POMLY Post Mortem

Hello hi and howdy, Fisher here.

My game is done. My second day one patch has been uploaded. There are still more things for me to finish. But first I'm gonna take a hekn good sleep. 

I have learned a lot from this game. It is most my most ambitious project I've released yet. It was also my most down to the wire project. 

I've had some issues in releases of previous games, but this one had a bit of everything, from typos, to music that didn't have a .ogg at the end, to all sorts of things. The most noticeable is that i have stretched some images and also I wasn't consistent in sizing down the files for the sprites - mostly because I did this process by hand in a 3 or so hour haze because the images need to be converted to webp but also individually shrunken to the correct size. 

This project also continued to show me the things I enjoy and excel at, and the things I struggle with haha. If you dig into the code for the game, you can see who has lead the writing of each chapter, but if you don't do that, it may be hard to tell who wrote what. But the main difference is that I like writing descriptions a lot more, and Autumn enjoyed writing dialogue a lot more. Autumn also ended up editing most of the dialogue that I wrote to help fix it up, but I'm still trying my best to improve. I think back to a conversation I had way at the start of the jam - the thing I wanted to write the most, was a story that had torture scenes. I think it showed in my initial draft of the script quite evidently, because I made poor Zuzka endure so much torture that they would have died like 3 times over from blood loss. That also got edited down to make things make more logical sense and be tonally consistent, because this was meant to be a mostly grounded story, but I can't help but think that those were some of the sections I had the most fun writing. 

In general, I enjoy getting to go wild with prose. My special blend of autism doesn't make dialogue and character motivations and things like that come naturally to me unless I think them out a lot - or unless I am just writing some very factually based autistic characters. I didn't write all of Kornelia's dialogue, for example, but its dialogue definitely came to me the most easily. 

I want to continue to hone my prose writing. Of course, I want to get better at writing dialogue too, but I enjoy the sensation of writing something entrancing. Something where it makes me feel immersed to write it, and like the reader would be immersed as well. I can't do that very well with dialogue, but I wrote some very grueling and painful scenes for this game. Not all of it made it in, but I want to make more of that. That's really just what I keep coming back to, my desire to write more of specifically the stuff I enjoyed the most. 

I talked with Autumn about how I had this one idea for a scene for a future project, and how now I need to build out the rest of the story from there. Autumn looked at me and said "why not just write those scenes, and make it a nice short thing with just what you want, and the minimal required setup."

I think they are on the right track with that one.

Beyond all that, I'm grateful for this experience, for all the connections I made during this journey, for all the people I chatted with. I am happy that to some of the members of the toxic yuri jam discord, I'm just the lovable forum dog. I want to keep making games. I want to keep connecting with people. I want to keep building up the space for community that I desire. I want to keep helping people and chatting with people and being inspired by the works of people I continue to foster a relationship with more and more. I want to write some gruesome and gut-churning visual novels, and continue to let loose in my writing. 

But most of all - I want to go to sleep.

Good night everybloody, and thank you for this wonderful game jam experience.