Small Update + Post Mortem

Hello and welcome to another one of my 'ranting about my projects' where I rant about my projects. It's a special edition this time because I decide to go through my thoughts on all 3 Velox Jams so far. I have a lot of thoughts, so feel free to skip this one if you don't want a very in-depth dissection of things. If you only want to know about the changes in the updated edition, we'll start with that first!

FaithEater Change Log

This is going to be the only update for this game! It includes the following:

• Changed the design of the main menu screen  + adjusted Muerte's sprite position
• Added one new CG
• Rewrote a few scenes + various grammar and typo edits

IDEAS FOR VELOX FORMIDO

I had two ideas I was bouncing around, and which one I could wrangle into doing depended on the themes that won. Unlike Fabula and Turbo, I actually had an aesthetic and general plot idea for both games, complete with the messiest sketchbook doodles known to man. The idea that wasn't chosen was called I NEED YOU HERE and was going to be a very surreal game about being trapped with a strange finger in a cabin in the middle of the sea, whose interrogating you about what happened with Someone Else. I love this idea, which is half the reason why I didn't pick it LOL. It would have fit the themes (Trapped with someone and Doomed by the Narrative), but it was something I kinda thought deserved more of my time due to what it was about.

Which didn't matter in the end because I accidentally fell in love with FaithEater.

Originally, I just thought it'd be fun to make something inspired by Blasphemous (or Dark Souls for a more familiar title) and I also wanted to get back into making an otome/amare type game. Like most things, the originally idea changed slightly when I actually wrote it. Whisper (who was supposed to be renameable we'll get into that later) willingly entered this place to hunt down Muerte, who had been waiting for them for a long time. The two have a conversation, and how that conversation goes decides whether he put an end to them or not.

When I started writing, I ended up doing a lot of world building for this world. There's so many interesting things going on to me, and I really like what I ended up with in the end. Which brings us to the next section:

MAKING THE GAME

Regardless of what I went with, I knew I wanted to use this as an opportunity to learn NVL mode. I tried to do something new during the previous Velox jams, so I had to keep up tradition. Granted, crash coursing something new during a 36 hour jam you're soloing probably isn't the best idea, but hey. Why not? This is what caused slight issues. For whatever reason, after you entered the name of the Whisper, it would switch to ADV mode for any of their text. I could not figure out why it was doing this and while I probably could have figured it out with more time, I didn't have that time. I also got sick the literally day off because my immune system sucks lmfaO.

So I had to scrap the custom name, but I hoped Muerte mentioning that they were lying was enough to let players imagine whatever name for them. Also with NVL mode I feel like I was relearning GUI design all over again. I thought I was kinda getting the hang of making my GUI look ok for the most part, but uh, NVL shot me back to beginning mode. And while it's not the best ever, it kind of ended up looking like those old games I was obsessed with as a kid? So I kind of enjoy the look of it, even if it isn't notable or anything. Anyway, regardless of all that, I did learn the basics for coding in NVL mode, so that was a success.

Then came the writing for the game. I always switch between tasks, so it's more like I did half the writing, started coding, started GUI, started art, went back to writing, etc. It's a very chaotic process and I do switch to handwriting and traditional art to get my brain going during it as well. 

But yeah, I love that this is my longest Velox game so far and it's the one with the shortest time frame. Honestly, I could write a whole saga in this world. There's just something about it that clicked in a way I wasn't expecting and it made writing this very easy. I don't know if I managed to get the romance part across, but you know, what's more romantic then exchanging blood with God who has always known your name-

The art was something else entirely (shout out to Unsplash for saving my ass because there's no way I would have finished the backgrounds if I had to draw them). I wasn't sure how I wanted the backgrounds to look, and editing photos in a way that fit my art was quite the challenge. Thankfully my art style leans more to semi-realistic so after going through like a million filters and messing around in Krita, I got a very hazy but harsh sort of filter going on with the images that fit really well with the atmosphere. I actually really like how they turned out!

For Muerte's sprite I made the most ugly looking sprite at first and was went "absolutely not", scrapped an hour of work and started over. I'm so glad I did, the version in game is x10 better. Finally, I was convinced I wasn't going to have time to do any CGs, but it felt wrong not to have one in an otome adjacent game, so I speed ran one in about an hour as well.

Overall, the story is the strongest part of this game and I think I achieved exactly what I wanted from it tonally. A lot of this world was taking pieces from other old/dead books and borrowing them for this. It made the writing process a lot easier, but I think that's also why the world took on such a fun and interesting shape to me. It's just Neat.

COMPARING MY VELOX ENTRIES

Idk maybe to some it'd be better to wait until the rankings are out, but honestly? After trying to write the rankings portions for the previous two jams I have come to realize I just don't care about rankings LMAO. My favorite part of the Velox jams has been learning things, playing other peoples games, and being annoying by commenting on every single entry (it'll be a sad day for me personally when this jam gets big and I can no longer feasibly play every single entry. That's my real goal at this point).

I've talked about PRETTYBOY Inc. and Disruptive Compassion a lot in their own post mortems so I'll try not to talk too much about them, but I thought I'd like to rank how I feel about them personally.

1. FaithEater

Listen, visually this is not my best of the entries but I'm actually so in love with this. I think the key reason for this is how bad 2023 was and how that effected all my feelings towards my creative work as a result. 2024 has been a lot better, and I've been enjoying making things again and enjoying what I make. Maybe the rush of that has made it hard to be objective, but then, when is ranking your own work ever objective? Maybe half the love I have for this is just because I'm finally in a healthy creative space again. Still, it's my favorite so far.

2. PRETTYBOY Inc. is Hiring!

Something about this story is just really neat to me. I actually go back and replay it too, which is weird because if you had me do that with my other games, I'm like 'wow, I could fix....so much alfsjsaf." It obviously isn't perfect by any means, but this is the game that made me realize what I wanted from my game dev side of creation. Something just weird, dark, and vague. It's also just such an accurate representation of what it felt like to be job hunting, and how weirdly invasive job interviews can be sometimes. At least, how I've personally experienced it lol

3. Disruptive Compassion

I made this during a point where I was pretty much completely disconnected from my creative work. Nothing really felt like me or my voice, and so when I put this out it just kind of....was. It still feels very distant from me, and maybe one day it'll feel like something I made? It's a very interesting thing to feel, because this is the only thing I've made that I've truly felt completely disconnected to it, and to this day, I'm still not sure why.

As a whole, they did teach me a lot about game design. PRETTYBOY Inc. finally made me finish learning the basics of Ren'py (LMAO), like image buttons, making text pause or autotype/click, GUI design, etc. Disruptive Compassion was more me learning/testing out what I like visually, and FaithEater had me learning how to work with NVL mode and feel like I had never designed GUI before in my life (also LMAO).

But let's get a little real for a second, and get into what I learned as a whole.

RANKING

I wasn't going to include this section this time actually, since idc about rankings so I never have much to say but UH:

What the fuck do you mean I got top 3 and top 5 for narrative and theme incorporation????????? I was expecting to be ranked in the middle for all categories because the entries this time around were all bangers. So this being the jam where I ranked was so surprising. Honestly, nothing else matters beyond the fact people liked my writing, which makes me super happy. I'm more a writer then a game dev, so seeing people enjoyed that aspect of FaithEaters was really nice!

And as a side note, this is also the highest of the jams I've ranked for sound! I've been really trying to get better about audio and sound design, so I'm glad it seems like I'm improving based on the overall score! May I continue learning more things and improving my skills!

VELOX GAME JAMS

I'm not quite sure how to write this section? I wrote pretty much the rest of it this the week after release (except the ranking section obviously lol), and then kind of just reflected on the Velox Jams a lot. I'm not a social person, especially online. If you're one of the few who have been around a while for some reason, then you probably already know that I have schizoaffective disorder. It makes the paranoia of interacting online, where everyone is faceless, incredibly suffocating. It takes a lot for me to interact with anyone because of this. Even a simple message of excitement can send me into a spiral if I try to send it. I've long accepted I'll never really exist in internet spaces.

But you know, Velox Jams felt like the first step I took to at least try not to let it get to me. I think it was easy for me to use Velox as a means to hack my brain. Voting is expected, so I may as well try to comment while I'm at it. The ""expectation"" of it made it so it made things easier to actually comment on others work, even outside of just the itch.io page. It was very small, and to most hardly noticeable. But to me, with a brain on fire? It was probably the biggest step I'd ever taken.

It was a nice exposure to interacting with others. It also proved to my brain that the whole interacting online thing isn't automatically bad or scary. And from there? When I've been in a good head space I actually comment on other peoples work, I have plans to do more game jams this year, I even joined the indie otome discord! Discord, which has been a major trigger for my paranoia since the thing was conceived! I probably won't ever be the most social or vocal person online, but I exist a little more then I did before, and I'm happy for it. So uh, thanks to the Velox Community for being so cool. Y'all helped me take those first steps, and I really appreciate it. I'm happy to be where I'm at.

With that, congrats to everyone who did Velox Formido! 36 hours was a wild ride of a time, and I'm excited for whatever comes the next round. I'm not sure what my calendar will look like come August now that I have my current job, but even if I can't participate, I'm still going to be annoying and comment on every single entry and support you all!

I'll see you there!