Welcome back! In this (possibly final) instance of the retrospective series of posts on Cuttlebone, I’ll be talking about advice, reviewing some of it, talking about some of the mistakes I made, and looking into how I will be steering this ship on future visual novel projects.

Reviewing advice

If you’re looking to make a visual novel (VN) and have done some basic research, chances are you’ll have bumped into advice posts and articles before. There’s a variety of retrospective texts out there that attempt to warn the budding VN creator on some of the common pitfalls of development, offering various forms of advice.
Now that I’ve made a VN of my own, I’d like to look back and reflect on some of the advice I read, and how they panned out with the development of my game.

“Make an outline of everything you need to do before you start working.”

This is one piece of advice I feel I heard particularly often. In theory, this is a great idea; Having a checklist of things to do that you just need to check items off of gives you a clear path to follow and removes a lot of the indecisiveness out of the project.

The issue with this is a beginner visual novel developer won’t know the majority of problems that they will encounter along the way.

Every single thing I worked on came with dozens of hidden caveats and problems. Something that seemed like a simple two step process would end up turning into this tangled mess.
A grand total of zero time predictions worked out correctly. Even the ones related to the things I had most experience with already, like illustration, took more time in the end than I imagined they would. I would say to myself, hey, I should be able to get this thing done in 3 days and then I’ll move onto the next one, and that would end up taking over a week. Then add to this random real life problems, like the new keyboard I bought which came faulty (the N key was broken so for about a month I had to fight my muscle memory and write Ns with my right Alt key), and it set back those estimates even more.

“Start small / Don’t bite off more than you can chew.”

This sort of ties in with the previous point - there are too many problems you won’t foresee, and whatever scope you decide to go with, I guarantee it won’t be small enough.

When you start out you just have no proper frame of reference. Things you think are simple or small are actually sizeable endeavors.

And even if you’re fine with the idea of the project taking longer, that you really reaaally want to work on this big idea, I still vehemently advise against it. It’s not only going to exacerbate the problems I talked about, the work itself just won’t be as good. It’s much wiser to sharpen up your skills and oil up the process with something small, and then tackle your big idea with the better practices and skills you’ve acquired. NaNoRenO and other visual novel jams are great to do precisely this.

Game jams

Speaking of game jams like NaNoRenO, I have some advice aimed more directly toward those!:
- Do not make the game longer than one hour (branches included). Even if you have a dedicated writer I don’t see it as a good choice, because it will inflate everyone else’s workload when it comes time to make assets to illustrate that script. And if you have little prior experience writing, as I did, then do a 30 minute novel, max. Ideally 15-20. But Kuro, you say, yours is one hour. Yes, and it took me two and a half months instead of one. If you want it to be done within that time frame, then I suggest you limit yourself to these estimates. That said, if you’ve already messed up the scope and are deep in it, then keep going. Make it the best you can!
- Do not treat any aspect of the project as trivial. No, you can’t just design and implement that whole settings menu in three days. No, you don’t just hand the game off to proofreaders two days before the game’s release date. No, you can’t just take care of the SFX on the last day. I highly advise you think of writing, coding, UI, portrait art/CG, background art, and music/SFX as separate roles that take the same amount of time each. So for example, if you’re thinking of upgrading your load from just portrait art to include doing backgrounds as well, think of it as doubling the workload and amount of time it will take you. Ideally I’d say you should dedicate a minimum of two weeks to each role. The exception being if you’re using free-to-use assets, in which case 3 or so days for each should do the trick.
- Not an uncommon piece of advice, but I’d like to echo it - have people proofread your game, preferably at least 3. The reason I say 3 is mostly to safeguard you from one of them not being able to do the thing they signed up for. In my case some forgot about it, or had unforeseen events take up their time, and so on. Which, you know, you can’t really blame people for that, but you should account for it. Having more proofreaders is also good because none of them are going to catch all the typos you missed. The more you have, the lower the chances are something will slip through the cracks.
- Use productivity tools to help you with crunch. Inspiration and motivation will only take you so far. At some point, if you want stuff to get done, you’re just going to have to hunker down and force yourself to work. There are a variety of tools out there to help you do this. I personally find that a variant of the Pomodoro method works well for me. Try stuff out and see what works for you.
- If you’re stuck trying to do something, ask for help. Whether it’s difficulty changing something in the engine, or you’re unsure if this pose works too well, or if this or that sentence are not very well structured, try to get in contact with people who might be able to help you. If you’re using Ren'py as the engine and are having trouble modifying something in it, then the Ren'py IRC channel is an excellent place to go to. For other assorted advice, the Lemmasoft forums are full of nice and knowledgeable people. Warning however, this is not to be mistaken with expecting people to do your work for you. You’re still going to have to do the work yourself, but having guidance when you face problems can help you a lot.

^{None of the Pomodoro programs out there satisfied all my needs so I made my own - Pomo-chan. I had to bust it out quite a few times to get work done.}

Cuttlebone - Mistakes and regrets

In this section I’d like to talk about some of the things I did wrong in Cuttlebone. I’ve touched upon time management and some assorted problems I dealt with, but I’ve yet to talk about the problems that didn’t get solved. Here’s some of the mistakes I made that I’m looking to amend in future works:
- Make promotional art! It totally didn’t occur to me that it would be important until the time came to release the game and it was already too late. Some sort of cover illustration for the game, to give it a face and identity at a glance among all the other games out there, would have been great. I ended up scraping together something with the logo and part of the illustration used for the swimming scene, but it just looks weird and not a very accurate cover representation of the work.
- Write the script before drawing the facial expressions. I drew the majority of Inami’s expressions before the script really started to take shape. The result was some expressions not quite fitting her reactions, or some expressions being severely underused (I think a couple are used only once in the whole game), or certain reactions that would have benefited from their own expressions not having them. It makes the most sense to work on the expressions when the script is near complete.
- Start with a bang. A recurring piece of feedback I’ve gotten is that the first chapter of the story is just not as interesting as the rest. The idea was that I felt I should provide some sort of setup before introducing Inami, to make her entrance more special. Unfortunately the execution fell short of its goal, and feels mostly dispensable in the scheme of things. The problem is made worse by the background music not being very fitting, and by that chapter playing a relatively large role in the story due to its short overall length.
- Taking on every role myself. While it was fun to take on every role and having full control over the game, it severely inflated my workload, and made for an overall worse game than it could have been. I spent dozens of hours working on things that were not my strengths to get average results (UI, backgrounds), while the stuff that I’m better at didn’t get as much time dedicated to it as it could’ve to really make it shine (portrait art).

And some of the things I regret not having done:
- Didn’t draw Inami with untied hair.
- Didn’t draw Inami in school uniform.
- Didn’t draw Shu and Inami’s rooms.
- Didn’t show more of the complex (and what I did show of it isn’t very accurate to the vision I had).
- Didn’t have more fitting music (unfortunately out of my control since I don’t know how to compose).
- Didn’t show Inami’s Mom I actually drew her afterwards a few times. :p

^{I’ve run out of related images, so here’s this neat one. In Inami’s initial color scheme her hair was black!}

The future

Last time I’d mentioned I was starting work on my second visual novel. I’m still in early plotting phases, laying down the ground work, but it’s going well so far. Over the coming weeks and months I will reveal more details and give development updates on it over at my twitter, so stay tuned! I will be making some big changes in the distribution of roles.

I’ve already arranged to have my friend Vick (who helped me with designing the logo and the store page for Cuttlebone, as well as gave me endless feedback) take care of the UI work next time around. He’s more capable and more motivated at it than me, so bringing him on board will make the overall look of the game much more cohesive, and free me a considerable amount of time to work on making other things better.

Then, I intend to have a composer make custom background music pieces, instead of resorting to free-to-use music again. I’m in talks with someone but it’s still too early to confirm or deny if he’ll be the one doing it.

In addition, I’d ideally like to find someone to help me with background artwork, or to take it over entirely. It was a gigantic time sink in Cuttlebone and my skills are not quite up to par with the level of quality that I desire. However, I don’t know anyone who would possibly help me out with it, and/or that does background work of the quality that I want. And to do it voluntarily at that, it’s a troubling proposition at the moment.

That leaves the portrait art/CG, coding and writing to me once again, which I intend to keep a fierce grip on. The illustration is still the love of my life, I’m too picky about how I want my engines to behave, and I had a lot of fun writing the last story so now I want to write more. :p

The script is currently scheduled to be 2-4 times larger than Cuttlebone, spanning over roughly two months instead of just one day. I’m not going very big just yet because I still have lots of things about my work flow and the team structure that I need to solidify and optimize. But I hope with the 3rd project to be able to do something larger. It’ll be a slice-of-life romance once again, with slightly more dramatic themes. I’m excited to be able to reveal more details about it soon!

See you again!

And that should conclude this series of posts. I hope you enjoyed reading them! It felt nice to get a lot of these things off my chest, and perhaps maybe help other folks. I will attempt to be more transparent about the development of the next game and post more information to my twitter. Thank you very much for reading and see you next time! (｡･ω･｡)ﾉ

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Cuttlebone Retrospective #01 - Preface, Writing
Cuttlebone Retrospective #02 - Pipelines

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You can download Cuttlebone for free here!