#postmortem

[quiet-cabin]

Omamori PostMortem!

Here it is folks! The final Omamori devlog 🥹. In it we'll be taking a look at how everything began, some of the ups and downs we had along the way, including some looks at behind the scenes work, and finally, what's next for the studio!

I'm going to try something a little different here. Normally I link back to the devlog on itch so you can read it there, but I'm wondering if people might be more inclined to read the full thing if they don't have to leave to another tab lol (Although I also worry that tumblr just isn't really great for really long post reading..) But! I shall put the choice in your hands. Here's the link to it on itch.io! Or you can click the read more below to see it here!

I'd be really interested to know what Y'ALL are interested in seeing next 👀

Hello everyone!!

It’s been one month since Omamori released which sounds incredibly fake but here we are! As of posting this, Omamori is sitting at 454 downloads!! Which is really, REALLY exciting and so much more than I ever thought to hope for. Thank you so much!

Today we’re going to be talking a little bit about the process, how things went, what we learned, and what’s next! This is going to be a bit of a longer post but some of you have been with us since the very beginning, and it might be nice to look back, and some of you are new, and have no idea how it all went!

HOW IT STARTED

(The original mock up I made to help Rob visualize what I was thinking for the main menu screen.)

In the beginning of April 2023 I started telling Rob about a 'totally not real' idea I had for a serirei dating sim. It was very much in the 'haha jk wouldn't that be fun, but it'll totally never happen' category. Then I thought, since it won't ever happen, it could be fun to do a little mock-up. Just a fake screenshot of a character and some dialogue. Then I thought, maybe I could try to animate it to show some additional dialogue. THEN I thought, well if I'm going to do all of that, I might as well just put together a slice in a game engine and just do a screen recording.

So I sat down and installed an entire game engine, learned how to navigate its interface and how to use its visual scripting language, how to create & use variables so that you could enter your character name, how to put in a dialogue choice screen, even made a tiny pixel art takoyaki... all to create a 20 second screen recording of a game that was totally not going to exist.

Totally.

I even shared it on Tumblr! It uh, as of typing this, still only has 3 notes lol. You can see the original post here, but here's a screenshot of it.

I won't lie, it was actually really disheartening to see basically no engagement with it. I know there wasn't much info on the concept itself, since the game wasn't going to be real (I thought), and maybe that would have helped, but it definitely did a blow to the ol' self esteem. (Although I can say, looking at it now, I really like this! I'm really insecure about my visual art and style, but y'know what, this is pretty cool! )

I didn't let that deter me though. I was really excited about this game and the story, and at the end of the day, it was a silly little project with my silly little blorbos. So I kept thinking about it and poking the idea and pretty soon the fixation was churning full blast. I was developing the plot, I had snippets of dialogue in mind, I was thinking about GUI elements. And all the while I was yelling all of this at Rob. Eventually I worked up the courage to ask him if he wanted to do the art, only to discover he was working up the nerve to ask if he could help out! After that, it was just a lot of excited yelling about this project.

Looking back at this original mock-up, I think it's really great to see how Rob took my original concepts for layout and design and breathed some actual life into them. At some point I'd done some additional iterations on the dialogue boxes:

And from there we got:

Which ultimately gave us:

HOW IT WENT

There were definitely some ups and down on this, for sure. Getting the demo out was a huge accomplishment and we were both eager to just keep working on it. In fact, the original plan, after releasing the demo October 2023, had been to release the full game by the coming March, for Serizawa's birthday. Ambitious? Without a doubt lol. Obviously that didn't happen, and our next hope was to release it for Reigen's birthday 2024. This way it'd be full circle. Then we hoped to release it for Valentine's day maybe. (This is why we didn't announce a release date until it was well and truly DONE.)

Some of you may remember that Rob injured his hand in early 2024 and so we took quite a bit of time off to let him heal. We're not about that crunch life. Even if this wasn't entirely a passion project, there's absolutely no reason to crunch. So we took a step back so he could heal up. While that was happening.. we had the Great Engine Switch.

The demo for Omamori was originally made in GDevelop. An open-source, no-code engine. And it worked great for the demo! But once I started adding in features that people would come to expect in a visual novel, like saving and loading, or a history of the text, things got a little more complicated. It reached a point where I was essentially building a visual novel engine within the Gdevelop engine. Which, while incredibly fascinating and a great mental challenge, wasn't exactly the best use of my time. Not when there are engines specifically made for creating visual novels, like Ren'py. Which has things like saving & loading, dialogue history, text size options and dyslexic font options, all ready to go out of the box. So, I changed engines.

Changing engines was a long process, partly because it took me some time to finally come to terms with the fact that I just needed to do it, and partly because while some things did come out of the box, I did still have to re-do other things all over again, like entering all of the dialogue and choice options for the prologue and part of chapter one that was used for the demo. I was also learning a whole new engine, which isn't no-code (although it IS really streamlined), and I had to find my way around.

We had a lot of plans for some things that ultimately had to get cut. Early on we planned to have more splash screen images for pivotal moments, which would also be accessible from a Gallery page on the main menu. We even toyed with the idea of reaching out to other artists in the community to see if they would be interested in doing guest art to be featured in the gallery! But as we made progress we had to decide what was essential to the game, to telling the story, and what was a Nice To Have. Learning how to nip that scope creep early is an essential skill in gamedev!

Still, all things considered, as a team of two people we made an entire game in only two years, even with the obstacles we faced. And I think that's pretty damn impressive.

Q&A

What was your favorite part?

ROB:

Getting to work on a passion project with Jace! Getting to see this through to the end with them was very rewarding. Like, did you know you can just make cool things with your friends?? It's awesome and makes for a unique blend of cheerleading, flexing, and teamwork. Definitely recommended.

For the art, I got a kick out of trying to develop a visual identity that was as much our own game as it was a Mob Psycho fangame. The first season opening sequence was my main touchpoint. This poster was a source of inspiration too, notably for the paper cut out look for the sprites. It was fun and a nice way to appreciate the series from a different perspective.

JACE:

This is actually a tough one lol! Part of what I love about being an indie dev are all the different roles you play. Jumping from writing to programming to creating mockups to resource sourcing for background music or sound effects, I think that's the part I enjoy most. It's hard to get bored when you're wearing so many hats and that really appeals to me.

If I had to pick a favorite part, I would say sharing the original drafts of the script with Rob and getting to see his reactions to Reigen's impressive levels of fumbling was a lot of fun. Also, figuring out a piece of code that had me stumped for days is nothing short of euphoric.

What was the most challenging?

ROB:

Mostly mental hurdles. Like, accepting that “good enough” IS actually good enough was sometimes a challenge. On top of wanting to tweak old sprites (we started this two years ago after all!) I had wanted to make more splash art and character poses, and add silly details like giving the face on Reigen’s pj outfit different expressions. But as it turns out, if you want to finish something then at some point you have to stop working on it. Great lessons for battling perfectionism.

JACE:

Changing engines and learning an entire new one was definitely a challenge. I'd dabbled with Ren'py before so I wasn't completely in the dark, but I hadn't done more than dialogue and some choices. With this I had to learn how to navigate Ren'py's screen language so I could build my own screens, I had to learn how to create and manipulate variables in the engine, I watched a LOT of youtube tutorials and got real familiar with the Ren'py subreddit lol.

Something that was really, really challenging for me was learning, and re-learning, how to start. I would work on the game for weeks and be doing great, really have a nice groove, and then Life would happen and  I wouldn't touch it for a little while and suddenly the thought of opening up the code was terrifying. I was convinced I couldn't do it, I had no idea what I was doing, and that I was going to get stuck. And it got harder and harder to just start. Even when all signs pointed to that I maybe DO know what I'm doing!

What helped a lot was that I kept a mini-devlog. Every day that I did gamedev work I journaled about what I worked on, how long I spent on it, and what my next steps were. This helped in SO many ways. For one, it was just really nice to see a calendar view of my productivity. Time is fake and its easy for me to think I haven't been productive "enough". Then I look at my calendar and see this:

Not every month looked like this of course. There's a couple where it's pretty damn barren. But that's where the other data points came to help. It was really helpful to see how long I worked on something as well.  For example:

It took me literally twenty minutes to create all of the idle and hover images for the icons on the corkboard. I remember I did this quickly before running out to work. And this became a point of constant reference for me. Every time I felt myself getting caught in the swirl of, I can't do this, opening the engine feels scary and overwhelming, or I only have .. two hours... three hours... before I have to go to work or go to an appointment or go to bed, what could I get done in that time, I would think of how much I got done in just twenty minutes. Because ultimately, any time spent on the project is productive! But having these little reminders helped a lot. And each mini devlog also had a section for my reflections and what I hoped to work on next. So if it was a few days, or a month or two, before I was able to get back to it, I could reread the most recent devlog to see what Past Me was planning to do!

What might you do differently?

ROB:

Oh man. Organization. I frequently moved the working files between tablet and desktop and ended up with duplicates all over the place. It was a pain after we came back from that long break for my hand injury because I had different expressions and sprites spread over a mess of nearly identical files.

The worst part is this was not the first or last time this happened. Why? Don't live like me.

JACE:

Well, if we're talking about Omamori specifically, knowing what I know now, I'd of course just start working in Ren'py from the start. I'd had the thought that I could learn one engine (to rule them all). Because I have ideas and plans for other games, and had hoped to find one engine that could do everything, and I wouldn't have to jump around, potentially learning a bunch of different coding languages. But, there's something to be said for using the right tool for the job, and in this case it was definitely Ren'py.

If we're talking about future projects and what I might do differently, that's a toughie. I think every project is going to require different set up and preparation. If I were to do another visual novel, I think I'd start tackling any special screens or gameplay mechanics as early as possible. Writing is one of my strengths and I know I can do that. And I'm familiar enough with the engine that I know entering in my writing and dialogue is pretty straightforward. But making those custom screens and troubleshooting them always takes much longer than I think it will.

In terms of organization, I have a Notion template I created for my game projects, and Omamori largely served as the trial run for what I would and wouldn't need. The mini devlog calendar is absolutely a keeper. But the way I organized the programming vs writing task lists definitely got reworked in the final month of Omamori, and I've already started updating my template and other already existing projects to reflect the new workflow!

I think with every new project I'm going to do things a little differently and, for me, that's part of the fun!

Do you think you'd work on a game again?

ROB:

Yes! I'm currently taking time off from commission work, but I really enjoy creative collaboration in general, so I would definitely work on a game again in the future.

JACE:

Oh honey, I already am 😏.

What's next for you?

ROB:

I’m looking forward to diving in to some original work this summer. Not sure where it will take me yet, but I've been itching to get back into making comics, so that might be next! If you'd like to keep up with my work, I update my Tumblr most frequently.

JACE:

I'm so glad you asked! While Rob moves toward exploring comics, Quiet Cabin is also going to shift gears. I'm going to focus on games with original characters and stories. I don't have any plans to make another fangame but I do have a LOT of other ideas! (Some of which were hinted at in Omamori 👀 .)

So what can you expect? Stylistically, I've always had a love for pixel art so there will be some of that going forward. Depending on the project I might seek out another artist to collaborate with for things like backgrounds or character sprites, especially if I do another visual novel. So if you're an artist and have read this far and would be interested in collaborating on a future project, definitely reach out! I have a lot of ideas, a lot of different vibes and genres, so don't worry if your style is different from what you see in Omamori! And who knows, I'm finally reaching a point where I'm happier with my artistic abilities so maybe for one of these projects I'll attempt the art myself!

As far as genres go, I've got more romance, some horror, some fantasy, maybe some monsters you can date.. 👀

I know we all came here for the blorbos but I truly hope you'll stick around for my next projects, I've already started writing one of them and I'm really excited about it!

Up-Coming Projects include (in no particular order):

Garage Sale Skull: A short, in-browser text game where you find a weird skull at a garage sale. It’s fine, it’s not real, it’s just some weird art project. …right? (Romance with a sprinkle of horror.)

Untitled Dating Sim(?): A visual novel dating sim. Maybe. The dating part is up in the air. It's VERY fresh conceptually and I'm still ironing things out so I don't want to say too much but I will say: time loops. Sorry. Wait. Maybe you didn't hear me. Time 👏🏾 Loop 👏🏾 Visual Novel👏🏾

Apartment 102 : There is something wrong with your apartment.. A very short top-down pixel horror game.

Reyna's Remedies: As a young potion and remedy maker, you open up a new shop on the side of a busy road in the kingdom. There's a lot going on, there's a monster in the Deep Woods, a monster the Princess went missing trying to hunt, there's a constant flow of adventurers in need of healing potions and everyday townspeople with mundane needs. With the help of your animal assistant, you have one month to raise enough money to secure another month of rent, to prove you can do this, and in the process help the different people that knock on your door. (A time & resource management game with an overarching plot. Queer romance with a bit of horror.)

My hope is to release Garage Sale Skull this summer. Untitled Dating Sim(?) is new and uncooked, but rattling around my head pretty loudly. Meanwhile Reyna's Remedies and Apt 102 are games I've been brainstorming on for literally years..  Either way, there are two more steam next fests this year and I'd really love to submit a demo for ✨ something ✨for at least one of them. We'll see!

Once a new project launches I will of course be posting devlogs here on its project page. I'll also be sharing quick updates & general gamedev thoughts on ko-fi, bsky, and tumblr. At the end of the day I'm still just one person, and I may forget to crosspost to a platform, but itch.io will always be the first place to get updates. I'm also considering making video devlogs in the future that will showcase more art and gameplay, especially as I shift toward games that have more action, so you can also follow the YouTube channel!

Again, I cannot thank everyone enough for their continued support and enthusiasm!! I'm really grateful to Rob for jumping into the abyss with me on this one. The game wouldn't be what it is without his help! All the cheerleading from followers as we worked on it and now, all of the comments about how the game has touched or inspired folks has been so, so amazing to hear. Thank you everyone!!

Finally, one last Ekubo for the road.

Thank you everyone, see you next time!

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Tumblr introduced a "postmortem" feature, where dead celebrities could blog from the afterlife. Only Terry Pratchett used it.

[honeyfolklore]

And all at once, the postmortem second part is complete. 🖤🪶

Please repost, it helps me reach more people!

Sincerely, your grim pathologist. Xxx

Ps, you can thank @froggy713 for the How Did It End wallpaper request. X

[when-sanpape-arts]

Pleaseeee update Postmortem PLEASEEEEEE 🥺

it's in the works! :3c chapter 8 has been a bit of a beast. so in a mean time, please enjoy this random assortment of postmortem sketches that have never seen the light of day

[vellichorom]

stop me if you've heard this one before; a tardigrade & condensed hot air get coffee & stroll the autumn-clad path... & they were both narrators 😳

COMMISSIONED BY @lilydoesdrawsometimes AWHILE BACK BUT I FINALLY FOUND AN APPROPRIATE TIME TO POST IT. HOORAY

// COMMISSIONS AREN'T PUBLICALLY AVAILABLE YET BUT CONSIDER D0NATING TO MY K0-FI FOR A DOODLE OF ANYTHING ( within reason ) YOU REQUEST!

[daguerreotyping]

Post-mortem tintype of a strikingly beautiful young man, c. 1860s

[transstornsdinds3]

Yo tengo un plan, es muy sencillo solo necesito un martillo y un movimiento involuntario que me lleve a romperte el cráneo y ni te gastes en gritar, nadie te escucha, eso es en vano quiero sentirme un poquito mas cercano

Sentir tu cuello cada vez más fino entre mis manos mirar tus ojos abandonando este plano No me alcanza que desaparezcas quiero tu cuerpo en mi habitación pálido y sin pulso para darle calor y mi casa tan sagrada nunca pudo conocer el amor solo fue testigo de lo peor.

[evvygrimm]

🩸🩸🩸 ……

[clownboyskingdom]

Ghost grandpa;;;;

[arimiadev]

Hello visual novel fans and vampire lovers! It’s been a while since I last wrote a postmortem, so I hope I’ll be able to write this concisely (and coherently).

Dahlia was a short visual novel I created in under 36 hours for Velox Formido, a shortform visual novel game jam ran by robobarbie and Allie Vera. It’s inspired by Ludum Dare, one of the longest running game jams in the world where devs are tasked to make a game in 1 weekend based around a theme. I got my start making visual novels by entering Ludum Dare…which was 10 years ago, as of 2024!

I had my eye on this game jam for a while now, as this isn’t its first incarnation. I’ve been a bit burnt out the past year or so, not completely where I can’t make progress but to where I feel like my work has slowed down a lot more than my peers and feel I can’t make anything quickly. When I saw the jam was happening this weekend, I hopped on board once the themes were announced.

the themes

While Ludum Dare has a rigorous process of eliminating themes until it gets down to the final one, Velox Formido has it where there are 5 themes that win and participants have to use at least 2 of them in their entries. The final themes were…

Enemies with Benefits

Flower Symbolism

Doomed by the Narrative

Trapped with Someone

Forbidden Romance

I started crafting ideas as soon as the themes were announced, which was what the jam started- meaning the clock was ticking!

My first idea was a shounen rivals-esque sapphic story about two rivals meeting up for alone time. I started writing it immediately but moved on to another idea- being trapped with a vampire. I doubt I’ll ever use the first idea, so I’ve shared the snippet I was able to write for it here. Every new line is the other woman talking, so think of it as a quick back and forth.

Even though I had started on this idea, I wanted to write something more… mysterious. Frilly. Girls in cute dresses, to be exact. So I began potting an idea where a girl wakes up to find a vampire in her room, unsure if she’s had her fill yet or toying with her next meal.

the story

The “flower symbolism” theme was definitely my first pick, as I love the concept of it and played around with it in my last visual novel, Asphodelium. I named the characters Dahlia (beauty, change) and Camellia (admiration, longing). Dahlia represents a change in Camellia’s life, a sudden burst of newness. Camellia longs for something different, some way for things to change.

The other theme I picked was “trapped with someone”, as the premise is a girl stuck with a vampire in her room. I didn’t want it to be outright horror, but still a little creepy and tense.

Dahlia "I've had enough pitchforks stuck in my face for today." Camellia "And why is that?" Dahlia "Because your kind isn't too welcoming to my kind." Camellia "I was asking why you were here in the first place." Dahlia "Obvious questions get obvious responses. I needed a snack, of course." Camellia "And you chose my residence." Dahlia "Didn't you say this was your fathers?" Her words curl around the last word, like ivy growing against a trellis. She's clearly already had a "snack", but was it enough to satisfy her? Or am I the main course?

Both of them are somewhat young, but there is still the element of the unknown. This creature clearly already had a meal, but does she want dessert? Is she just toying with her food? Or is she truly delighted to find someone her age to talk to?

With the time constraints I wasn’t able to flesh out much of their dynamic, but I hope it was still an enjoyable taste! The story ended up being about 2.3k words long with 3 endings.

the art

I started doing the art about….12 hours before the jam ended. I love working with fullbody sprites as they offer me a lot more versatility with posing, but I knew I didn’t have time for that here. This time I went for 3/4ths bodies, namely just so I could cut it off at the end of their dresses. I spent about an hour on each of these.

With the time crunch I didn’t have time to do concepts for them- I just winged it! I knew I wanted Dahlia to have pigtails, though she was originally going to have a purple theme. Camellia was supposed to have proper curls in her hair, but because the game starts with her being rudely awoken, I went with messy waves instead. Think of it as bedhead rather than her actual hairstyle.

I also quickly did a main menu artwork towards the end of my crunch in about half an hour. It was originally going to be the cover art on itchio but Dahlia’s >:D sprite looks more striking.

For the backgrounds I went with free photos from Unsplash and edited them. Personally, I like the look of filtered photos as backgrounds depending on the aesthetics of the game.

I didn’t have time to edit the GUI aside from the textbox, which was NVL mode.

the presentation

Dahlia is stylized fully in NVL mode, with the textbox to one side of the screen. I love NVL mode for scenes focused on narration and setting the right mood.

I was considering making the game a different resolution, but because the NVL mode is to the side rather than the entire screen I wanted to make use of the widescreen resolution.

The game is set late at night, so each of the backgrounds had to be nighttime. To match with this, I tinted the sprites to match each of them. For example, the above tint looks like this:

transform nightcolor: matrixcolor TintMatrix("#8594d6") * BrightnessMatrix(0.03) image dahlia night = LayeredImageProxy("dahlia",nightcolor)

I wanted to try something more complex like a tint + another light source overlayed onto the sprite, but ran out of time.

Another part of the presentation I did was to have a variety of shots. I had a very limited about of art to work with (only changing mouths and eyebrows, no arm poses or eye positions) so I knew I had to be smart about how I composited the scenes.

One thing I’ve done in other visual novels was to have one character further away and have another closer to the camera but their sprite turned black. This allows me to give the illusion of depth without having a sprite of the back of each character’s head.

for instance, this is that technique in Canvas Menagerie

Doing this in Dahlia was a quick and easy way to make the visuals much more interesting rather than swapping between two mostly static sprites the entire game.

The way I do it in other games is on a per-sprite basis, meaning I set brightness and position each time. It’s hectic, really! But because of the time limit for this jam, I was able to come up with a much quicker way to set it up.

transform lefttt: zoom 0.5 xalign 0.3 yalign 0.05 transform leftttb: zoom 0.8 xalign -1.6 yalign 0.1 matrixcolor(BrightnessMatrix(-1)) xzoom -1

The lefttt transform is for the character in the back- in this example, that’s Camellia. The leftttb transform (b standing for “black”) is for the character in the foreground who’s shrouded- in this example, that’s Dahlia.

Basically, the leftttb transform sets the sprite to a bigger size than the farther away sprite, sets the position, and then makes the color completely black before flipping the sprite (because this should be us seeing them from behind).

I also did quite a few small animations in the game, such as Dahlia dancing around or bouncing up and down. You define it once as a transform and can reuse it again and again.

transform dance: ease 0.7 xoffset -59 linear 0.25 ease 0.6 xoffset 74 linear 0.19 ease 0.76 xoffset -70 linear 0.3 ease 0.7 xoffset 102 linear 0.2 ease 0.8 xoffset 0

If you’d like to see the code in action, then guess what- I’ve released the entire source code for the game on GitHub! Feel free to sift through it to see the components in action and copy some of the code for your own projects. All I ask is that you do not redistribute the game (i.e. download the code, make a build in Ren’Py, and redistribute that as your own game).

wrapping up

I’m pretty happy with how Dahlia came out. It’s short and visually distinct and helped “prove” to myself that I’m capable of making visual novels in a weekend still. I tried to avoid spoilers here, so if you haven’t played it already then give it a try!

— Arimia

[ebbasukedev]

O2A2 jam Postmortem done 🎉

I just finished my postmortem for Chassis Aberration, what a ride! Go read it on itch: https://ebbasuke.itch.io/chassis-aberration/devlog/767147/chassis-aberration-postmortem If fellow O2A2 jammers see this, I'd love to read your postmortem too 💜 Link pls!

[knickknackpj]

Sorry it took a bit of time, but here's my postmortem for Chimera Baloney, my most recent game release! This doubles as my monthly devlog where I'm p much annoucing I'm taking a break after I do my Worst VN Jam Game

[romanticsims]

"Hi, my name is Graham. I shamelessly read smut in public and so should you."

[daandism]

gonna re-read my fav chapters of my comfort daanmarcoh fanfic because i need to be comforted rn

[clownboyconcentrate]

Thinking about. Space

[hartwound]

there are layers here i promise