Thank you everyone for playing!!

This was a project I've wanted to try making for a while now so thank you for giving this short game a play!

Who might've Iago been referring to...? ;)

About the Game

As one of the hosts for the jam, it's no surprise that I love, love, love shounen manga and action stories! So I've always wanted to make something that combines both of my interests into one. I wanted to make a visual novel that had fancy animated cutouts like a manga based MAP. Did I succeed? I'm not really sure;; More on that below lol

I started planning and working on this project around March, before kill your feelings, another game set in the same world. Both of these stories are my attempt in introducing this world to readers/players. I have... a much larger project that I built this world for, but the plot of that story never properly came together-- likely because I could not settle on a way to properly world build in the writing.

So this was, apparently, my solution (derp): make tons of small games that introduces the world in bite-sized treats before I can comfortably sit down and pen the outline for the main game. The reason this is called kill series, is because the title of the main story is God Killing Wish. When I first started on the concept of exorcist killing lie, I knew I wanted it to sound similar to the main story title. ...And then I came up with the premise for kill your feelings so I figured I might as well try to keep the 'kill' in every title.

Postmortem

It's true, although this is a game that I always wanted to make, I think I'm a bit disappointed in how it turned out.

Writing: I had a good idea for the plot early on. A boy meets an exorcist in training so I can introduce the world of exorcists and the old religion from an outsider's POV. However, what would the plot be? How does the exorcist in training, Iago, meet this boy when he lives in a completely separate world? Iago's backstory has been completed, I need to figure out where to go from here. 

This resulted in me writing the story as it is. Another couple days typing it out during lunch at work, I had a short story that hit all of the points I wanted to use as world building. I had to keep this story short for the sake of the art.

Art: As soon as I was done with the script, I started thumbnailing all the scenes. There were sprites, comics as fight scenes, CGs, and special scenes that needed additional art... This was a test of my abilities to create an action story in this style so it can be recreated for a larger project in the future. This is the part I feel that I failed the most: it took me about 2 months to complete all the art for a 3.5k word game. It wasn't really feasible for a longer form game with multiple arcs. So, it'll be back to the planning board for future projects. 

Programming: Thank god for Renpy 8.0's word bubble editor!! It really saved my life 😭It would take forever to position everything without it. Because of all the special scenes and art pieces, programming was a little mind breaking for this project, haha... By the end of the project, I felt like I did mediocre with the programming. I had wanted the VN to read like a manga, but part of reading manga is the flow of the page based on the word bubbles. I tried to keep this concept in mind, but couldn't recreate it well in the VN where most of the art remains the same.

Music: I realized with two weeks left, I should've looked for a composer. CC music is amazing, but they don't always fit the mood I'm looking for. I did my best, but I felt like the mood of the full game ended up all over the place. 

I will probably revisit this concept for a future project, but it'll require some more brainstorming to improve upon what I had for this game.