Postmortem +Thank you doodle

Thank you very much for playing!

About the Game

I was very determined to make an O2A2 entry this year because I missed a lot of jams for the first half of this year! (I say when I just finished another jam/demo project 7/1...) I knew I wanted to make another entry into the kill series so I wracked my brain a bit for what kind of story I can tell. Following my previous themes, I knew I wanted to make it somber, too. Last Kill was the result. 

I didn't have the space to clarify, but the girl featured in this game is Erzwei, one of the goddesses exorcists worship for power to fight regrets. Two of the twelve gods have been introduced now! Yiein, the god of change and Erzwei, the goddess of nostalgia.

(Image from Exorcist Killing Lie)

Last time I said the next entry into the kill series would be about why Ying became an exorcist, but... that story is turning out to be more frustrating to write and make so I don't know when that one will happen... 

Post Mortem

Writing: I originally set up the outline a few weeks before the jam. I had noted that if I managed to fit all three items in the point and click section within 1000 words, I should make additional items. The first draft for the script was 1.2k+ words. It was pretty painful cutting down 200 words and I was starting to despair I couldn't get it down to the right amount when surprise!! The final edits gave me 990 words. I deleted a lot of detail from our main character's thoughts. 

The art of minimalism... So... how about a director's cut later? 😅

Some fun facts... Once I decided that the goddess to feature for this story will be Erzwei, I considered making a new "MC" similar to the other games in the kill series. However, I saw that another OC of mine was already fitting. I changed some elements (particularly his cultural background) to fit alongside Erzwei, but otherwise his story is essentially the same. It's the story of a bunch of reincarnating swordsmen from across history so I suppose this is just one of his many incarnations. His name here is Deng Huoling. yes ik it sounds like a girl's name but searching for hanzi that sounds good together is a struggle ok

A sketch of his original design-

Art: Erzwei's design was decided a long time ago, but I tend to put her in more European style dresses, which wouldn't really fit here. I knew I wanted to set the time period to be late 1890s and early 1900s. Since the cultural background of the kill series is a mixture of East Asian (specifically China) and European (specifically German), I decided to make her outfit for this game/sprite to reflect dresses of the time. 

Her top is based off Chinese Han-style women's clothing at the time, but I made up the decor to the clothing as fitting for her character (the references were hard to depict the actual designs...) The bottom dress is based off Victorian era Western fashion. She's based off a thundercloud, though so most of her dress is just fluffy... fluff.

In retrospect, I'm struggling to find my references on the Victorian fashion of the time. Alas, my research was not enough and I'm sorry if it ended up being very inaccurate... But, in the end this is my own little fantasy world of everything I like.

Did I select the time period because I was playing The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles? ...Maybe... 

Not much to say about the background other than it drove me insane for a few hours.

Programming: Alright, here's the big secret revealed (: I want to make an Ace Attorney-like detective game someday and this was my first time practicing making point and click + match evidence to a prompt game. ...And, although I succeeded, I must never underestimate how much work goes into it. Making items to click is easy. Programming to ensure everything runs properly is much more difficult. I think my solution was ultimately very inelegant and inefficient. But... hey, it works! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ When I do the real thing, I'll make sure to return my stacks properly. What's that mean? Ahahaha... Let's just say I had to force the code to return to the main menu at the end of the game rather than letting it do that automatically as ren'py is normally capable of... 

I also had to make GUI elements as I went!! ...Thank goodness for CSP's huge catalog of assets so I can quickly make something that looks decent! I also had a lot of "fun" managing QOL details like highlighting images when hovering with code only...

Next time. Next time, I'll be able to use more art...!!!

Music: I ought to get into the habit of commissioning more original music. As usual, I struggled to find the right music and as usual, I struggled to leave it at one track. I originally only planned to play the music during moments of reminiscing, but then the audio restarted itself so often it lost its power lol. I cut my losses and played it the whole way through starting from the point and click section. 

And that's all! Thank you once again for playing, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did making it. This O2A2 was a nice excuse for me to try new things and while I have a lot to refine, it's nice to know I can "see" a method for how it can all be done.