Greetings all persons, the writings of Duhop are hither!
February was a dreary, unpleasant month to live in my city, and mostly uneventful when it came to the development of Alex’s Journey to the Grave as well. My own efforts consisted almost entirely of a grind to finish the editing and scripting needed to proceed with our upcoming rounds of playtesting, while a great deal of our art progress (and the posting of this devlog) was thrown into disarray by frustrating worldly circumstance after frustrating worldly circumstance.
Despite the predictably nasty weather, however, one event this past month made me seriously reconsider my stance on the RNG I’ve endured to wind up living in Winnipeg.
I’ve talked about the Winnipeg Game Collective and their yearly Winnipeg Game Jam in a previous devlog already, but to recap; WGC is a volunteer-run community group that aims to united both the casual and professional game dev community in Winnipeg, and PegJam is a friendly 3-day long event that brings them all together for the simple purpose of creating some cool-ass games.
Last year, I joined an existing group, and helped work on a cute little 2D action game called Zlorp Life. It was fun, but with my contributions limited to design, writing, and lore in such a gameplay-focused genre, I never really felt like I was truly in my element.
As far as I could tell, though, nobody else had ever worked with Ren’Py or even made a VN for PegJam at any point before. The entire time I was participating in the jam last year, I was thinking about it.
Even so, when this year’s PegJam came around, I wasn’t even sure if I had it in me to participate. The options I gave myself were either to not participate at all, or to go all out and try my best to create a visual-novel-producing dream team for the jam ahead of time.
Now introducing Pistachio Pink-Slip! A short visual novel where you play as the big boss grilling a certain trouble-making goblin girl about her various office antics.
Suffice to say, I chose the second option, and what we ended up with 3 days later as the newly coined “Team Mind Goblin” absolutely blew my mind.
In the days leading up to the jam, I somehow managed to gather up 2 artists, a writer, a photographer, a programmer, and 2 music producers who were all super excited to make a visual novel together. Every last one of them, mind you, with absolutely zero prior experience doing so.
And somehow we absolutely crushed it?!
I mean, even just the sheer scale of what we got done is still insane to me. In just ~32 hours of work, we managed to finish:
- A whole new unique world, setting, and lore.
- 2 fleshed-out characters with personal and relationship development arcs planned out.
- A fully planned out story and choice structure.
- A logo, multiple pieces of key art, and everything else needed for a beautiful main menu and itch page.
- A beautiful, fully custom, fully implemented Ren’Py UI overhaul.
- 2 fully implemented layered character sprites, with 3-4 poses and half a dozen or so expressions each.
- 11 fully implemented, beautifully filtered and edited photographic backgrounds, with a bunch more in reserve.
- 7 unique tracks for the OST.
That’s a lot, no matter how you cut it. No matter how experienced the team members were beforehand, and no matter how low quality the final product was.
But that’s the thing. They had zero experience making VNs, yet the final products look great?!
I mean Ren (yes, REN), the team’s programmer, had never even touched Ren’Py before in his life, but was somehow able to learn how to and implement the entire game’s UI in about a day and still have time to spare. Likely at least partially because at the same time, Mari (one of the artists) was pumping out the UI assets even faster than that.
I knew from my experience at last year’s jam that I had to closely control the game’s scope as the team leader, but as it turns out, I did not in fact have the right experience to understand exactly which parts of the scope needed to be which size. I vastly overestimated how much time and effort backgrounds, character sprites, and the UI would take, and vastly underestimated how much time and effort it would take to finish the writing, editing, and scripting of visuals.
Wait, so I underestimated, like, all the exact stuff that I actually do on a daily basis? Am I just stupid??
Well, maybe. But more likely, I think it’s because of my greatest underestimation of all. By far the biggest drawback of leading an ultra fast-acting, completely inexperienced team of 7 in a 32 hour game jam; the cost of communication.
When I’m working on Alex’s Journey to the Grave, I have all the time in the world that I need to communicate with my team members. A few hours per week of talking back and forth here and there on a long-term project feels practically negligible, barely even registering as a significant part of the effort you’re undertaking. That’s also not even considering the fact that I’ve worked with all of them for multiple years already at this point, and there’s a huge wealth of built-up understanding, knowledge, and resources that vastly cut down on the need for lengthy communication.
In the case of Team Mind Goblin at the jam, however, every single aspect of that dynamic was reversed. Not only did the team have zero prior knowledge about any of the specifics of the work, I also had close to zero understanding of what kind of people they were, how they worked in their respective fields, or what kind of input they needed to stay on track, so almost all of my own time ended up allocated to leadership and project management.
In hindsight, it’s kind of a miracle that I was able to get anything whatsoever done other than coordinating and teaching people. I’m super, super stoked about how things turned out, because I’m pretty sure the crux of that miracle was the simple fact that my teammates were just super fucking awesome and really fast learners. By the end of our 3 days together, while I was desperately rushing to implement as much writing and scripting as I possibly could so we would have something to show, completely ignoring the fact that I’d fallen miles behind on planning out tasks and had pretty much no clue what 90% of the team was even doing, they somehow managed to stay on track and get the right shit done with barely any direction at all.
So by the time the showcase at the end of the jam came around, we ended up with an incredibly polished-looking VN with succinct visuals, great humour, and an unfinished, broken script of about 2,000 words with barely a dozen lines having a sprite that actually moves.
So is that even a W?
Yeah, it’s still a massive W. With the casual nature of PegJam, it doesn’t really matter if your end product is finished or not, only that you’re glad you spent the time to make it.
Going into it, I never expected have so many teammates, such incredible teammates, or teammates that were so very helpfully invested in anime/manga and other VN-adjacent culture. I was honestly half-expecting to end up participating by myself, making whatever I could manage with free pre-made assets, so they truly were the reason that the final result blew my expectations so incredibly far out the water.
…That’s probably enough glazing for the funny corpo goblin game, so let’s just get to the point already. What did I learn from making it?
The experience as a whole gave me a totally new perspective on exactly the same work I’m doing with Alex’s Journey to the Grave, from a very different scale and format. I think the most important thing that did for me was to help me rediscover and better understand the cost of communication I’d lost sight of in the longevity of the project, and to start appreciating more the resources and relationships I’ve long worked to build up for and with the team of Violet Horizons.
Leadership and project management is, in fact, a lot of goddamn work, and exponentially more so when starting a new project and/or working with a team that’s new or unfamiliar.
I think this is a lesson that I definitely needed to learn, because I learned much of my project management skills while I was already working on AH&AS and Alex’s Journey to the Grave. I likely underestimated it so much for the game jam not only because my experience with it happened so gradually, but also because I overestimated how much of my effort back then went into learning how to do it vs actually just doing it.
I’m definitely glad I’ve learned this lesson now, so I can look back and remember it when it comes time to plan for future projects. I could definitely have seen it completely blindsiding me otherwise ðŸ˜
Anyway, thank you so much for reading! Next month, I’ll be back with a devlog much more focused on what’s going on with AJG in particular, so make sure to tune in then 😀
-Duhop