and many QA processes.

The release was nerve-wrecking! I've never done jam solo before, so I have no-one else to panic with. I was considering to release on the last day, but yesterday I thought: 'I'll just get this done and move on! I'll play other entries to relax afterwards!' so I pressed the submit button and took a break from internet for the rest of the day.

I did some announcements on my Twitter, Tumblr and some relevant discord servers. That was embarrassingly exhausting hahaha... I have to read and manifest Arimia's blog more for the sake of my marketing-self to grow up and do more of it. ^^;

I had tons of fun making Tuna Rice, I loved the process and everything with it! I hope it can cheer you up as well~

Other things

• I'm considering to resume Illa Café development, which means pausing Blooming Chimes' development itself. I think it would be cool to have Illa Café debut for Winter Jam since it has winter setting! Winter Jam allows prior works so I perhaps want to try pushing Illa Café for it! Depending whether I'd make it or not by the deadline (end of year), then I'll resume Blooming Chimes for the next year's Otome/Josei Jam.
• The VN Dev community is preparing for Spooktober Jam which is the biggest jam of the year with sponsors and prizes! I'm excited to see the devs and the entries that they will be making; and I'm 99% sure I won't join this jam since it's not my main genre to write... I leave that 1% just in case something comes up impulsively. (But perhaps not really, since I want to push Illa Café for Winter Jam... and I want to play the entries too!)
• This week many artist friends and people I'm following are making Misskey account to expand the social network reach. I don't plan to join, as I'm done with making new accounts. Also, Misskey is on fediverse so I'll just follow friends with my Mastodon account.
• I'm having lots of fun and laughters with the newest Cookie Run: OvenBreak's update. A court case, debates, so serious yet so goofy. For the first debate, I took the "Pineapple on Pizza Lover" side! I was initially hating the idea but after one bite, hey, it's actually good! Like, surprisingly nice! =P And I love the new Langue de Chat Cookie and Cappucino Cookie?! I may make fanart of them? Hahaho!

As usual, thank you for everyone who's joining me here this week! I hope your weekend will be lovely. Take care!
- Konayachi