So, a post-mortem of a finished game... where... do I... begin? No seriously. I don't write post-mortems. So I don't know what to do with them? I guess just sorta... write my thoughts down, I guess?

Intrusions of a dream-eating demon; this was a project idea that came to me while I was working on my attempt at a menhera jam submission. (still ongoing btw). 

Like the protagonist of DreamEater, this idea intruded into my headspace. If I recall how it went, I was talking to some friends and associates, the discussion of o2a2 came up and whether we were going to participate. My first instinct was to say "no," since I'd already done it before and I don't really like to be limited.

Plus I didn't have any usable idea that I thought I could wrap up in about 1k words, since brevity is something I struggle with in my writing.

Literally moments after I said that, the idea popped into my head. Funny how often that tends to happen. 

The idea was small, lacked any of my usual details (kinda had to avoid large explanations here), but it would not leave my head and I was convincing myself that I could take care of this. So while I worked on the menhera project, a small part of my brain started doing pre-production stuff in my head when I had some free time. That way, when the jam started, I could hit the ground running.

I remember thinking to myself as I was putting everything together, that this is a good project, that things are going really well, that this may be one of the best things I've ever made. I tend to set very high expectations for myself. Sometimes it works out. I push past my limits, learn new things, streamline my process and become that much closer to creating my kamige. However, one major issue with my expectations for myself is that... it sorta skews my idea of what is acceptable workloads for others or didn't really line up with what was realistically possible. And because of that, I had to fail. A lot of the time. Sometimes in ways that still haunt me to this day. 

However, I think a lesson that any aspiring game dev should learn... failure is not the end of the road. Every dev I know, before they created that one project they're super proud of, they had to climb a mountain of failures to get there. Some people are still climbing. For me in particular, some of my failures were worse than others.

I failed before the project got off the ground, I failed before I finished the story concept, I failed before I could draw one character, one background, write one line of code. Sometimes I didn't even get past the synopsis stage. There's always a setback, every time.

However, with each failure, I failed a little bit less each time. I took what worked, and learned what didn't. I learned what was reasonably possible in a given time frame, I learned how to manage my workload, I fine-tuned my own creative abilities to the point where I can complete a project without having to half-ass major portions of the project. 

Which brings me to Dream Eater's completion within the allotted jam time. I made the project I wanted to, it's a little rough around the edges, but it's fully functional and pretty good, all things considered.

So what's next for DreamEater, Tea&Torment, and myself? Well...

I'll probably work on polishing. There's a few things I didn't get to finish, and had to put something together real quick. So making those adjustments is high on my list for a 2.0 build. However, I want to temper expectations. I do not intend to expand the story or go beyond the conditions of the Jam. So there likely won't be story changes or art changes, or things like that. No, what I'll probably focus on is optimization and customization.

The reason being... the download is about 220-250mb. That's... a lot of space for a VN, especially one as small as this. The reason the file size is so huge is because of the expressions. While each expression is about 3-5mb in size, there are also... 51 of them. So, yeah, math wise, that's a lot. So what I'll probably do in a future build is convert the pngs to webp format, shrink the dimensions of the image since only a few of them required a zoom in. From my estimates, converting to webp brought the filesize down about 20-40mb, while decreasing the size of the expressions to the game's default resolution cut it down 3-5mb to 1-2mb. That makes the project much more accessible to people, especially those with limited space or slow internet. I'm an aspiring game dev, so having more people engage with my work is always a plus.

The idea of making an android build or a web browser build has been suggested, unfortunately I can't guarantee I'll do that. One of the reasons is because I don't know how. I can promise to look into it, but I can't promise I'll end up doing that.

For customization, I'd like to change the ren'py default GUI elements to more custom ones, I'd like to get a VA to voice the demon (protagonists are usually not voiced). For example, I had to put the title, cover, and window icon together in a hurry but I'd definitely like to adjust that.

As for how long this will take...

No idea. These are relatively small things I can do, but some of them also require me to make more artwork. And as I've learned, my tablet and summer heat do not mix well.

I can't guarantee how long it'll be before the 2.0 release, or even if my interest will still hold by then. But it's something I'm interested in doing, so we'll see how it goes. Anyways, I'm tired, I'm half-asleep as I'm typing this and I just want to call it.

I don't know if this how a post-mortem is supposed to go... but this is how mine went.

Oh, one major thing I learned from this project that I am embarrassed to say I didn't figure out sooner: "You don't need to constantly write hide in your code when you want to change expressions, you just need to change your define statements so it's tied to one of the defined characters." That information will save me countless tedious bullshit by not having to write the hide statement 500,000 times in a script.