Itch.io often features ranked game jams which are more competitive (obvious: prizes, mostly cash, are offered!) than unranked ones.

Spooktober is an annual game jam whose goal is to create a visual novel (any game engine) with either a horror theme or something related to Halloween (candies, etc.). At the beginning of October, judges will play and rate every visual novel.

This is my third ranked game jam:

• My ranking wasn't fabulous for a RPG Maker jam (33rd out of 47) but the score wasn't bad (3.3)
• Partial off-topic for Scream Dunk 2023 which plummeted my score at 2.3, despite an original concept and a game created in pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript

Week 1 - From a concept to another to another

Like in most jams, you are allowed to write a draft of your story before the jam begins. I could benefit from that time to think of a first idea: the story of a teenager whose girlfriend checks every cliche of the yandere! I could've created a very disturbing content... but it would've violated the jam's rules: no sexual abuse nor incitement of self-harming!

After that, I went on some sort of escape game visual novel in an Ukrainian laboratory after a nuclear explosion happened thirty years ago. The problem of the escape game genre is to think on coherent puzzles, with logic solutions, and easy to program on Ren'Py. It would've been difficult for me to add enough puzzles to make the experience nice and complete.

So this is my third idea. I always keep in a folder my unused story drafts. I've picked a story from two years ago I couldn't use in anticipation for a jam on rpgmaker.net since this jam had never happened!

It's the story of a Spanish teenager boy who visits a widow whom helps him write a novella for the school. However, a bit of paranormal will spice their encounter!

Week 2 - The novel's identity

Since the story's rather serious, I chose to make it monochromatic. Every visual is shown in a grey palette.

I wrote my dialogue and my descriptions on the flow.

Playing every novel created for NaNoRenO 2024 inspired me for some technical parts: coded a splash screen (pictures/texts before title screen) ; zoom in&out pictures to create dynamism ; first person story)

At the end of the week, I've managed to write the prototype of the story. I've reached 3.3k words, 0.7k less than my initial objective. However, you need to know that the quality of a novel is not proportional to its number of words. I've played novels with more than 12k words (1.5h of reading) that were average and novels with less than 2k words that were nice.

Week 3 - Tweaking

The main element of my novel is the use of a ouija to speak with a ghost. The system in itself was quite simple to program: a picture of a ouija picked, a cursor, an animation to move the cursor from letter to letter.

As for web coding, the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) concept is essential for a code of good quality. I've stocked in variables every X/Y coordinates of each letter of the ouija, the cursor's moving speed and the waiting time on each letter. If I want to slow down the cursor's speed, I only have to edit a variable, not a number FOR EACH letter shown by the ouija.

Then I read again my texts to detail them, correct them, etc. Splitting my story in scenes help me to see where I am.

My goal was to finish the writing at the end of the second week. I respected my schedule and I could overcome my objective... by 5 words.

Ren'Py has a functionality to list every TODO you let in your code.

There's a lot of work left, especially about the visuals: Spooktober isn't over yet! (By the way, Flamenco was the initial title)

I made choices during this phase: I decided to not program the mini-jeu nuage d'idées (minigame cloud of ideas) for fearing of lacking time. Priorities first!

By chance (or by opportunism?), I took two days off at work in order to progress faster.

Week 4 - Polishing

I took some time to prepare the game page on itch. To stay consistent with the graphical style of the game, I decided to keep the greyscale palette.

It looks a little too formal but eccentricity wouldn't have been relevant.

The musics are imported. I have a small database of audio files:

• RMN Music Pack (and for some reason ; the two tracks chosen had either a title or an author with a Spanish-sounding name!)
• Sounds from the RPG Maker VX Ace engine - Did you know? You are now allowed to use these assets on any other game engine provided you legally own the version of RPG Maker you want to use the assets from.

The hardest part had to come: character sprites!

Even if itch proposes free packs (Alvaro), the graphical styles don't match at all between each other. I have 5 characters (Federico as a thumbnail ; Luisa, Serafín, Alvaro and the señora Ortiz for the complete body) of different genders and ages so it was hard for me to stay consistent.

Once again, I use my resource database. For ages I'm using a little character generator for Photoshop/GIMP. Even if it's focused on teenagers/young adults and doesn't have a lot of different elements, it's easy for me to edit every character to make it unique.

At first, Federico's sprite was coming from a Flash dress-up game. I've decided to start it over to stay consistent with the four other protagonists.

Little edits in the code and for the visuals... and the novel is definitely finished on September 24th in the evening.

After some documenting on how to make the novel directly playable in the itch page (warning, the game playable only in the page is not enough to validate your submission ; you need to have a ZIP file available), I quickly promote it on various Discord servers I'm in.

Before submitting, I have to answer a few questions about the game. 

The day before, the DevTalk Discord reminded to avoid uploading the project at the last minute! Last year, 8 projects suffered from the "last minute syndrome" ; and some of them had disqualifying bugs!

Unless somebody points a major bug, I can resume working on my NaNoRenO 2024 videos. Because of the jam, I've only played 2 novels for a hour of playtime!