Happy Halloween!  Today we'd like to share some afterthoughts about the process of making Vampliar. Writing a postmortem is also a part of participating in the Devtober Jam. 

Foxpancakes:

This kinetic novel was originally made for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam 2021. But we joined a week late and weren't able to complete it in time. Even though Hatoge supplied all the character sprites (minus the cat) and the ending CG art in a timely manner. I'm lucky to have had him collaborate with me on this project. It was me who wasn't able to write the story in time for the jam.

I saw that the Devtober Jam was happening in October and I thought it would be perfect to help motivate me to finish writing the story. 

I've learnt that a 1-month game jam is not enough time for me to complete a vn with my constant self-doubt, slow pace and real-life responsibilities. I also plan to take a break from jams...even though I keep thinking about joining more lol. 

I think I achieved what I set out to do with this vn. Though my vision for the story was a bit different...I wanted it to be more comical but I'm not great at comedy. Comedy is hard….

Fun fact, Tristen's name was originally "Tristan" but I kept spelling it as "Tristen" so I just change it lol...not a big change but still kinda funny. Laurie is actually short for Laurence. I've always loved the name Laurie so wanted to give it to one of my characters. :)

Originally Laurie was more of a flirty and cool character, but I changed him to be kinda clueless, dorky and hopelessly in love lol… Tristen was always a tsundere type character. I guess I just really like that dynamic.

WRITING

Foxpancakes:

I doubted myself a lot while writing this story. I constantly questioned if it was boring or not...if they talked about vampires too much or not enough...if my writing was good enough. I even thought about scrapping it and rewriting the whole thing. So to see people play it and say they enjoyed it really warms my heart.

Some parts I did have a lot of fun writing! But, the editing process is never fun for me...so I reached out for help with that. Having an editor made me feel more confident in my writing and helped me finish it. So I'm grateful to my editor PyrrhaIphis for helping me. 

My writing process is a mess… I usually open a document on google drive either on my phone or PC whenever I get an idea. Then I just write it out. It could be a scene that popped into my head or some dialogue. I try to keep it all in one document but I usually end up with a lot of these documents…

Then I take all the ideas I really liked and piece them together in one document into a somewhat coherent story. After that, I will fill in all the missing/needed scenes to make it really make sense.

Then it goes through a lot of editing…

Hatoge did help me a little with ideas. Originally Laurie was going to be upset about the portrait but Hatoge said it would be cuter if he loved it and he was right. 

Oh and I do write outlines but they're usually very brief. I like to write from the seat of my pants and things do change along the way. So I don't write fully detailed outlines and I hate writing them honestly haha. 

Here is a screenshot of some of the files...there are more lol. 

ART

Foxpancakes:

Getting backgrounds was easy. I bought some creative commons backgrounds from Minikle and edited them a little myself.

First picture is edited and the second one is unedited.

Hatoge:

The vibe I was going for with the character art, was 'modern stylish vampire meets isolated bookworm'.  Laurie cares about fashion a lot, so I wanted to make sure his clothes are unique. The newspaper print on his shirt is actually inspired by a real shirt I bought in japan, and the rest of his clothes were loosely referenced off of visual-kei fashion. 

Tristen on the other hand strikes me as someone who doesn't like to think about what to wear for the day, who just owns a lot of t-shirts that he randomly chooses from after waking up. Maybe Laurie can choose his outfits for him in the future haha

Overall I really liked making art for these two. I think the 'cheerful enthusiast' x 'jaded cynist' is one of my favourite ship dynamics, and I had a lot of fun bringing more life to these characters through their different expressions!

(Early concept art that served as a guide for the final character sprites.)

MUSIC

Foxpanckes:

One thing I did mess up on launch was the music. I got a bit impatient with the music and just put in some songs I liked. One which looped for far too long and didn't fit the story very well. 

Music was easy to obtain, we used some free creative commons music. Hatoge helped me pick some of the music out for the update. 

PROGRAMMING

Foxpancakes:

Programming was slow and tedious but I learnt some new things. Coding in the sprite expressions takes the longest amount of time and it is easily my least favourite part of the whole process. I love seeing it come together but hate putting it in myself haha. 

LAST WORDS AND SPECIAL THANKS

Foxpancakes:

If you read through all that thanks for sticking around! I hope this has helped someone know the work that goes into making a visual novel, even a small kinetic one like this. 

I met some cool new people along the way! Thanks to the people who read an earlier version of my draft, Red Chan and Nemo. 

And thank you very much to my proofreader and editor PyrrhaIphis!

A big thank you to Hatoge for the beautiful art and for helping me bring this silly idea of mine to life.

A special thanks to my friend squidcolas who did the super cute cat sprite. And who allowed me to use it in this project.

Special thank you to my friend Pempille who drew the first ever fanart!

And thanks to you for reading and enjoying Vampliar! <3

Fanart by Pempille: