Finding my workflow and finishing the game

It was a relief to release this small game. Even though there isn't a huge amount of gameplay, I feel it was the perfect size to establish my workflow. At the same time, I got to practice many new skills.

The story, it mainly serves as a prologue to a larger narrative set in a city called Dwaji. The actual story is more of a cyberpunk, centered on the fragility of the human mind and hard/difficult choices. I’ve been writing the story for quite a while, but turning it into a visual novel was a completely new process for me: deciding what descriptions to leave in, what to cut out, and where to add branching paths. It was also interesting to see how the language changes when switching from the original Finnish to English. The translation could be a lot better, but that’s also something I’m striving to improve at.

Game programming is familiar to me, but I hadn’t really used Python or specifically Ren’Py before, so they were quite new to me. When I decided I wanted to try creating a visual novel, I checked which engine DDLC was made with. For a moment, I considered building my own engine, but Ren’Py offered so many great features and such smooth usability that it was an easy choice in the end - especially since a project like this doesn’t require massive performance from a computer.

I used Python for other tasks as well. There is a scene in the game where a terminal monitor shows a lot of counting hexadecimal numbers that eventually leave a single number visible. I wrote a Python script that generated this and saved the results as PNG images, which I could later use in Blender as part of the animation.

Speaking of Blender: I’ve been modeling with it for a long time, though in phases. I don’t consider myself particularly skilled, but I can make the assets I need. This was a good project to test my skills again, especially regarding post-processing creating outlines, shading, and a slightly analog, paper-like feel. In the end, I rendered 39 images and 3 small animations. Of course, some images are the same scene from different angles or settings, but it still required a lot of amount of work.

I don’t remember much about the sound design, as I built those parts back in the summer when I was testing the first version of the game. My tools included FL Studio, kHs plugins, Audacity, a Zoom H5 mic, and a pile of old samples.

The most challenging area was creating the 2D art, specifically the character portraits. I first sketched them in Aseprite to get the silhouettes right and used those as a rough base in Krita. I started with Lei’s portrait since he appears the least, and finished with Lyra, who appears the most. I can’t say I’m 100% satisfied, but they are good enough to get the job done. I think it’s important to consider how much energy to invest in each part. If it’s a free, small 15-minute experience, it’s probably not worth burning yourself out over. :P This area likely consumed the most energy, so I decided to do one character portrait per day. No more. Once the images were nearly finished, I ran them through GIMP to apply posterize and dither effects. Finally, I combined the Krita drawings with a few Blender renders (for the mirror scenes for example).

All in all, a very good workflow for building a project began to take shape. A lot of time was spent simply experimenting or looking for solutions. But even things like the order of drawing and filling layers in Krita, finding the right template settings in Blender, and deciding which parts of the text to cut or add were valuable lessons.

And in the end, a small prologue in VN format was born.

Of course, the workload will be much easier in the future if I continue this, as I can reuse many assets and won't have to start everything from scratch. But that depends more on the reception the game receives.

And finally: in this era of AI, it has been very important to me that all the creative work, the art, and my way of expressing myself come from me. AI is an excellent tool for many things (like books and search engines), but when it comes to creativity, I trust myself. If there are weaknesses, then I must improve or turn those weaknesses into part of the style and the bigger picture. :)