Hi there, howdy?

To all those who celebrated it, I hope you had a great Christmas; and to those like me who didn’t, I hope you still used this opportunity to stuff some chocolate in your face (yes, I’m starting this devlog with a Frozen reference, I’m unstoppable)!

First of all, what can I say, but… OH MY GOD I HOSTED MY FIRST GAME JAM AND I’M RELEASING A GAME FOR IT, IT FEELS SO SURREAL, I’M SO HAPPY, AAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More seriously, ever since I discovered the concept of game jams and joined my first one with the Abyss Team when we worked on La Vie en Rose (for Yaoi Jam 2020), one of my dreams had been to host mine someday.

So, earlier this year, I tweeted about this dream of mine, that I wanted to host a game jam someday… and for some reason, I was encouraged to host it this year. And I guess the suggestions were right: after all, to organise a game jam, you just need to create it on itch, and perhaps some devs will be interested in it!

When I decided to organise it, I asked my number one bully friend Len to host it with me, she accepted and ta-dah: Once Upon A Time VN Jam was born!

I’m quite happy with this jam: after all, autumn is finally finished and has left most of us cold and depressed. Now, winter has to be cosy, and what’s cosier than a good old fairy tale, amirite?

(by the way did you know that i read this “amilitay” for years before realising it was “am I right”...)

*voice in the distance* we don’t care chiiiim stop rambling about useless stuff and please talk of your game

… ah, right, the game.

THIS game.

Gosh, it’s been a wild ride.

Seasonal depression and risks of burnout

Guess who has three thumbs and made a lot of games this year? Well, not me because I only have two thumbs, but you got the gist of it.

So, hear me out: I know I put a lot of passion in my games and, more than that, they helped me explore a lot of coding specificities I needed/wanted to learn. But here is the thing: I’m always trying my best when I develop a game, really: I never released a game I wasn’t satisfied with it.

…

“Fast-food dev”

For some reason, during autumn, this thought started to bud in my mind, like a poisonous flower (an oleander maybe, why not…).

Then, I started to hate EVERYTHING I created, to look at everything with disgust. Yes, even When The Wind Blew You Away. I’m sorry, Peter.

So, understandably so, with this mindset, it was quite difficult to work on projects, and on my initial OUAT project, The Birth of Cinderella. It wasn’t a very long game either, but it required a lot of art and coding experimentations that… I wasn’t in the mindset to create, convince that it would end up looking bad anyway.

However, in November, I announced a game and held a casting call for it: Son of the Woods.

And, for some reason, working on this game… helped with this? If you guys don’t know, the Daughters of the Sun trilogy, of which Son of the Woods is the second entry, is based on Jean Racine’s Phaedra, which is my favourite thing of all time, and the work that’s been the most influential on mine. And not only did I trust Racine, I also know that almost nobody masters this story as well as I do.

And I actually… liked this game????? And it even helped me see things on the brighter side about my games and ready to go back to this OUAT project?

But now, I had another issue… I didn’t have enough time to complete it. Of course, had I chosen to crunch, easily done – after all, I developed High School Lolita on my own, in the span of a single month.

And, well… let’s say I’ve been suffering from symptoms I’ve last suffered from five years ago, when I had a burnout. And to be honest, I didn’t want to experience that again. So, I wasn’t burnt out yet, but I could tell it was going to happen if I didn’t take things slowly: so I chose to take things slowly.

How did this game end up existing?

After a bit of brainstorming, I thought I could submit the game I’m supposed to make for my twitter account reaching 300 followers, River of Rebirth, for this jam, since it’s quite fairy tale-themed, but… honestly, I felt bad letting Annelise down.

Then, I remembered a scrapped idea I had for an Annelise short-game: it consisted in having Annelise’s six love interests have soliloquies, and the game would end up in Annelise’s own monologue about the wishes her heart makes (of course I had to have a Cinderella reference).

The idea was scrapped because I didn’t think it wouldn’t make a very interesting game: why would you care for the characters? Sure, Henri was the Prince Charming and Annelise the Cinderella famous thanks to the tale and the Disney film, but it would have been a bit complicated to raise interest for the other five LIs (for example, I do love Maximilien, but I’m not sure “The son of Cinderella’s former vocal coach” really sells his character…).

But if I only restrained this game to Annelise and Henri… then I could make it happen! After all, there was a perfect scene for them to express their emotions in a way that connects them: the scene happening right after Cinderella runs away from the ball!

Obviously, I could have written the actual ball scene, but to be honest, it seems too important a scene to be featured in a short game lol.

So, I wrote the script in around 3-4 hours, which is quite okay? So, I planned this: a game involving these two characters, each one has one CG. Two CGs shouldn’t take too long, it will be fine…

…

Well, this game ended up with nine of them… I mean, for a specific reason: I really wanted to give it a storybook effect, and have you ever seen a storybook with the same illustration on every other page? I think not!!!!!!!

In the end, the CGs didn’t take that long, I don’t think I spent more than twenty hours on them? I guess drawing a lot makes you faster at art fvgbrrfg, which is a good sign for future projects (*coughs* Waterlily on the Froth *coughs*).

So, in the end, this game ended up being on the simple side of coding, so it didn’t take much time or didn’t raise any major difficulty. The hardest part was honestly to change the sliders of the settings into bars, for those who’ll understand the difference in Ren’Py. I never tried before, but in the end, it wasn’t that much of a struggle (so it makes another Ren’Py superpower unlock and even more GUI opportunities open for me, I’m winning!!!).

Now, before concluding this devlog, I kinda want to share some thoughts I had on writing a Cinderella.

How to write Cinderella, Brother Chim edition

It obviously depends on the direction you choose, so I’ll only consider the one I chose for Annelise: I wanted her to be faithful to what emanates from the Cinderella figure.

So, at the root of the character, Cinderella is a genuinely kind character, even in the Perrault’s tale. While Snow-White, in Grimm’s tale, invites her evil step-mother to her wedding only to force her to wear heated iron shoes so that she dies, Cinderella finds good husbands for her step-sisters, even the one mean enough to call her Culcendron (a bit of French lesson: while “cendron” is derived from “cendre”, meaning “cinder”, “cul” means… ass. Not even buttocks, or bum, really, it means ass. The meanest of the two step-sisters literally calls her “the one with cinder on her ass”...).

And that raises a lot of complaints: people fail to see why Cinderella is so nice, why she doesn’t run away from her step-family etc.

I do think it’s missing what makes the essence of the character. Cinderella is a very kind and generous character, being good for the sake of being good and to navigate through hardships.

So, if you want to make your audience feel compassion for Cinderella, I think it’s important to keep in mind: she’s full of love for others, and feels enough love to believe in their improvement, and to believe that she can improve them by being nice to them and making the thorns around their hearts wither and bloom into flowers instead. But this inherent optimism is an important part in the set-up of her character, whether you want to narrate a Cinderella deconstructing it or one triumphing thanks to it.

For Annelise, she’s set-up as even more naïve, groomed by her step-mother’s fake affection into becoming her step-sisters’ servant. But Annelise is firmly convinced that they are the two women supporting this family which doesn’t have a man in it, and that was what my initial idea, The Birth of Cinderella, was narrating (so, how Annelise “became” Cinderella). However, in her official game, Annelise makes a discovery that makes her question everything about her relationship with her step-mother, and loses some of her initial naïvety. Therefore, while, for the original project, Annelise was 18, here, Annelise has her canonical age: 21. She has already started deconstructing her toxic household, hence her bitter thoughts about her step-family and her looming feeling of being trapped; however, she still remains open to others, trying to see the beauty in them – including Henri. Moreover, she hasn’t lost her very empathetic nature, and that’s something that felt important for a take on Cinderella.

I guess that’s it for this short comment on how I chose to write my Cinderella! I hope you guys appreciated this devlog, the game and are looking forward to some more experiences by my side!