Postmortem +Thank you doodle

Thank you so much for playing!

 Thank you everyone for 300+ downloads/plays! I made this game on a whim and in three days, so I'm genuinely really happy that people enjoyed this tiny game!

About the Game

This is the afterword I wasn't able to put in the game itself because that would've broke the 1k word limit haha... 

I wasn't planning on doing any solo projects for O2A2, especially since I had just finished the art for For the First Time during the first week of the jam. The way I got the idea for this story was really silly: I was watching some streamers play Demonologist and laughing at the ways they try to get the ghost to response to further the game, "Hey, if I was the ghost, I'd be so tired of these paranormal investigators coming to talk to me-- I can make a VN about that...!"

So, yeah, I made the whole game on a whim. I even asked an RNG bot whether I should try finishing the whole game in 5 days. (The bot said no.) At first, I considered making it a small point and click to either get the exorcist's attention or scare them, but that would've been a lot of work so I didn't.

After I wrote the outline and started going through my collection of character designs to use for the game, I remembered-- Don't I have an exorcist character in a big game/world I'm planning? Why don't I just introduce him here? So, yes, Ying will be returning in other games alongside other exorcists for many adventures. The biggest question is how to best organize the timeline...

Postmortem

Third time's the charm! 

I tend to be a wordy writer, and have a tendency to want to draw every scene as a CG so O2A2 has always been a struggle for me. This is my third time trying to submit a project of my own and I finally did it! Amusingly, my first idea for O2A2 also involved Ying, but I'll release that another time since I foresee it being a 1k+ wordcount story.

Writing: I came up with an outline late one night and the next day, I wrote the whole story during lunch at work. The first draft was about 1.3k words, which I had to reluctantly cut down. I feel like quite a bit of the characters voice was removed as I reworded sentences and whittled down the wordcount. Ying was a bit more polite in the original draft.

Draft: "Can you tell me why you're still here?"

Final: "Why're you still here?"

Kill your darlings 😢

Coding: This was the second thing I worked on! This took a night and a half... I told myself, if I couldn't get the word bubble GUI to look nice with no images-- or if I couldn't get it to work at all-- I was not publishing this. So I spent many hours on Tuesday on it. It's the first time I tried using NVL so I had to fight with the GUI for it, too.

Art: Art's always the easiest part! Knocked this one out in about two nights! I was a bit troubled with the rules of keeping to only one character in the CG. The original plan was to have Payton appear as well. I even wanted a more webtoon/manga spread-like layout CG, but that would've broken the rules haha... 

Music: Thank god for Alcaknight's incredible CC music!! 

While maybe not 1k words and single CG, I want to make more short games! It's much more relaxing, haha...