Hi guys, howdy?

New game, new NaNoRenO, new devlog!

To start my whole rant about this game, I think it can be fun to examine how this project, without me expecting it, became my one-month tormentor!

Advice for NaNoRenO: SHORT PROJECTS

NaNoRenO isn’t a marathon: it’s a one-month sprint. I know what I’m going to say is going to sound strange considering the pace at which I create games, but one month for a game is SHORT. Very short. So something good to do is to work in teams and to avoid too lengthy projects: realistic restraints are the best way to produce something.

This was what I did two years ago with The Life I Lost, my first NaNoRenO participation: Megan’s sprites were commissioned, and it is a not-too-lengthy kinetic novel. So the project, despite me changing direction with it during the jam, was the kind of project that you should go for for a jam like NaNoRenO.

Last year, I released nothing less than High School Lolita – my crushing love story, which is certainly one of my favourite games because of its intense and dramatic story and, from a dev perspective, a real step-up from my previous games (despite it still being more simple, in the end, than the games I’m making today). I remember March 2023 was an intense month for me: HSL has 20k words and a story quite difficult to articulate (but from the feedback I received, I’m glad I apparently did well).

So, for this year, I wanted to take things slowly, especially since I intended to release The Thread and the Sword, the final instalment of the Daughters of the Sun trilogy, within the same month.

So, I had an idea, back when I worked on The Day Being Ace Made Him Stronger for Ace Jam: I wanted to make a wholesome, cute ace game, letting you befriend the love interest if you preferred, rather than date him. I’ll explain later how I conceptualised this project, but long story short: I had an idea which I thought would be short (after all, it couldn’t be longer than When The Wind Blew You Away, it felt kind of similar, but with an even less complicated relationship between the protagonist and their love interest?).

Ha.

Hahaha.

HAHAHAHAHAHA.

HOW NAÏVE I WAS.

For some reason, this project, planned to be around 7k words, ended up being more than FOUR TIMES longer.

What’s the point of giving advice if you can’t follow it!!!! “Gneugneugneu short projects” WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU CHIMERIQUEMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HOW DID RENDEZ-DOUG END UP BEING LONGER THAN HSL??? I DON’T KNOW!!!

But that’s okay. I’m okay. Heehee.

I started writing Sandra’s route first and was surprised to find out it was above 15k, but it was fine: after all, I wrote it very fast, so Adriel would go as smoothly, it’s not as if I was going to be sick for ten days.

………………………………

BUT ALAS, I AM A JOKE TO EXISTENCE, CONSTANTLY BULLIED BY THE VAGARIES OF LIFE, SO OF COURSE I HAD TO GET SICK GOSH WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

At some point, when I got better, I was convinced that I could only release the two first days of Rendez-Doug for NaNoRenO, rather than the full-game… but I guess releasing games really made me faster at coding and I managed to release it? Not that this game is particularly ambitious in the coding department, but still????

So, next year, if I do participate in NaNoRenO, I hope I do something short. And I hope I won’t be bitterly laughing reading these lines.

What about Rendez-Doug?

Okay, time to talk about the real star of this game and this devlog, the one and only… erm… Doug?

I had the idea of the character in January, while I was developing The Day Being Ace Made Him Stronger. If you guys read the devlog I wrote for this game, you see that, at the end of it, I mention my idea for NaNoRenO: a visual novel with an asexual love interest, at the end of which he might confess or not; and if he does, you should be allowed to stay friends with him or instead embrace a romance. This project was Rendez-Doug and, if you played the game, you can tell that’s exactly what happens in Sandra’s route.

So, while brainstorming it before NaNoRenO, I had doubts on one thing: in my mind, the protagonist was a female character, but I wondered if I shouldn’t allow self-inserting to a greater extent and, in the end, some players did prefer to play as a male protagonist.

So, I didn’t exactly write self-inserts, but decided to write two MCs. This idea was inspired by Odyssian Blaze, a visual novel letting you play as either the cultured and responsible June, or the sociable and playful Julio. Writing these lines, I realise their personalities kind of resemble Sandra’s and Adriel’s (admittedly, Sandra and June still feel like two very different characters, but oh well)...

So, Odyssian Blaze is a fun game about Greek mythology, letting you have different interactions with the love interests depending on the protagonist you play as. I thought I could do something similar and I think I succeeded? I guess the difference is that, in Odyssian Blaze, if June and Julio react differently to the events of the plots, according to their contrasting personalities, the plot of the story is the same. In Rendez-Doug, I wrote two different routes for the two characters and wanted Sandra and Adriel to have their own personal arcs.

I also wanted each route to explore different facets of Doug and I had a lot of fun writing him as reserved and delicate in Sandra’s route, and clingy and caring in Adriel’s route.

And basically, the love interest I wanted to conceptualise for this project was supposed to be different from the ones from my two previous NaNoRenO entries, The Life I Lost and High School Lolita:

• In The Life I Lost, talking about “love interest” is a stretch, because this game isn’t really a romance game: the protagonist’s wife, Megan, is, as I said, his wife: you don’t need to seduce her. However, I wanted her to be a playful, supportive character, the person Jasper, the protagonist, needed to progressively accept his future role as a father. If you played the game, you know this is her characterisation in the first act of the game (which ends when you name the child). In the second act, I wanted Megan to appear deeply in love with Jasper: they are a happy couple, and the perfect fit for each other to embrace the new chapter of their life. And the last act (starting after the twist) subverts Megan’s first characterisation, putting Jasper in the shoes of the one who has to support her.
• In High School Lolita, talking about “love interest” is even worse than it is for The Life I Lost, because the love interest in question is the heroine’s groomer. The idea was indeed to write a twisted romance, criticising the “teacher/student” relationship trope. However, I wanted Matthieu to be nuanced and, in the end, he became a character failing to fight his conflict between his moral principles, and the twisted attraction he feels to his own teenage student. Well, basically, “male teacher Phaedra”, as I can now say considering I concluded the Daughters of the Sun trilogy.

So, I wanted Doug to feel different from both: it wasn’t very difficult to make him different from Matthieu, so I analysed Megan’s main traits: she is a cheerful, quirky character having an unbreakable bond with her husband.

Then, things were simple for Doug: he had to be a boring divorced man! Then, the idea came naturally: writing a character that appeared boring, bland at first and… what? Him being secretly the most interesting guy ever? Nah: honestly, I didn’t vibe with the idea. Not that it’s always bad, but I don’t like the idea of “blindly” getting to know someone you find boring with the hope you’ll eventually find them attractive because they have a deep secret etc. I instead wanted to write a character who was “unassuming on the outside, but a treasure within” (hey, if I had to reference Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper in any devlog, it had to be for Rendez-Doug)! So in the end, I wanted Doug to be a nice guy (without the trademark, because he’s not nice to get girls), and, rather than subverting his simplicity, I wanted him to be loveable thanks to his simplicity. So I hope you guys enjoyed/will enjoy this little cute game of mine, don’t expect anything cute any time soon!! Now, I’ll start actually developing River of Rebirth (yes, finally), so I hope you guys are looking forward to it! Kisses!!