Devlog - SWAK Week 2
14 days in, so it’s time for another progress report on Love in the Time of Spellphage.
Not a huge change in the asset tracker as I wrapped up most of the small part and have spent the last 5 days in focused background mode.
Asset creation
Between backgrounds I was able to wrap up jackets (multiple forms for each character) for the 3 characters who can be seen outside on the first day of the game. Also designed this logo for an in-world restaurant:
Drew a hand and a portal, multiple little cats. I really like doing these small one offs as I feel like I can experiment with them versus backgrounds which are way more demanding mentally. But since most of the small assets are done it’s been a pretty big week for background work.
Backgrounds
I had a pretty terrible time with this street scene I worked on for 4 days.
I’m going to point out all the things wrong with it but I ask that you wipe the mistakes from your brain when you play the game.
I started fairly confidently, really loved the back line of buildings and managed to keep it mostly flat rectangles. Then I moved on to the right side of the street. Activated the perspective ruler and started to draw some buildings. It was decided that the eye line was too high and I told myself I would push all the lines down with the Transform tool once I had them done. But then I came back the next day and pushed them down and altered the perspective ruler and then started the left side. I didn’t realize how much I had altered the ruler by the time I was done with the lines on the left side. I kept returning to the right side, trying to push it down more, trying to fix the roof which I drew in after the shift because the top of the buildings didn’t exist in the first pass.
Something I had gotten good at for the first few days was Deleting My Art. A very common and helpful art tip. Didn’t like how a character was looking? Delete it. All the lines look bad? Delete them. There is learning to be taken from sticking with something incorrect and figuring out how to fix it, but I was mostly in ideation and discovery mode, so each deletion led to something better.
But as I feared with starting background, I fell into sunk cost fallacy and wasn’t willing to throw away 2 hours of work. The saving grace of the piece is that I am really happy with the left side buildings and the back row. It feels Montreal-esque without being too on the nose. And while I’m still struggling with colour selection in big pieces I don’t think there are too many mistakes.
I brought my fear into the next background I started and spent a lot of time in layout and perspective mode.
I am very happy with how main character Lauren’s room turned out. It doesn’t feel great to instantly jump into working on another character's bedroom but I’m hoping I can take what I learned from Lauren’s room and move a little faster. Lauren’s room took about 10 hours… I ended up downloading a lot of 3D objects from the Clip Studio Asset store which let me feel like I was playing with toys as I chose where to place them and size them.
I have 2-3 backgrounds to go, even if they all take 3 days each, which leaves me some wiggle room to revisit art pieces from earlier in the month and adding more details.
Version 0.1 launch
While conceptualizing our game we designed it around 7 days that the player would play through. When making a branching game, a solid rule is to build your Golden Path first. This can be your “happy” ending path, or the path you think most players will enjoy or gravitate towards.
Since our game is a romance sim it would mean choosing one of the love interests and completing their path before anyone else's. This proved difficult in a pretty big way in that one of the central parts of a romance sim is being able to choose who you romance. We worried that having one obviously foregrounded character would give the wrong vibe.
I kept pushing for finding a Golden Path during the build up week before the game as I’m familiar with watching new game makers spiral out of scope and get lost in the weeds. We talked it over multiple times, thinking about how the game breaks up in other ways. Just a day or two before the jam started we had the realization that if we wanted something that felt like a full game, we could scope by days instead of paths. We scoped down pretty drastically, to the first 2 days of the story. The major downside being that this scoping didn’t help with scoping down of asset requirements as we would still need art for each character and location.
And while this did mean rushing through as much art as possible in the first few days, I think this scope is what’s to credit for us being able to publish Day 1 as version 0.1 before the end of week two.
You can play Day 1 on our Itch.io page however I do recommend downloading a version instead of playing in the browser as you’ll have a better audio and performance experience that way. We’ve gotten some positive feedback from friends already and possibly some Beta Tester who are strangers to us and have fewer reasons to be nice to us :o
Next steps
The next big thing for the project is writing Day 2. We have some ideas on these scenes but it will likely be a fair bit of brainstorming still. For myself, I’ll likely be in background mode for the next week as we don’t even know all the scenes or locations we’ll need for Day 2 yet...
We’re also hoping to get feedback during week 3 and incorporate anything actionable before the end of the month.
It’s likely to be another focused week and I already feel myself longing to do art that doesn’t involve a perspective ruler. But feeling very accomplished in what we've been able to make so far!