I had to learn a lot deciding to make this project on an impulse.  As always I had sketched the characters and outlined them on paper, making a list of everything I would need but, as mentioned before, some of the things, I didn't have any previous reference on how much time it would take. And, of course, things go wrong or end up taking way more time than I anticipated.

I planned the concepts fairly quickly, as I linked on the game page, the setting was from a D&D setting I'm writing for fun so I had a more clear vision on what to design and the traits to include on their clothing and furniture. I made the executive decision that they all would display the most basic traits from each faction so I wouldn't have to dwell too much on them. Although, I was lost on how much the animal characteristics to show since they originally are in a more animal, chibi form. The decision was mostly based on Verbena's scene so Muscatt could recognize them by their legs.

I'll confess I'm still uncertain about their designs so I will think more about it in the future. I'm thinking of starting a more detailed explanation about how I come up with the concepts on my Ko-fi so if that is something that interests you, consider following me there.

I outlined the story in the first few days and wrote the whole route in a day or two. The scrip was quite short after all. But as I'm no musician I started to watch some tutorials on music theory as soon as I could. 

It took me some fumbling with different music software, I started on cakewalk but it was too weird for me, so I kept searching until I landed on LMMS and that was much more intuitive for me. 

You should have noticed but I wanted all the tracks to be rearrangements of the music for Happy Birthday. My friend, who is an actual musician, gave me helpful advice so my OST was listenable at least. Things like making the notes not sound like they cut suddenly, extending the melodies, fixing some repetitiveness, all helped me a lot.

The horror track was one of the last I composed, and in the middle of it, I thought what if each of the routes had their own theme for it? I wasn't certain but I ended up trying to make the ost in Maple's image. So part of it tries to bring some familiarity of the normal theme but the other keeps distorting as his mask already fell. 

It's not anything amazing but I was proud to manage to compose anything at all. Music always felt like a craft so far away from me >.<

I kept reading Ren'py documents over and over and watching the same tutorials over and over. I already knew how to make choices but everything else was like a puzzle and I felt dumber and dumber watching the same thing and learning nothing 'v')' 

But making the transitions with the black bars and showing text without the text box was very important to me and thankfully I figured it out with some trial and error and advice from veterans developers and oh, how am I thankful XD

Even the UI was a nightmare and I didn't do anything other than move things around. I regret not having a gallery but I'll definitely figure it out until the full release. 

After having all the script somewhat done and making sure my endings worked, I had to put the SFX in. I was recording little by little through the days but I kept forgetting and going to sleep most of the time. 

My only experience with sound design was an art video or two I did for that one class in college but at the very least it taught me it was possible to record sounds on my own with my cellphone and some echo muffling. 

I wasn't that creative with anything other than the grass steps and the banging for the Dead End, but the imagery is funny to think about now. Not to mention being in a fluffy blanket fortress while in a 30 C environment is... hell. 

I finally opened my Audacity and did some basic editing so they sound somewhat convincing, but I even think some of them ended up too long. You really only need that second or so and it's done. Other than that, once you start you end up wanting to record a sound for everything, frantically looking around the room to find things to hit. 

(You can see my lineart slowly deteriorating as the CGs go...)

A lot of the art assets I had to cut corners, simplify, speedrun. It was the only thing I knew how to do but I ended up wasting a lot of time with other things. I have a couple of backgrounds that didn't even make in since I decided to cut the intro and go straight to the party. Ran's sprites were also wasted because of that. 

Backgrounds took me a whole week to draw, I kept struggling and hating everything, I do like the party hall but Muscatt's room will be the first thing I redesign. 

And I wrote about it on my ko-fi's devlogs, but I only realized I had 11 CGs to do and only a week left, so that didn't go according to plan. They are, essentially, glorified placeholders right now, and to save time I decided to blur every background, owo) A piece of trivia, the "charm CG" was supposed to show Verbena handling the item but I went to a cut-in format instead. 

My poor dog boi also didn't have a sprite to show this time so you can't even catch a glimpse of him in the demo. 

I also struggled a lot with the game page assets and the logo. It took me forever to do it, I swear every time I decide to work with vector I regret it immediately. It does have the vibe I'm going for but I really just winged the arabesque, I hope I'm able to make something a bit more refined in the future... but I suppose that goes for everything. 

So I had some stumbles along the way but, now I have a better notion of how long I take to do those kinds of things, and being able to learn all this makes me more confident about developing more games. Even planning and envisioning things, having a game you can play and show to others, it's like "look, it's real! It's possible!". 

For the full game, I intend to release all routes at once so it will be a slow process. 

I still have to work on other projects and college but I will posts updates on my twitter and ko-fi whenever I can. 

Thank you to everyone who played, if you managed to have fun with the game, I feel accomplished.