Deep in the Forest post-mortem

This week's post is a public post-mortem of the demo of Deep in the Forest; that is to say, a little recollection about the process of making the game.

Sinnia and I met in the Discord server dedicated to Renpy in Spanish; she has been working on webcomics for years, and joined the visual novel scene just recently. In the server, we had the idea of making a game jam for narrative games in Spanish, so the JuNarEs game jam was born... and Sinnia and I were "suggested" to make something for it (lol okay, nobody pointed a gun to our heads, but we were expected to support the new game jam apart from my task of managing their Twitter, so... we gave in and started to plan for a game.)

Our first plan was... really bad XDD A really edgy thing about a detective chasing a serial killer and being kidnapped and tortured by him; yaoi if you squinted. But as the day of the start of the jam approached, we realized none of us were looking forward to working on it, so as plan B I took a look at the list of ideas in my Documents' folder and chose the one who fitted better with Sinnia's art style.

We worked really fast for it: in two weeks she had made the sprites of Jan, his uncle, and the four love interests who appear in the demo, and I had finished the script for it and the basic code of the game. Then, what awaited me was the English translation of the 8.7k words of the script and adjusting all the aspects of the code so it looked good, and, for Sinnia, making an illustration for the main menu/cover of the game and one in-game illustration. And, surprisingly, this part was the hardest for us.

Let me tell you coding is not exactly my forte, and designing game screens even less: even now, when I'm quite happy with the GUI of the game, every time I add a new feature a new issue arises! So you can expect some minor changes in the final version.

As for Sinnia, she was also taking part in Yaoi Jam 2020 with a spin-off of her main game, currently in development. The effort of drawing all the sprites of DitF plus the CGs in her own game made her chronic tendinitis go really bad, and one morning she woke up in pain and the doctor told her she needed to give a rest to her hand. She only came back to finish the CG in DitF on the 30th, just in time to add it to the build of the game in the nick of time!

It's not decided yet if the final game will be commercial or not; probably yes, but with a low price tag. In any case, apart from Sinnia's art, all the game assets have been purchased in packs, so they aren't exclusive for Deep in the Forest.

We are planning for around 60k words, with a single route and seven love interests, where the player can choose who they want to go with Jan during his adventures. Apart from the current minigame, the updated demo will have a potion-making minigame, and the final visual novel will feature a battle system, too. An Android version is on the works.

The demo is available on itchio, for Windows, Mac and Linux; you can download it from this link:

 https://ertal-games.itch.io/deep-in-the-forest