Devlog - SWAK Week 3
It’s time for the week 3 summary. That’s 21 days of working on our game non-stop. Neither of us has taken a full day off since we started, doing probably 7-10 hours of work a day each (well, a little less for me on the days I go to my paying job). We’re still progressing at a nice pace but with more than half the month gone the to-do list feels a little scarier with each passing day.
The assets list increases a little every week. Last week there were 77 needed assets, this week ending at 82. Some of those are ‘nice-to-haves’ which I’m going to start tracking as stretch goals so they don’t contribute to the overall number necessary for launch.
Backgrounds
I was able to finish 2 huge bedrooms in the last 10 days. They were so intense for me that I felt so much relief when I opened a new canvas and could just bask in the emptiness of it. Managed a smaller, more abstract background for Day 2 in just a day, which felt nice and productive. After that I started to work on “end scenes” for the game. Visual novels often end on a unique art scene so we wanted some of those. Like the “reward” for finishing the game.
I was able to finish up one of the ending images pretty quickly and it’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever drawn. I want to post it online real bad but it’s basically a spoiler that I want people to first see in game. So in game it will stay for a few months.
This background doesn’t have any spoilers so check out this good wall. The door even opens! I was able to get this done pretty quickly as well thanks to some wood panelling assets and a wallpaper material from the Clip Store. It’s simple but I feel like it really sells the scene in engine.
Assets
Since I spent so much time populating a nerd room I ended up drawing a lot of Stuff to fill the room. Tried to give it a fair bit of character. This is my collection of Little Guys for Cass’s room.
Making a Montreal-like
The city in our game isn’t Montreal, but it’s got parts of Montreal with twists. It made sense to us to set the game in a city like Montreal since it’s where we live and we knew we could look around and find references easily. There are some clear Montreal landmarks that I used as reference for a few backgrounds so far.
This photo is my main inspiration for the park background. The statue changed into the amethyst obelisk and the cross on the mountain replaced by our magical school.
The apartment front is based off of an apartment building where a friend lives.
The school in the game is called Crowstone and I used Montreal’s Ravenscrag manor as inspiration. This manor turned psychiatric hospital (with an honestly very dark history that the Wiki page weirdly doesn’t mention) is a building near Mont Royal park but in the game I put it right on top of the hill to loom over the city. Making it visible in a few different backgrounds.
The street scene is also very Montreal, I would have loved to include the classic spiral staircases but I would have hated doing those in perspective. Also debated having a French stop sign but we decided against it since we don’t have any French in the game. And it is meant to be more of a fantasy world than the real world.
There are a few other iconic Montreal features like churches everywhere, constant construction, random art installation, and great parks that I’d like to include in future backgrounds. Given the strong D&D influence in our game world, churches would probably become temples to different gods, construction might be magic that works on its own. But each background takes me at least 2-4 days so we’ve really tried to limit our location in this first part of the game so these things won’t come up in the next version. But I’ll definitely be using more image inspiration like with the statue and hill photo reference because I’ve really enjoyed incorporating my everyday world into a fantasy story world.
Next steps
I’m trying to wrap up the last art assets in the next 7 days so that we have a comfortable few days to implement everything and make sure it works before submitting the game to the jam. I’m feeling pretty confident about getting through the last needed art pieces but there’s still a lot of writing and other implementations to get done too.
Something I’m noticing for myself is that by spending so much time in the Creative Zone I find myself coming up with new ideas constantly. Not just art ideas but my other hobbies too. I want to do some video editing and make a trailer for the game. I have an idea for a level 1 intro adventure in D&D. I want to work on my volunteer projects. I want to do art for the D&D campaign I’m already running. And I recognize this feeling from my years doing NaNoWriMo. Part of it is longing for the thrill of a new project after being so intensely focused on a single one. Part of it is just that creative activity feeds creative energy. I’d love to say that I hope to carry this energy into February but there’s a solid chance I’ll crash and not want to touch my tablet for a while. I’ve started to get some back pain over the last few days so I’d like to give myself some rest time. So resting is my main plan for February 2nd, that and getting back into physio exercises.
You can still play Day 1 on our Itch.io page for another week or so. We did a minor update after its first release to add a few more art assets and cat content. The current game will get replaced when we release Day 2 next week!